When I see sites that are not working I recall the five website characteristics that have to be in place and correct in order for the site to succeed. Here's my story about an old "dog" site.

Did you ever hear that idea of doing a website about something you just really like? Well, I'm crazy about Dachshunds, so I made a big elaborate site. Took me a long time.

As it turned out wiener dog words are cheap, so I flooded the site with a ten dollar a day budget and a few articles.

I had a signup rate of about 15%. The list really took off!

Let me tell you that a wiener dog site is easy to do! Wonderful pictures! I was optimistic.

I had CPA offers and affiliate offers and adsense and ONLY adsense paid. The adsense made 3 or 4 bucks a day and I was spending ten dollars on PPC.

People came to the site and liked it, but wouldn't buy. I didn't get it.

I declared the whole thing to be a great learning experience and shut it sown. Maybe I stopped too early and I could have prevailed...but I had all five of the criteria below going pretty well and it didn't work.

I also had better ideas. Say what you want, maybe I should have hung in there, but I dropped it.

Here are the five things I think can make or break a site.

Low Traffic - When your salespage has no traffic you are done right there!

Your website has to have visitors driven to the site! My preferred traffic generation method is Article Marketing.

The best ways to drive traffic to your offer (site) are PPC, Article Marketing, and Web 2.0 Social Networking.

I'm still old school. I don't know social marketing yet.

PPC is not my first choice for driving traffic. Article marketing works all the time, but you have to get into it quite a ways before it kicks in.

I use articles to send people to my blog where I have several offers on webpages linked from the blog. It works but it's certainly not spectacular yet.

Bad Site Design - If you have traffic to your site, the next thing to look at is how visitors perceive your site.

If it looks unprofessional, if it's tough to navigate or is a little ugly... it's unlikely that visitors will trust you. They just won't give you their money.

Bloggers can look good through nicely designed Wordpress themes and templates. There are website templates, too.

But, I have to tell you, being able to build or at least modify your own HTML websites is an absolutely invaluable skill. Learn about it a little. It's actually easy after you expose yourself to it for a while.

Bad Traffic = Untargeted Traffic - Example, if you have a wiener dog site don't use "dogs" as a keyword in Adwords. You'll pay for tons of traffic and very little of it will be interested in Dachshunds.

Targeted traffic is what you want, not "general' traffic.

When selling specific items, send your traffic directly to the specific item's page on your site that gives them what they are looking for.

Copy Problems - If you send traffic to a beautiful page that promotes a specific product and it isn't working, you may want to consider your copy!

Is the copy full of grammatical errors and bad spelling? The kiss of death!

That's how a lot of people judge you, or the image of you...by the words you use and the way you write. This includes spelling and grammer. You have to get it right.

Rewrite your copy to the best of your ability and then find someone to proofread it.

Copywriting, when it's bad will kill sales, and when it's good it will make sales happen. Tell the prospect how a product will improve their life by selling the benefits.

No E Mail Follow-Up marketing? What if you did it all right? If your prospect left your site without buying...it's OK...If their name and email has been captured by your autoresponder. And if you follow up with an autoresponder series.

There is an accepted idea in email marketing that it takes, on average, seven contacts before a customer buys.

The lesson is this...If you want above average results, attempt to sell AT LEAST SEVEN times! Otherwise...accept low returns.

And, you can use your autoresponder for this!

So, EACH of the items listed above is critical to your online business success.

Here's the nugget. Get the website, salespage, web page...whatever you want to call it... really looking good. Now, send it a lot of targeted traffic. Articles are my favorite. PPC is my next choice. And it's faster.

Pay attention, bank the money and then...PAY ATTENTION AGAIN! You will learn and prosper!

Oh, by the way, reconsider your offering (product)...if it's not so hot, all the stuff above will still leave you with no sales!.

So, now you have it! Do all the above AND make sure it's a killer converting product! That ought to work!

Now...go forth and prosper...and pay attention...you'll get it!