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Making Your Small Business Website Profitable

Introduction - in this article we will explore and summarise the options open to sole traders and company directors to help boost sales from creating or transforming a small business website to boost sales and profits. For most small businesses, a website is a necessity in order to boost sales as well as project a professional image to customers, suppliers and investors. Shockingly, a recent survey by BT found that half of small firms still did not half a business website. Most busy small business owners do not have the skills, time or inclination to create or improve their business website to exploit the power of the Internet. Most businesses resort to contacting a local web designer to create or improve a company website and hence end up with a small pretty looking 'brochure website' with a few pages about the company with its primary contact details. This in itself does the job of projecting a professional image (assuming the web designer is any good), but does not usually get any more website visitors from search engines, blogs or directories. Having a pretty small business website is not enough in today's tough trading conditions. Small business should develop an internet marketing strategy, which in itself can be implemented as surprisingly low cost, with tenacity and patience.

Why Exploit The Internet? - 80% of all internet users use search engines to find things they want. 80% of those users only bother clicking through to the top three results for a given search result. Therefore, getting a company website to the top of Google for particular key phrases should be one marketing objective. Unfortunately, few business owners possess have the expert knowledge, or are prepared to make the financial commitment, or have the time to learn the skills required to achieve top rankings themselves. To get started the first step a business person must ask themselves is 'should I do the job myself or outsource the job to a professional Internet marketing organisation?'. The answer largely depends on the marketing objectives and the level of skills and expertise of the small company.

Using a 'Search Engine Company' (SEO) - The prospect of thousands of daily visitors, delivered free to your official company homepage has spawned an entire industry of internet marketing companies, providing small business services, claiming to be able to 'get top Google rankings in days', charging exorbitant rates in the process. Many market themselves as 'SEO specialists' and yet there is virtually no formal accreditation or exams these companies require to exist. Search Engine Optimisation remains as much a black art as a science and SEO should only be viewed as a component part of a companies overall Internet Marketing business strategy. Assuming for a moment the owner has no skills and wishes to employ a Internet Marketing firm, the best course of action is to find one from a personal recommendation, from a trusted friend or colleague. If no references are available from a friend or colleague, start with searching Google itself. Unfortunately, anybody can set themselves up as an 'Internet Marketing' company. The problem is how to separate the cowboys from the good ones and qualify their level of expertise and whether to believe their claims and promises. Some basic qualification criteria when approaching these companies is as follows:-

Check they have actually have a published registered company address, company number and telephone number. Using this pull off their company report from companies house to check who owns the company and what revenue and profits the company is made in the last few years. It can be done in minutes at a cost of Ł4 a report.

Ask them for the contact details of reference sites and case studies of existing clients which would normally be their own website.

Find someone local to your location so you can meet them face to face (rather than a relationship by telephone only). Personal rapport is vital in communicating and understanding the business objectives of the project. There are many small business website design services offshore in Eastern Bloc countries or India. However, the real challenge is not the building the site in the first place but the on going support and bug fixing, coupled with the possible language and culture barriers and time differences.

Check out there web site to see if they have good search engine rankings themselves and whether tools like a blog or forum exist on their site.

Agree a fixed price beforehand with measurable criteria of success, such as a deadline and detailed description of services.

DIY Internet Marketing - the main areas to consider are as follows:-

Do Your Homework - the first step to research your market to find out what your prospects are using the Internet for. Check the top competitor web sites to get a feel for key sales messages they are using on their websites. Check industry reports to establish the potential size of the market and look for competitive prices, methods of selling, and post a survey on your own website to obtain feedback from existing website users.

Establish Measurable Goals - right down how much money you hope to achieve from online activity, when this should happen and how you expect to achieve this. Look closely at your own margins to establish how realistic your assumptions are, based on quantifiable factors such as the number of website visitors, average margins, overheads and sales conversion ratios.

Identify a Suitable Business Model - by employing search engine optimisation processes to your website, it is possible to achieve a 'organic' search engine rankings. This usually involves six months to one year of consistent activity (see below). Alternatively, it is possible to use affiliate marketing based business model to promote your goods or services (without bothering with investing time and effort in search engine optimisation). It there is not enough margins in your products or services to realistically pay/ motivate prospective pay affiliates, then this model is not appropriate. Lastly, investing in online advertising can bring instant sales conversions. Using established pay per click networks such as GoogleAds and Overture, prospects can be found and sales made instantly. Here, the precise margin must be understood in order to calculate the break even point.

