11 Reasons a Website is Vital to Your Business

Posted on November 28, 2011 by

If you are in business and don’t have a website, you’re not alone.

Most tech savvy folks cannot imagine that there businesses that do not have a website in this digital age. Well you will be shocked to know that around 40 to 50 percent of businesses do not have a website (according to a study by Godaddy). That should give you a hint about how much more competitive you could be right now.

Further, more than half of those companies don’t know how much such an initiative would cost, according to a new study conducted by 1&1 Internet. Many SMB owners said they are confused about the cost and effort involved and need more information about the benefits of having a Web site.

Benefits of a Website

Every day more and more people use the Internet to find information; it is convenient and saves time more than any other media such as newspapers, magazines, and TV. Having a website is becoming so mainstream that customers and the general public simply expect a company to have one. If people want information on a product or service, they are now saying, “I think they have a website, I’ll check that out first.” Below are just some of the benefits you can expect from a website:

 

  1. Increases awareness of products/services

    A website provides the opportunity to publish the who, what, where, when and why of your business in a powerful and effective manner. How many potential customers might be swayed if they could learn a little more about you, your company, your products, etc., without having to phone or taking the time to meet with you in person? A website makes it easy for customers to learn more about your business at their own pace.

  2. Expands your marketplace

    A website can expand your reach to a market that may have been difficult or expensive to reach through traditional advertising. Now 95% of people search the Web rather than the Yellow Pages when looking for a service or product. With an e-commerce site you give information to the world and make sales when your offices are closed.

  3. Increases hours of operation

    Not only will your website be there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with the possibility of reaching millions of people every day, but now your customers are able to contact you outside of your normal business hours. Your website, hosted by a major Internet Service provider like Godaddy or Bluehost, is still working for you while you are at leisure or asleep.

  4. Reduces costs

    Reduce publishing costs

    One of the largest expenses a business can incur is designing, printing, and delivering marketing materials. Websites are quicker, easier and more cost-effective to update than print-based media. You can keep your website more current, more affordable, and easier to manage than any other media.

    With a website, you can instantly publish new product announcements, employment opportunities, contact information, coupons, almost anything, without material or delivery costs. People can learn about it instantly just by visiting your website.

    Reduce marketing costs

    Buying advertising space, whether it’s a newspaper ad, billboard or radio spots, can be expensive. In addition is the burden of the hours spent trying to figure out the perfect words to say in a limited space. A website is an unlimited number of full-page ads that you can change at will!

    Reduce communication costs

    A website can do far more than sell products. You can have pictures, details and prices of your products/services, the very latest company information, hours of operation and maps indicating the location of your company’s outlets on your website. It can supply your staff, suppliers and business partners with important and timely information. Just about any printed matter can be converted to a web page and distributed by email at far less cost and time than by fax, mail or courier.

  5. Builds Branding

    Build brand awareness by having your website URL on all other marketing material you use. Having your brochures, website, business cards, ads, posters, etc… have the same look and feel increases your brand awareness–and makes it simple for people to get even more information about you.

  6. Enhances your image

    A website can help you to establish a credible, professional image, instilling a level of trust with your customer and their purchasing confidence will follow suit. Your website can (and should) reflect the spirit and vision of you and your company.

    The Internet also offers the opportunity for a small-business to portray itself as a big business. (Or, for a big business, to fall flat by having a website that poorly represents its true stature.) How will your business be perceived on the web?

  7. Improves Customer Service

    Does your staff spend a lot of time on the phone answering customer requests for information on a product or service? Do they keep answering the same questions and sending out the same material? Do they spend a lot of time on the phone with customer support?

    A website can help reduce long distance phone bills, postage costs, printing costs and labour costs (and frees them up to perform other tasks) by having that information on your website.

    Your website can also take orders while you sleep as people can place orders on a website at any time, day or night. You would be surprised how many extra sales you could have by developing an on-line brochure or virtual store.

    A website lets you publish support information with up to the minute accuracy. Some companies only offer support through their website. If the website doesn’t offer the answer an online feedback form is provided. This is perhaps the most underrated usage for business websites.

