You have 30 seconds to make a sale on the Web.

That is all the time your visitors will give you. Most businesses waste this time trying to impress people with fancy graphics, phony claims, or techie tricks. Let me tell you what this means.

It means you will not sell. If you do not sell, you will be out of business. The toughest things to discover about Web marketing are facts. Plenty of theories and empty promises are offered, but very few answers to questions like:

* What method of Web advertising works best?

* How much should I spend on a Web site?

* How do I know if I can sell my product or service online?

* What marketing is most effective for selling what I have to offer?

It is easy to get free opinions. Even worse, you may be guided toward creating your own Web site. You could spend six months learning a skill that brings you little money. Meanwhile, your competition is marketing to your prospective customers.

To profit from the Web, you must understand three important facts that will impact your business in the next three years.

The most important job of Web marketing is to center all the attention on the sale and none on the technique of presenting it.

When your customers notice the computer, they are not paying attention to your message. Many people believe that big, fancy graphics or Java will help them sell their Web site’s value. Meanwhile, a visitor leaves before the message is shown. Tricks slow the whole process down.

That is why simple marketing techniques work, because the majority can read your message and decide whether they want to act—immediately.

All the technical tricks in the world will not help you sell. Create a basic Web site with good headlines that invite people to contact you. Email with text-only files (any word processor can save a file as text-only) to insure that everyone can read it quickly, no matter what type of computer or software they have. At the most, you have 30 seconds for them to decide whether or not to read your email, or explore your Web site. That is why a headline is so important. If they do read/explore, you have about seven minutes to sell them.

Create marketing that does not exclude anyone. This will save you tremendous amounts of time and money. Keep it simple.

There are two types of businesses online; those who test, and those who lose money.

Web success is built on testing. Test your marketing, measuring how much you actually sell from a Web site. Count how many leads you generate, and how long it takes to convert those leads into sales. Do not limit your sales to the Web. Selling by telemarketing, fax, or personal meeting are an excellent ways to close outside the Web.

Who cares where they buy? Online gurus talk about e-commerce. You will focus on:

* How to use the Web as a business tool, making it part of your entire sales process and virtually eliminating overhead cost.

* How to sell online and off-line by pinpointing where they want to buy, and using the Web to help them get there quickly.

* Building customer relationships; creating long-term customers.

Those who spend all their money on a Web site and do not test it lose money. They cannot measure the success or failure of marketing. This is the "Magic Dust" approach to the Web. The result is a beautiful, utterly worthless Web site. It is simple. Learn how to measure your own success—then measure it!

While the Web may change every day, people do not.

Mark Twain had a great saying during the last economic revolution, the Industrial version: "It is not the progress I mind, it is the change I hate."

People surfing the Web see change every where. When they come online, big business tells them they are virtual. When they go to Web sites, they are forced to download odd collections of software just to see a message.

Assume that people contacting you have limited time. They do not care about what you are selling, just what it will do for them. Show them how your product or service fits into what they want.

Contacting you at a Web site or via email should be like walking into a store in a village. Greet them, keep the dialogue friendly but not informal, and point them toward what they are looking for.

One more thing: give them a bonus for contacting you. A free report, offer, coupon, or sample is essential to marketing online. And put a time limit on your offer; unless you develop the urgency to buy, they will just "think about it." Make your offer so compelling, prove you can deliver, and get your customers to commit to the solution you are offering.

The Web boom shows no sign of ebbing. Thousands of sites come online each month. The Internet pioneers, the technical geniuses who invented it, are being overtaken by the new settlers. These new businesses weren’t leading the way, but they are coming online now.

What new Web businesses are being sold is, for the most part, pure hogwash. Web companies talk about more information and more technology as if these are the keys to making money. Meanwhile, customers of those pioneers lose money because no one is showing them the way to profit from their online efforts.

Look around the Web. Tons of businesses waste insane amounts of time and money. You can turn waste into revenue if you understand this simple secret:

The Web isn’t about computers, it’s about people. About customers. About making money, not software. Fill in the holes of technology with tested, proven marketing savvy.

It’s not about bits or bytes; it’s about dollars and cents.