New Small Business Website Guide
When and Why You Should Consider Building Your Own Small business Website.
As we move into a new age, a business website is fast becoming more of a necessity than a luxury. Many people buy online and almost everyone uses the Internet to find information.
Even when people are going out to make a purchase they often have a look online to source the product first.
Most people naturally assume that they should hire a professional to build a website for their company. Of course in an ideal world we would all do just that. Unfortunately if you are not prepared to make a realistic investment and an ongoing financial commitment you will probably be wasting your time.
It is possible to buy a website and get it hosted cheaply and this is why many small business websites fail to deliver. Simply putting a website online is not enough. Unless you want to end up paying to advertise your website you will need a strategy.
When you set up your small business website you need to consider a number of things. You need to understand how people use the internet and how you will make the right people find you. Building a website that captures the right visitors is the key to success for a small business. A large volume of irrelevant traffic is going to yield little income so the emphasis should be on traffic that is highly relevant to the company.
The good news is that for the average small localised business a good web presence is inexpensive and not too difficult to achieve.
With a little understanding of search engines and a few free tools and services building your own website can be a very productive indeed. If your website needs are simple this should be the first avenue that you explore. If you need complex databases or sell a wide range of products that frequently change price you should consider a designer.
When planning an online strategy you need to consider weather to build and run your own website or to outsource the work. Whatever you decide to do it is crucial that you first arm yourself with at least a basic understanding of the processes involved. No one knows your business better than you do and a basic understanding on your part will help your designer and ultimately your business. You will also be able to weigh up your designers understanding of search engine optimisation.
A growing number of software packages have evolved in recent years making it easy for even the novice computer user to build a website. This is an advantage for those that choose to build their own website, but it poses another problem. There are a now many so called web designers who have limited if any knowledge of search engine optimisation. Obviously if you do have the luxury of a reasonable budget to plan, build and maintain your site correctly, then you should use a designer. If you choose your designer with care you should be OK. However you should still make it your business to arm yourself with a basic understanding. Doing some online research will pay dividends when you come to form the structure of your website.
A small business website should be a low cost, yet powerful weapon in your marketing arsenal. Not only can it be financially rewarding, but building and running your own website can be great fun too. So before you rush out and hire a website designer just take a bit of time to explore doing it yourself.
One good place to start is DIY Business Website.
DIY Business Website is a video course designed specifically with small business owners in mind. The course has a set of core videos that take you step by step through each process involved in getting a successful online presence. The video course is kept simple enough to overcome the common problem of information overload yet delivers a good understanding of the basics . The website author Steve Hippel demonstrates planning, building and growing a website by building a site for a local plumber, so you get to see the whole process. You can then adapt the principles to your own business and literally copy what he does.
Large company’s spend vast sums of money on their web presence because they know that the first in the queue is the most likely to get the business. This presents a problem for small businesses who simply do not have the financial resources to compete. or does it?
In actual fact the very nature of the internet and the way that search engines sort the pages into a list of results makes it easy to compete in a small business niche. A small localised business can set out its pages to capture traffic from a rather different set of search terms than those the major companies will need to use. Done correctly, this will also deliver traffic that is highly relevant to your company and it‘s products and services.
If your business is small, reasonably localised and you require a fairly simple website, building your own website should be investigated first. Many of your competitors will have got a cheap website built and put online. This will give you a major advantage if you build your own website.
If you want to explore building your own website there are numerous websites articles and resources available online. It is a good idea to find a resource that takes you through the whole process. searching out the information you need will most likely lead to conflicting information and holes in your strategy.
With a little simple research it is often quite easy to identify a set of search term that are highly specific to your company’s niche. By constructing your pages around these search terms or niches you can capitalise on a lot of natural search traffic. Natural search traffic is free and should form the basis of your strategy. If you can score high on a broad range of search terms for free, you can often eliminate the need for paying to drive traffic to your website.
Another big benefit is that the website can be set up to earn additional income from related, but not competitive products or services. Many people make substantial full time incomes by setting up websites purely to sell other peoples products and services. You can even get paid for clicks. Put simply when someone clicks on an advertisement on your page you get a small commission. These methods are often described as earning money on auto pilot among the internet marketing community.
If you build your own small business website you should start with some research. There are a number of tools & resources available online including video tutorials, ebooks and membership websites. A good way to approach this is to find one that you are happy with and stick with it. The one thing about the internet is that it can quickly give you a bad case of information overload.
If you hire a designer, make sure he known his stuff. Merely building a website is not enough. Your average 13 year old can build a site, but he/she probably wouldn’t know too much about optimisation or back links.
I don’t think I’d be ready to do that. But seeing your writing here makes me feel like I should do it.
P.S. I’ll sure put the word out about your site and I would appreciate any business you may send my way…
Finally, a good site that isn’t in my face trying to constantly sell me something. Thanks, please keep up the good work.
I am willing to bet that in 2010 goes on, methods of on-page and off-page SEO will differ as we think it. I think we will see a transformation to user metrics in deciding ranking results. That included with advanced personalized SERP results and we’ll be seeing a large transformation of the searchers experience with Google and the other SEs. Each search result won’t be made alike, take a look at things like user interaction, bounce time, bounce rate, etc… Focus on a better website all around, and I think you’ll see better results in 2010.