If you are serious about selling on the world wide web and being successful, your number one priority must be gaining your visitor's trust. Without trust you won't sale much and that's really being optimistic. How do visitors know that they can trust a web site enough to buy? In this article I'll show how to gain the trust of your visitors.

The first impression can be everything. Studies have shown that visitors can determine almost immediately whether they can trust you or not. Making it essential that you have good, clean and professional looking web design. The web design should be easy to the eye and easy to navigate. It should also load fast and require nothing to download in order for it to be viewed, such as flash and Java.

Provide your visitors a way for them to contact your business. Many visitors will look for this information, some don't even realize they do. If you don't provide it you are sure to lose sales. They need to know this information, just in case they need help or want to return the product or want to make a comment. You need to provide a mailing address, phone number and email address/contact form.

Secure Sockets Layer certificate is also important part of gaining your visitor's trust. Secure Socket Layer is a protocol that sends encrypted data over the Internet. Secure Sockets Layer certificate shows that all information being transmitted on your web site will be passed on securely and is protected. Some people will not even think about buying from a web site that don't at least offer this as an option.

Testimonials can be a wonderful way to gain your visitor's trust in your product or service. Testimonials show that people that have bought from you are pleased with your product or service. Also, never make up testimonials, this can hurt you more then it helps because it's not too hard for you to be caught in the act. This may lead people to believe that all your testimonials are fake and that you can't be trusted.

Internet surfers are ever more looking at the privacy statement on web sites because of the fear of personal information getting into the wrong hands. You need to let your visitors know exactly how you will be using their information you collect and how you'll be storing it. Visitors need to know if their information will be sold or shared with any third party and if you sale or shared the information with any third party, what information will you give out?

Also what security measures will you take to protect the information you have collected and how can they change or delete any of their information? It's also a good idea to get your privacy statement certificate by an organization that's well known and trusted. Most of these organizations make sure your privacy statement is fair to the internet surfers.

Money back guarantees are becoming very popular and for good reason, they show that you are confident in your product or service and that you have nothing to hide. It removes all risk to your customers and makes them much more likely to buy from you. Further more, remember to honor all refund requests in a timely manner without fighting with them. Just suck it up and give them the refund.

Provide a sample or trial of your product or service. This will allow your potential customers to test out the product or service before making any commitment. Some potential customers may have never got the product or service from you before because of the fear that it wasn't what they really wanted and needed. Just like offering the money back guarantees, this too will show that you are confident in your product or service and that you have nothing to hide.

Getting endorsements from an another well known and respected organization(s) or person(s) will help prove your claims. The integrity and expertise of the person or organization endorsing your service or product also plays a role. Someone that's consider an expert about one of your service's or product's subject would be better then someone that don't know much or anything about it.

Matt Colyer is the owner of the Superior Webmaster. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.