  8. Improves Efficiency

    Email can improve efficiency of your operation – for your customers and your employees. Customers who use email don’t have to deal with many problems of everyday business: pushy salesmen, remembering to call during business hours, having to battle crowds to get to your stores, spending time waiting on voice mail or getting the wrong information. It’s convenient, easy, and safe for the customer. Email is also convenient for you. You can respond to all your customer inquiries at the same time, and do it when you have a free moment – not in the middle of rush hour when someone calls up to ask for product information or directions to your location.

  9. Provides information

    Even without an online store, people can look to your site for driving directions or a map to find your store. Tourists can look up your small shop and stop there on their next trip to your area. (Are you on Google places?–you should be if you are a brick-and-mortar shop).

    Many people use the Internet to find information. You can use your website to educate and inform others. This can be done in various ways: publish an online newsletter, have an advice column, offer message boards, or simply have a place where people can submit their names and email addresses to join your mailing list for more information. This is another way to gain public awareness of your business or organization. It also allows you to grow your customer base for direct marketing.

  10. Creates a competitive edge

    If your customers can’t find you online, they will find your competitors. With more and more companies making a web presence, the companies that lose business to their competitors will most likely be those who fail to represent themselves on the Internet. If a potential customer can leisurely browse your company information online but cannot find your competitors’ information, your company now has an additional edge.

  11. Opens new channels of communication with staff, affiliates, agents and suppliers

    Intranet websites (websites that are generally closed to the Internet users and are accessible to organization members only) are an easy way to provide your employees with a way to reach the information they need to perform their duties in one centralized location. You can post benefits information, changes in staff, kudos for hard work, a place for their schedules, and much more. You can put as much or as little information as you want on your site and make them supply a password to access the information that needs to be kept private. Here’s where you can keep corporate records and make version control much easier.

Posted in 2SWM, Call to Action, long-tailed keywords, Website Design | Leave a comment

7 Elements You Should Have on your Contact Us Page

Posted on October 29, 2011 by

Your Contact Us page is vitally important. Why?

Because it’s actually the second most popular page AFTER the home page (unlike the mistaken belief that your About Us page is what people look at next).

You see, the contact page is where people are going to go to ask a question…

or see where you’re located…

or see how big you are…

They may want to do business with a big corporation…or, just go with someone smaller where they can pretty well accurately guess that the rates will be significantly lower than those at a big corporation.

1. Answer this question: Why should someone contact you? You need to explain why people should contact your business and describe for them how you can help them solve their problems. That should be good incentive to put those reasons right up front on Contact Us page.

2. Have the Business Name, location(s), corporate phone number, fax, mail stops, etc. The Contact Us page should list out all of your business locations, or link to a page that goes in to more detail about each location.

3. Have the people who work for you there (at least those in public view)–a visitor looking for a particular individual in a particular department would save time from the Contact Us page, rather than going through the receptionist. We all know that getting through a receptionist can sometimes be like trying to pass a guard dog and being suspiciously scrutinized every grueling step of the way. But on the flip-side, that may be what they were instructed to do.

4. Provide a form for your visitor to complete. The form (er, e-mail) is a very effective way of succinctly stating exactly why you are trying to contact the business. It’s great for both the sender and the recipient–the sender can take their time to clearly formulate their thoughts and the recipient then can effectively direct the email.

Include the following fields:

  • First Name
  • Last Name
  • Email
  • Company Name (optional)
  • Subject
  • Message

Depending on your business, you may want/need their address (careful in making this decision).

5. Blog content. Have some blog content and comments in a sidebar. Your visitor is going to want to know more about you–what better way than to allow them to ponder what you or your company writes about in their blog. Comments are excellent because they show people are interacting with you.

6. A Call to Action. So what do you want the visitor to do AFTER they submit the form? Where do you want them to visit next? This is important because you want them them engaged to learn more. And yes, there are powerful techniques that good webmasters know for controlling their next move. The contact us page should redirect to a Thank You Page that explains when and how you will be contacting them.

