If you are selling on the Web and relies on pay per click search engine marketing to get traffic, you’d know that the costs are creeping up. The BlueNile.com CEO Mark Vadon said in February

“To give you perspective, in our top five keywords, our cost per click was up over 80 percent compared to a year ago.”

Target Marketing magazine in an article on “Conversion Tactics” stated that traffic alone will not be enough. The article recommends:

• Shift more resources to conversion tactics and less toward traffic generation.
• Focus on holes in the buying process (where visitors might be falling through) rather than the holes in the traffic acquisition strategy
• Commit to making your SEM efforts more relevant
• Devote time and resources to better know your customers and needs.

Getting traffic is important; but converting that traffic should be the main focus. This is especially true for small online entrepreneurs with limited resources and may not have the money to burn on PPC like big companies such as BlueNile.com. To get ideas on how to improve your traffic conversion, read the article How To Sell More on the Web: 30 Tips To Increase Conversion Rates For An Ecommerce Site