Presented on US Sports Net By Yahoo Small Business
| By: Erik Welker The success of any local business depends solely on sales volume. It’s been said in business time and time again that "volume fixes everything." And these days your advertising dollar is more important than ever. If your current marketing budget is not returning a high enough sales volume to churn out a decent profit, then it's time to make a change. The first question for most business owners is "where do I begin?" Let's start with a few facts. Most local business owners have a limited budget, very little free time and extremely limited knowledge of how the Internet works. But they know for certain they should be advertising online within their local community. Many local business owners have already taken the plunge into the online community but are now scratching their heads trying to figure out why their website is not working as well as they thought it would. And that brings us back to the question of "where do I begin…" The entire online advertising process begins with your website. Over 90% of the websites on the Internet today are not geared properly for success. These days it's very easy to find a web designer to create a nice looking website but, unfortunately, a nice looking website is only the tip of the iceberg. Your local business success depends on a lot more than just a pretty website. At the very least, your website should contain some sort of "call to action" as well as professionally written ad copy. Most web designers are not business oriented and therefore do not understand what a call to action is. Most web designers are also not professional copywriters. A "platform" is simply the type of construction that was utilized to build your website. You could actually take two identical websites that looked exactly the same, and if one was built on an outdated HTML platform and the other one on a WordPress platform, they would perform very, very differently on the Internet. And even if you are using a platform like WordPress, there are still over 1 million plugins to sift through to make your site optimized for the search engines. In other words, a Web designer who is not skilled and proven in business and/or who does not understand the intimate details of Google and Yahoo's algorithms is not qualified to work for you, hence the reason why so many local business owners have websites that are costing them money month-after-month rather than bringing in additional revenues and a significantly higher sales volume. | |
If your local business already has a website and your website is not helping to attract more customers and increasing your sales volume significantly month after month, then unfortunately your web designer has very little knowledge of business and/or search engine optimization.
As a local business owner, your job is to save money every chance you get, but your website is something that you should not try to cut corners with. Your website, along with proper advertising, can be more effective than any form of off-line advertising you can possibly think of including the yellow pages, newspaper ads and even radio advertising. The world is changing rapidly, and so is the way that most consumers find products and services in their local marketplace. If you cannot be found, you are losing valuable sales volume that could mean the difference between profits and bankruptcy. There are several techniques available to help you decide whether or not to utilize a particular advertising company to help you promote your local business online. The first thing you should do before choosing an online marketing agency is to look at their overall ranking. There is a Google owned website called Alexa.com that ranks tens of millions of websites on the Internet based on their quality, value and traffic. If you visit Alexa.com and type in the website address of the company you are contemplating using to build your website properly (both on the front end and the backend), they should have a good "Alexa ranking." If they are not at least in the top 1.5 million and they have a copyright date on their website of more than one or two years, then look for someone else. If you already have a website and you want to determine how well your site has been constructed by your web designer, simply visit websitegrader.com and type in your website address to see what kind of grade your website gets. If your website has a grade of lower than 75, then once again it's advisable that you have another, more qualified company redesign and/or reconstruct your website. Even if you like the look and feel of your website, it's possible to "migrate" your website to a better platform with the right plugins that will optimize your performance. Erik Welker is the Founder of SteadyStreamOfCustomers.com, a company that specializes in WordPress migrations and Local Online Advertising. |
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