One of the most commonly-heard expressions of disappointment arising from new Internet business owners is that their pristine and highly-attractive website just isn't getting any visits from potential customers.
What's happening? Visitors - the first step to a sale In order to sell something to a customer, you have to somehow engage in dialogue with them.
True, casual visitors to your site or 'browsers' as they are sometimes called, won't in themselves do a lot for you.
To obtain benefit, you will need to convert them eventually into paying customers but that's going to seem like a far-off dream if you're not even getting those visitors to begin with.
It's important to say that no article of this nature can say for sure what your exact problem is.
It could be any one of a number of things and you may need to get an IT services specialist to look at it for you.
Even so, it's probably a fair bet that your website is suffering from one or more of the following.
Poor optimisation A significant percentage of potential visitors to your site will be drawn there as a result of search engine enquiries.
Your website and its content needs to be specifically tailored and customised to be visible to those search engines and even more importantly, attractive to them.
If it isn't, your site might be appearing way down the list of results returned by one of the major engines and therefore, huge numbers of your potential clients will never get to see it.
Contact an IT specialist for advice and guidance on what is called search engine optimisation (SEO).
Insufficient external publicity However good your SEO is on the web site, it can only do so much for you - particularly in the early days of your business when you may be relatively unknown.
There are a number of marketing and advertising techniques you may need to adopt in order to publicise your website through a number of channels other than the search engines alone.
Talk to an advertising or IT advertising specialist on this one.
A flawed sales proposition This is sometimes a painful one for a business owner to contemplate and be objective about but it can be important.
It may simply be that you are offering products and services to the marketplace that people are just not interested in - or at least not in large numbers.
If that's the case, however good your SEO and other advertising is, you are going to struggle to attract visitors to your site.
This is really about market research, which you should have undertaken before designing and building your site anyway.
Even so, sometimes getting an external objective assessment of what you are selling is a good idea.
Be open-minded about the results rather than defensive.
Uninteresting website design This probably won't stop people visiting your website initially but if you see that few of them are going any further than the homepage, it may indicate that your message is simply poorly laid out when people first arrive.
Once again, talk to an IT or content management specialist on this important subject.