Your business is small, you’re just starting out and you don’t have any employees. You may be asking yourself if you really need a website. After all, not all businesses are destined for internet selling. The fact is, today, more and more businesses both large and small realize that having an internet presence, even if you don’t directly sell through the internet, is vital to doing business in today’s market place. Ever since the early 80s when the internet first took hold, the importance of the medium has been steadily growing. Today if your business doesn’t have a website it’s not taken seriously, it’s the first place most people turn when they are looking for information about a company be it their address and phone number, their price list, opening hours or inventory.
Staying Ahead of the Competition.
In an article dated July 9, 2007, AdvanceMe Inc, a leading provider of funding for small and mid-sized businesses, reported on the findings of the Capital Access Network Small Business Barometer:
http://www.capitalaccessnetwork.com/documents/SurveyResultQ22007.pdf .
AdvanceMe distilled the results and made the following statement about small business owners:
“The results reveal an understanding of the importance of promoting their business presence on the Web with 68 percent utilizing first generation search engine optimization tools to help drive traffic, and another 58 percent using some form of online advertising.”
http://www.advanceme.com/press/2007/press_release070907.aspx
Having an internet presence sets you up as a first class provider and lets your customers have access to your store to answer simple questions even when your brick and mortar store is not open for business.
What are these small business owners doing with their websites?
If you have a business that is not built around internet selling, like many of the business owners in the survey, you may be wondering what these small business owners are doing on their websites. Here are some of the things they are accomplishing:
• Setting themselves apart from the competition
• Providing information about hours of operation and inventory to their customers
• Providing email access via their “contact us” page so customers can ask them questions
• Providing an opportunity for partners and affiliates to sell their products
• Advertising promotions, sales and new products or services
• Reaching customers who do not live in their local area
• Letting customers see pictures of their products
• Blogging – providing information on a weekly basis – staying in touch with customers
Reach More People, Offer a Better Service
People turn to the internet more and more frequently. A decade or two ago, people looking for a local business would turn to the yellow pages of their local telephone directory. Today, more and more people turn first to the internet and do a search on businesses in their town. Let’s say you have a dry cleaning service which really cannot be done over the internet. You may think having a website is a waste of time. But if your competition has a website, and their name comes up in the search engine, they are likely to get more business than you from travelers, new residents, and people who simply want to change dry cleaners.
Coin Laundry image from Flickr
If you have a website you can not only reach your dry cleaning customers, you could develop an email service to let people know when their dry cleaning is in, let them know about special offers. You could use the website to advertise extra services such as alterations, tailoring or shoe repair.
No matter what your business, with a little imagination, you will be able to think up several ways that you can improve or enhance your service with an internet presence even if all your customers are local. You could even use the website to increase income by using advertising for similar products on your site.
Analytics, Business, Website Content | Yiana Palacios | 
September 24, 2009 1:43 pm | 
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