We have seen that you can increase your revenue by increasing your traffic, merchandising and improving your C.R (Conversion Rate). Though you should use all the three techniques, there is a particular order in which when applied will result to making more money more easily and consequently is more effective. This order has such far reaching effects on your total web revenues that it worth dedicated attention.

In trying to increase sales in your website there is a natural urge to increase your traffic. Simply double your traffic and you tend to double your income. Unfortunately increasing traffic is the most ineffective of the three. As we have previously seen here, you have two options in increasing traffic; first, you can buy traffic through PPCs (Pay per Click Search Engines) and/or you can optimize your website for Search Engines (SEO). Buying traffic is the more ineffective of the two. This is because every visitor to your site costs you money. This automatically eats into your revenues. On the other hand SEO is a specialty few internet businesses willingly want to tackle. It involves designing your web-pages to rank high in Search Engines like Yahoo and Google. This in turn results to increase in internet users who find your web-business. This traffic is free. Unfortunately the mechanics of SEO have a long learning curve few are willing to learn. And to make matters worse, results are not guaranteed.

The more prudent approach to increasing revenues would be first to increase your Conversion Rate (C.R) before merchandising and/or increasing traffic. And this can be attributed to two reasons. First, a higher C.R ensures you are making the most money possible from a given volume of traffic. A poorly converting website is equivalent to a leaking bucket. Such a website loses willing and able buyers which amounts to losing money. The cost of losing willing and able buyers can be enormous. Apart from the immediate loss of profit, there is the loss of repeat business. This makes other strategies like merchandising ineffective. All in all the cost of losing willing and able buyers due to poor C.R amounts to the lifetime worth of a customer.

The second reason to opt first for an improved C.R to increase revenue has to do with control. Unlike increasing traffic to your website, improving your C.R involves testing and changing elements within your website to find the most effective combination. Though not an easy task, the fact that you control nearly everything about your C.R gives desirable control that you can manage to your benefit.

Once you have a optimized your C.R, you can then reap the maximized benefits of other two techniques for increasing web revenues, namely merchandising and increased traffic.