Small Business Design Resources

How YouTube Can Benefit Your Small Business

Why Doesn’t Your Business Have a Website?

I find it surprising that some small businesses still don’t have a website. Typically, small business owners who decide not to have a website say something along the lines of, “My business is very small. It’s just me and three employees. I don’t want to sell my products online. Why do I need a website?”

My answer is always the same: regardless of the size of your business, and whether you plan to sell your products online or not, you do need to have an online presence, or you risk losing potential customers. Here are the four main reasons why even the smallest mom and pop shop should have a website:

Make It Easier To Get More Info About Your Business

Even if you don’t plan to sell online, you should have a presence on the Web so that customers, potential employees and business partners can quickly and easily find out more about your business. These days, when people search for information, the first place they go to is the Internet. More and more research shows that in almost every area, the first step in the decision making process is gathering information online. Not having an online presence will make some potential customers assume that you’re not a serious business and look elsewhere.

Your Competitors Are Online

For many prospects, if they have a choice between two businesses, and one business has a strong online presence with lots of info and the other has no website, they will feel more comfortable doing business with the site that has a website. A website makes a business seem modern, up to date and more accessible. A lack of website conveys the opposite – it makes a business look outdated and less professional.

Your Customers Are Online

This is easy. If your customers and prospects are online, you should be online too, and since these days almost everyone is online, regardless of what you sell or who your customers are, you should have an online presence. The same is true for social media, by the way – you don’t need to be on Twitter if your customers are not using Twitter. But if they are, you should have a regularly updated Twitter account and a prominent link to it from your website’s homepage.

Streamline Customer Service

A website is a great way to provide support for your customers and save yourself valuable time. Your website should include as much information about your business as possible, with the goal of minimizing the volume of phone calls you receive and the time spent on answering phone calls and emails. Include your address, directions, store hours, as much information about your products and services as you can, and answers to the most frequently asked questions you receive.

It’s important to realize that it’s not enough to just have a website. You should have a professionally designed site if you want to be taken seriously. A generic, low-quality website could actually hurt your business instead of promoting it, so it’s better to have no website than to have one that makes your business look bad. Small business website design is probably more affordable than you realize.

Landing Pages: What They Are and Why You Need Them

If you’ve been considering an online advertising campaign for your small business, you’ve probably come across the term “landing page.” The concept of a landing page is new to many small business owners, so don’t worry if you aren’t sure what it is or how it’s different from the other pages on your website. It’s actually a very simple concept that can really increase the effectiveness of your advertising campaign.

What is a landing page?
A landing page is exactly what it sounds like—the page a potential customer lands on after clicking a link. Technically, any page on your website can be a landing page. However, the most effective landing page is one that was created to match the needs of the person who clicked on the link that leads to it. The goal of a landing page is to capture the visitor’s attention and get them take an action you desire—make a purchase, for instance, or fill out a sign-up form.

Why you need a landing page for your advertising campaign
When you create an advertisement, whether it’s a banner ad or an email to your client list, you craft it with a specific goal and audience in mind. You do this to connect with your customers and encourage them to click on the link to your website. But your interaction with your customers doesn’t end there—you want them to take a certain action once they reach your website. This is where the landing page comes in. Sending people to an ad-specific landing page on your website will provide them with exactly what they came to find, making it more likely that they will make a transaction.

Here are a couple examples to illustrate what a landing page can do for you:

Imagine that you own an online store that sells women’s clothing. To market your website, you create an advertisement that promotes your new swimwear collection for summer. To go along with this advertising campaign, you design a landing page that features the top-selling swimwear items. People who click on the swimwear ad are more likely to stick around if they land on this page and immediately see what they’re looking for than if they’re directed to the homepage of your site, which has just a small link to the swimwear section.

Or maybe your marketing goal is to get people to sign up for your email list. To do this, you offer them a free e-book in exchange for their name and email address. When people click on this offer, they’re sent directly to a landing page that contains the form they need to fill out in order to receive the e-book. This will be much more effective than sending them to your website’s homepage, where they will have to hunt on their own for the link to sign up for the e-book. You’ll get many more people to sign up for your email list if you create a landing page specifically for this purpose.

Essentially, a landing page increases the effectiveness of your advertising campaign by immediately engaging visitors who are attracted by your ad. How many times have you clicked on a link only to find yourself on a webpage that seems completely unrelated? That was an example of a bad landing page, and chances are you hit the back button on your browser within seconds. Keep that from happening with your ads with a well-crafted landing page.

Social Media for Businesses: Empty Hype?

