Small Business Website Wisdom

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Small Business Web Site Success

Think of your small business web site as “Web Marketing Central.” It’s the all-important centerpiece to your online marketing strategy. And if you create it and promote it the right way, your web site can lead to big success …. check out my book on small business web marketing to find out how.

Build as much value into your small business web site as possible. Load it up with helpful content, articles, tools, resources, industry news and more. Make it a one-stop-shop for information relevant to your business and the products / services you sell.

In web marketing circles, this is known as making your website “sticky.” The more valuable the content you offer, the more likely people will be to stick around. The longer they stick around, the better the chance you have of converting them into customers.

Just keep in mind that the more content you add to your business web site, the neater things must be. Organize your site content so people can find things easily. Keep things clean and uncluttered. Within ten seconds, people should be able to identify the correct path to the information they seek or the product they want.

On a small business web site, the goal is usually to lead visitors down a certain path. This path usually leads to a desired action, such as an inquiry, subscription or purchase. You can’t fully control where people will go or what they will click on, but you can at least offer your preferred path and make it easy for people to follow.

On the other hand, when you overload your web pages with too many items, you end up dividing the reader’s attention, creating unnecessary distraction, and increasing the likelihood visitors will leave your site altogether.

You should also incorporate some kind of response-generating mechanism into your web site, and feature it in key areas across your site. Lead generation is an area where a lot of business web sites falter. Some companies have no form of lead generation whatsoever, while others use the always ineffective “call us to learn more” approach.

These are the fundamentals needed for small business web site success — quality content, organization, usability and lead generation. If you’d like to learn more about each of this concepts (and how they can increase your web marketing success), check out my book, Online Equalizer, below.