Choose the Right Type of Website - high volume, low margin, consumer based goods that can be delivered through the post or downloaded, are ideally suited to the Internet. For these types of businesses, e-commerce based website model is cost-effective and hugely scalable. Conversely, a manufacturing based supplier of expensive, heavy duty industrial goods times does not lend itself to in e-commerce model. These types of businesses can still hugely benefit from a comprehensive 'brochure website' or 'portal' based model, (increasing website exposure by promoting themselves to new markets, (whether UK or overseas). Social networks such as Facebook and Bebo, where communities of like-minded individuals are sharing opinions and information, can be hugely beneficial to small business. Similarly, implementing your own blog or forum allow your website visitors to post opinions, provide customer feedback and boost customer goodwill. These type of website functions can apply to almost any online business.

Search Engine optimisation - search engines are made up of complicated mathematical algorithms, that compare one website with another, based on a user's key phrase to deliver the most appropriate relevant result. To achieve high rankings, a systematic marketing process needs to be rigorously followed by webmasters. It is critical you follow proper published search engine guidelines and do not employ techniques are that dubbed 'black hat', which risk ranking penalties or even your entire site being banned.
Firstly, it is necessary to identify the most popular key phrases used by your prospect market using tools such as KeywordDiscovery and the Google Keyword tool. By matching or 'optimising' each page of your website to a particular keyphrase used by prospects, it is more likely that particular page will achieve a high ranking (compared to webpage where the content is not targeted and optimised around that particular key phrase). This is partially achieved by ensuring the key phrase appears usually a couple of times (i.e. has the right 'keyword density'), on the webpage and in prominent positions. For instance, it should appear on the page title and near the top of the textual content in the first paragraph. Conversely, repeating the chosen keyphrase 10 or 20 times can have the opposite effect, and may be seen as 'spamming'... Search engines take a dim view of this and sites are automatically penalised for such techniques.

Secondly, it is vital that you write compelling content that is is unique to your website (in other words is not simply copied and pasted from elsewhere on the Internet). Content should be posted daily and always keep in mind that articles should provide real value and interest to the reader. Writing quality content is the core of Internet marketing and without it, small brochure websites will never rank highly against larger detailed sites. Write about the issues that concern customers, discuss industry pressures, summarise industry news, write press releases of product launches and employees activity. There are many ways increase the number and diversity of written pages on a website. Never write content just for search engines. It is possible to outsource content generation (but this is not advisable as you can never be sure where the source is from and hence your site risks duplicate content penalties).

Thirdly, ensure your website is useable and aesthetically pleasing. It is highly recommended you use the skills graphics designer that also has a good knowledge of search engines. Key areas to ensure they implement a browser independent design, the navigational structure is easy to understand, and the site is accessible according to W3C standards. You may also which to ask them to implement metatags for you. These are hidden HTML webpage elements which search engines use to create a 'snippet', which becomes visible in search engine results pages (SERPs). In particular, your targeted key phrase should appear in the meta-title and in the meta description of the metatags.

Fourthly, one of the oldest established principles of search engines algorithms is that of link popularity. This is a simple measure of the number of links that users can click through', from a third-party website to yours. The more 'inbound links' of the right 'quality and relevancy' your website has, the greater it will score in search engines. In other words, a link from a public library website pointed towards a website that sells books is ideal. 'Off topic' links are not as highly valued and can even damage search engine rankings (especially if the link relationship is two way or 'reciprocal' in nature). A lot of SEO firms offer link popularity services. Be extremely cautious of such offers, which normally include risky techniques such as using link farms, off topic pages, duplicate domains, duplicate content and 'triangular linking relationships'. The simplest approach is to create one one a reciprocal linking page that is highly relevant to your industry and company.

Where to Promote Your Website? - There are hundreds of search engines and thousands of business directories to submit your site to. In addition, many types of community portals and directories and blogs exist that allow you to post information about your skills and website. These posts will create many inbound links to your site which help rankings. Try and share your content by offering it up as XML or RSS content feeds. Social Networks, blogs, forums and directories are especially good for creating user interest while at the same time promoting your expert company knowledge, skills and services.

To conclude, Internet Marketing is a full time job, involving multiple skills and long term commitment. You must have a technical mind to start with, as well as the patience and belief that all the hard work during the first 3 to 6 months will bear fruit when your site is fully established.

Making Your Small Business Website Profitable

Related Content: Internet Marketing Market Research Pay Per Click Professional Selling

Related Content:

Internet Marketing

Market Research

Pay Per Click

Professional Selling