Would my Company Benefit by Having a Website?
By Chris Falck
Why have a Website?
A Very good question... and in truth there are literally hundreds of reasons why your company would benefit from having a website. They offer:
10000 times more information than a TV commercial. Are on show 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Costs less than filling your car with petrol. Allow you to sell your Products and Promote your business worldwide.
Need I say more?
OK, don't just run out and get one! A Web site needs to be carefully designed to get your message across in the most efficient way. It is vital that they are:
Fast loading and don't allow your visitor to loose interest before they have seen the site. They need to be easy to navigate and very user friendly.
For 99+% of businesses an effectively marketed, well-designed web site is the most important marketing tool your company will have, while for less than one percent, a web site is simply useless!
The Internet is an appropriate tool for most businesses but not necessarily every single business. There are instances where a web site would simply be a waste of time - not many admittedly, but there are a few.
Your Web Site's Purpose Is To Sell. Almost all Web design specialists are technicians. They may be dab hands with the technology but any business Web site is designed for one purpose only - To Sell. Your business exists to sell. It exists to create long-term, repeat buyers.
Your web sites purpose could be to create a product sale or to generate leads or to generate leads or to advertise your services or to educate prospects. But it's got to sell.
Do you understand the significance of what I am saying?
Many business owners have been persuaded that what's needed is a technological solution to a technological problem. This has led to sites that are hard for visitors to find their way around and are very costly to maintain.
If your site has spurious graphics it will quite simply be cumbersome and will definitely be slow to load - The result of this is quite simply that your visitor leaves your site because they are fed up waiting and goes elsewhere!
To sell you need to adopt the KISS principle... Keep It Simple Stupid!... Make it easy. The design of your Web site needs to be simple!
A good Web site is much more about business and marketing strategy than it is about the underlying technology. Furthermore, your Web site needs to integrate with your other marketing activities.
There are some big differences between Web marketing and conventional marketing so you need to know what the essential ingredients are. Quite simply, it is a combination of the following that will lead to success for you on the Web:
Technical Expertise
Creative Web Design
Web-adapted direct marketing skills
Potential Customers.
There are far too many Web sites out there today that are a huge disappointment to their owners. They've spent their money; they've got their Web site and sadly, nobody visits it! Does this sounds familiar to you?
So what's this hype about their being millions of surfers on the net? Is it a lie? No there are literally millions of surfers, many of which would be keen to purchase your product or service. It takes time and a lot of effort to attract visitors to your site. But if you know how to do it... they will come - by the thousand!
Many web site owners simply believed they would get lots of business simply by having a web site. This is simply untrue. You may believe that you only need to register with a few dozen (few hundred?) search engines to get the visitors flocking. But again, that alone won't do it for you.
Registering with search engines is a vital step, but before you do, your site needs to be optimized for the keyword searches that Internet users will use to find your site. If your site doesn't appear in the first page or two of results of a search and your competition's site does, you can imagine who would get the business!
So which search engines and directories should you register with? What techniques should you adopt to get your site at or very close to the top of the search results listing? And what actions can you take to ensure that you stay there?
To be honest it's a difficult and time-consuming job. Fortunately, companies exist that have some specialist software tools that can help you get over these problems.
If you are intending to create a web presence for your company you would be wise to take the following advice...
Take some time surfing the net looking at businesses that relate to your own. Look at your competition etc. etc. Look at what they are doing, how they are doing it and think if their web presence would be beneficial to your business. Don't be put off if you have heard that the site is not profitable. It is probably because of the difficulties explained above and that there owners are not clued up on How to promote your business online.
I hope this information is useful to you.
Written By Chris Falck
Director Rose Data Systems Ltd
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Chris Falck is an IT Consultant, Internet Marketer, Designer, and Webmaster of AUTOREPLY2U - http://autoreply2u.co.uk and eCom-RDS - http://ecom-rds.co.uk. (Amongst Others).
AUTOREPLY2U is the Ultimate Autoresponder & Follow-up Service and provides FREE & PRO accounts to its many users. Take the TEST-DRIVE by visiting the site or by emailing us at mailto:testdrive@autoreply2u.co.uk
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