I’ve been observing my small business design clients for the past couple of years to see how they choose to use social media to promote their businesses.

My unscientific conclusion: small businesses seem to either love social media and use it as much as they can, or avoid it completely. There’s almost no middle ground, and it’s especially interesting to me that the clients who avoid social media are almost, it seems, afraid to use it.

Businesses worry about using social media for several reasons. The main reason is that they worry they will be wasting valuable time and resources on something that is no more than a hype – a passing trend that will disappear within a few years, leaving all those businesses who poured time and money into social media marketing with nothing.

Another common fear is that since social media is essentially about opening your business to your prospects and clients and having conversations with them, you would lose control of your brand and of your image if you engage in social media.

I would like to address the second issue first. I don’t think you should be afraid of social media. The conversations in social media about your brand are going to take place whether you are involved in them or not. It’s actually better to be involved, to initiate some of the conversations and certainly to follow mentions of your brand in social media (use Twitter Search) and respond to them.

As for the first question, most experts agree that while no one can say for certain that social media as it is now will be here in the same form a decade from today, the general concept of engaging customers and prospects in direct conversations is here to stay. I agree: consumers and businesses are quickly learning to expect two-way conversations with each other instead of solely relying on the traditional one-way promotional messages in print ads and in television commercials.

So, can you show clear return on your investment in social media marketing? This is where things get a bit trickier. Marketing is one area where it’s been traditionally difficult to show hard numbers, and social media marketing is no different. However, social media ROI can and should be measured.

A few ways you can measure the success of your social media marketing campaign:

1. Is your favorite social media channel (such as Twitter or Facebook) among the top ten referrers to your website?

2. When people get to your website through a social media channel, how engaged are they? Do they immediately bounce back, or do they spend a few minutes on your site?

3. What percent of your social media visitors become leads by downloading white papers or eBooks or by subscribing to your blog or to your newsletter?

4. What percentage of social media visitors become clients or customers?

Remember that whatever you do to track your social media ROI, you need to be patient. Establishing a social media account, growing it and cultivating connections with clients and prospects isn’t something you can do overnight. I would say that the typical social media account takes at least six months to start showing results, and the longer you keep at it, the better your results, provided you only follow relevant people and engage them daily.

Someone Has My Domain Name – Now What?

As a small business owner, you surely put a lot of thought into choosing the perfect name for your business. Now that you’ve decided to take advantage of all the opportunities offered by a small business website, you will need to purchase a unique domain name to serve as your business’s online presence. The obvious choice is yourbusinessname.com—but what do you do if someone already owns “your” domain name?

You basically have two options for securing a domain name that has already been purchased by someone else:

1. Ask the owner if they’re willing to sell. Visit the URL you wish to have to see what the owner is using it for. In some cases, the domain will be “parked” or inactive, meaning that it’s currently undeveloped. You might be in luck if the domain name you want is parked or doesn’t direct to a website, because it means the owner doesn’t currently have a use for the domain and may consider selling it to you for the right price. Sometimes a parked domain will have a page stating it is for sale and providing a way to contact the owner. If not, you can look up the owner’s contact information with a WHOIS search. Most domain registrars offer their own WHOIS database search, or you can use a site like http://whois.domaintools.com. Even if there is a site already up on the domain name you want, you have nothing to lose by asking the owner if they’re willing to sell. If you feel uncomfortable contacting the owner yourself, you can pay to have a registrar do it for you. For example, two of the largest domain registration companies, GoDaddy and NetworkSolutions, will contact the owner and make an offer on your behalf for a fee. Keep in mind that there is still no guarantee that the owner will be willing to sell, and you’re out the fee regardless.
2. Wait for the domain registration to expire. The WHOIS data on your domain name will list the date the current owner’s registration expires. If the owner doesn’t renew their registration, you may be able to snag the name for yourself. There are a few things to consider if you decide to go with this method:
   • Domain registrars offer a grace period after expiration, usually around 35 days, before they put the name up for sale. This means that a domain won’t necessarily become available on the day it’s set to expire.
   • Many companies will let you “backorder” a domain name, where you pay a fee to be put on a waiting list in case the name expires. The fee is nonrefundable and you aren’t guaranteed a chance to buy the domain—the owner may renew, or you may have to compete in an auction against other people who have paid to backorder the domain.

Alternatively, you can always go with a similar name that is available or think outside the box to come up with a unique and memorable name that represents your business. Another option is to choose a different domain extension, such as yourbusinessname.net if yourbusinessname.com is already taken.