7. Social Media. Another good way of getting your visitor to further engage with your website is to allow them social media buttons…even duplicated from above. They will learn even more about you and your company…Who knows, they may even “like” you. :-)

Posted in Call to Action, Contact Us, Website Design | Leave a comment

Don’t Start a Website Without Knowing your Keywords

Posted on August 22, 2011 by

Keywords are absolutely vital to your website, your blogs, your Facebook, YouTube, and so on. Keywords are the silver bullets that drive visitors to your website. Furthermore, the keywords that you use should be carefully aligned with your niche, that is, your specific service and/or product for them to be effective.

So how do you get those keywords which your target audience is using? Before I tell you that, also consider that you should assess the right amount of competition that is appropriate for the size of your keywords.  For example, if I was building a website for a pie manufacturer, I would NOT recommend “pies” as one of my keywords.  The odds of an unknown website appearing at the top of page rankings for a search engine for someone typing in “pies” is infinitesimally small (you’ll be on page 1 million…maybe).  That’s because there are so many bigger players out there that have a greater web presence, have much traffic, and have high enough rankings that “pies” works for them.  However, if one of the pie maker’s long-tailed keywords was “recipes homemade pumpkin pie”, then even as an off phrase with minimal searches still gives a first-page ranking of 5th for sort of a nobody like pickyourown.org.

BUT, ff you have been around forever on the web and dominate your keywords, your likelihood is high that you will come up on page #1 with a single keyword…like “cola”.  As you might expect, Coca-cola comes up #4 out of 278,000,000, (that’s million! pages), preceded by Wikipedia twice and cola.org, a research firm.

Now if you were just paying close attention there, you probably noticed that cola.org took first place–partially because the website itself contained only the name of the search key…that’s important to the search engines, and therefore to you.

Find keywords that fit your website project size.  Plan your website according to how fine a niche you can manage. What you should consider is defining your keywords before you even THINK about choosing a website name, unless you already estimate that your website name is your niche already.

Choose a good research tool (or find a webmaster who can do it for you). Use a keyword tool that will tell you how many people search for your keywords in a given time frame.  The tool should also make suggestions about the different kinds of competition, local or global.  Google Keywords External tool is a good one, more on this below.

Generate “long-tailed keyword phrases”; the more niche-specific, the better. Rather than considering “pies” as a keyword, what kind of pies do you make? So how about “pumpkin pie recipe” or even more bizarre but quite useful “how to pumpkin pie” (yes people type that kind of stuff in too, so don’t limit your options)

Here’s how a keyword analysis should proceed

First, write down all of the keywords relevant to your site (ahem, use Excel).

Next we’re going to take those keywords and enter them into a tool provided for free by Google, call the Google Keyword External Tool.  You can open it up here: adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Now, after you type in your keyword, try “pies”, (and answer the captcha box), you will see many suggestions.

2 columns are important here. The Competition and the Local Monthly Searches (that means the United States if you live here).

Long-tailed keyword phrases

The Competition is how many websites are “serving up” those keywords.  The Local Monthly Searches are the number of searches per month, filtered usually your country, device, and language. the whole idea should be obvious…use long-tailed keyword phrases that are high in searches but low in competition–that strategy will push you up into the rankings.

I know this can all be a bit overwhelming, which Is why we perform this service for you, even if you already “own” a webmaster.

If you want US to help you build a website, check out other sites we have done.
www.softwaremagician.com/webisites

By the way, we can perform this analysis for you and use more complete tools then even demonstrated here to find a good selection for you.

 

Posted in keyword research, longtailed keywords, SEO, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Privacy–Cloud Email Allows the Feds Access

Posted on August 1, 2011 by

Cloud-based email such as Google seems like such a great idea.  Why not have all your email in one place, accessible from anywhere, anytime.  How cool is that.

But it doesn’t come without a catch–your privacy.

You see, any email that’s left on a server for more than 6 months is considered abandoned and can be tapped by authorities without a warrant.  Wait a minute.  Did you say without a warrant?

Yep.  The ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act) of 1986 was set up

Posted in cloud email, ECPA, Email, email privacy, Entourage | Leave a comment

Outlook and the iPhone Sync (Sort of)

Posted on March 11, 2011 by

Now that I have my iPhone I discovered that my Outlook does sync with it but just kinda’ sort of.

