Is Your Small Business a Diamond in the Rough?

The sheer vastness of the cyber economy is staggering. A couple of more than six billion webpages vying for the interest Internet users around the world. Obviously, millions of these websites are possessed and managed by people exactly like you--small business business owners and managers wishing to enhance the general public profile of their corporation and, eventually, increase sales.

Considering that only a portion of websites are internet search engine optimized or even adequately marketed whatsoever, chances are that lots of of you aren't making much roi.

While there are always a multitude of known reasons for this issue, one sticks out as remarkably simple: Most small-office-home-office (SOHO) websites are practically invisible to the surfing open public. The old adage "build it and they'll come" is enchanting but remains, quite unfortunately, used and abused by business owners hoping to press their wares on the internet. A website, like other things in a culture overloaded with information and suffering from consumerism at every level--B2B included--must be promoted. And smarter marketing is the only path your website will create a good ROI.

Simply creating and publishing a website and then looking forward to the telephone to ring (or your inbox to flood) is comparable to printing off maybe 25 brochures and then purposely leaving the complete put on your seat before you log off the subway. What do you consider will be the chances some of those brochures will sell anything to anyone? They may be the flashiest and cleverest brochures ever released, but if nobody ever sees them, it generally does not really matter how enough time or money you allocated to the things.

The same principle pertains to business websites. Which will not even take into account the problem of content or usability. At least with a brochure, most people push themselves to place some content (read "useful information") in it someplace. More often than not the margins are also aligned properly, and the colors have a tendency to not annoy most color blind people. But I'll save those topics for future articles.

When you create a website--or hire you to definitely build it for you--think from it not only as an internet brochure for your wares (which it is and many designers forget this), but as your business' own walking, speaking, close to flesh-and-blood salesperson. Would you like your salesperson to be always a wallflower, seated in the part of the ball room at a Rotary conference, string smoking and nervously looking away whenever someone tries to make attention contact? Or would you like your salesperson to work the area, shake hands numerous interesting people, and present each one a flavor of what your business provides? Hey, smoking is moveé. But network is so now!

The main point is, nobody nevertheless, you as well as your webmaster is likely to be visiting your site frequently if nobody nevertheless, you as well as your webmaster is aware of it. Websites must be advertised just like other things. A couple of countless ways to bring traffic to your internet site, many you might not have even heard about. Whether you hire search engines Optimization (SEO) expert or just rely on person to person produced by you as well as your staff, a very important factor is for certain: you must purposefully seek ways to bring traffic to your internet site and then continue religiously.