On the Web: Want to Increase Your Online Sales?

Traffic is like oxygen for a website: it can't "live" if it doesn't get it, no matter how cool its features and graphics are. The simple truth is that you need visitors to get sales. Want to increase your sales by 20 percent this holiday season? You need 20 percent more web traffic to do so.

What's not so simple, though, is figuring out how to cost effectively boost your traffic. Boosting traffic costs time, energy and/or money. In the early days of e-commerce, sales went up because new shoppers were flocking to the web each year. A site just had to be ready to "catch" the visitors that came along.