Specifically, the contacts sync with the standard Contacts app, the calendar syncs with the standard Calendar app and the notes sync with the standard Notes app.

BTW, what actually DOES then syncing is iTunes on your PC. You have to download that before anything else.  Then when you plug in your phone to the USB port, then iTunes delivers you a decent configuration screen (tabs along the top called Summary, Info, etc.  The Info tab is where syncing is controlled.

I’ll discuss each individually.  First the Contacts app.

When iTunes is configured to sync contacts with the the Contacts App, when it is done the contacts will be found in a long list with a single search box (the magnifying glass just above the A in the upper right-hand corner if you don’t want to scroll to the very top of your contacts).  Click on any entry to view/modify/delete the record. The only part I do like is if you meet someone new that you want in your database, there is a nice feature that let’s you take their photo and that DOES sync back into your Outlook contacts.

So the Contacts app is obviously about as evolved as mold.  I’ll get back to you when I find a better app.

The Calendar app is a more reasonable program. You’ll see the month view by default but you can touch the List or Day view to see your appointments.  They expand when touched and you can change the Start/Stop times, change it into an event, even set a simple Repeat (Every Day, Week, 2 Weeks, Month, Year).

IPhone CalendarIf I create an appointment in Outlook and set the recurrence of Daily every 3 days, the iPhone creates the required entries correctly (calling it Custom at this point).  Now here’s the gotcha.  If I change the “Custom” entry to Weekly and sync again, Outlook will still retain the original recurrences up to the current date you are looking at when you changed it, BUT Outlook will now have a modified new set, one for every week.  Note: the iPhone will NOT have removed the 3-day recurrence until the week mark takes over–Yes, you guessed it–you get 2 sets of records during the next week, until the official Next week kicks in.

However, I do love the iPhone spin gauges to reset the date, time, AM/PM.

You simply “flick” your finger over the selection “columns” to set.

Finally, The Notes will sync with the Notes app.  And, notes even in subfolders will sync. But herein lies another gotcha…iTunes will ONLY sync Notes if there is not a single note with a blank first line, no matter what folder it is in. If you have ONE NOTE with a line which is blank, your Notes sync will fail.  In a way, that’s not surprising because Outlook uses that first line as the key to the record and obviously iTunes gets confused if it doesn’t see it that way. And besides, why have a first blank line if you want to find out what the note is about anyway?

One last thought about Notes.  By default the notes are sorted in Modify Date order.  I haven’t found any way of changing that order.  It’s not so bad if you don’t have too many notes and notes folders.

And the coolest part of notes for me is that I keep links to favorite videos.  Like this one called the Digital Nativity:

Today Outlook…tomorrow the world (the remaining 300,000 apps)  Whew!

Posted in Calendars, Contacts & Categories, IPhone, Notes | 3 Comments

AOL: Messing up again.

Posted on January 6, 2011 by

I’ve never made it a secret that I have disdain for AOL.

They say they’re safe…but their credit cards were heisted right out from under their noses.

They say they’ll keep your advertising down…but not theirs.

Now they’re doing another insecure “look at me” antic…

When you become an AOL email member (god only knows WHY you would want to do this, please use a Gmail email) they’ll give you the opportunity to send everyone you know that you’ve created an AOL email with them.

It’s called True Switch.

Now I had an alarmed client flag me on this.  Apparently True Switch is rabid, psycho and very much like a bull in a China Shop in it’s approach.  When it asks for the import, it doesn’t stop at simply your current email contacts.  Oh no…

It dips into all your .pst outlook files, even your archives.

It looks through all your emails.

It scours your logged on email webmail accounts including Yahoo and Earthlink.

And it sends EVERYBODY YOU’VE EVER KNOWN an advertisement that you’ve become an AOL email user. Now if that’s what you want, then great.

If this sounds a little like a self-promoting advertising message you’d be right.

(Oh, did I mention that the acronym for Self-Promoting Advertising Message is SPAM?)  (yes, that’s what it stands for.)

So be very careful out there when you want to “move into a free AOL account” and let everyone know…

…you’ll have no control from then on out.

Posted in Contacts & Categories, Email, spam | Leave a comment