It is no longer important to ask businesses whether they have some form of online presence or the other. The question we now need to ask them is this: “Is your website working?”
Business owners must never, ever lose focus on that the most important thing a website (or any other tech for that matter) should do for them is to increase profit by either reducing running costs or increasing sales. The latter is the more popular reason we have people trooping online to setup presence, yet sadly more than 50% of small business websites do not achieve this. Worse still, some business owners do not really see this as a problem and hence they keep wasting their resources on maintaining the website.
The more pro-active business owners simply shut down the website as they can clearly see no impact of this channel on their bottom line. Yet we know the problem is not with the web, the web works and is making a real difference in businesses across the world.
How do we fix this problem? I will leave you with 3 ideas:
Set tangible goals
What are the set goals for your website? None??
We give our staff sales target and we nudge and urge them towards it, why are we not doing the same thing for our website? Rather than leave your website floating there in the cyberspace, set goals for it.
Some simple goals you could set:
- Increase website visibility by optimising it for search engines
- Increase sales from website by 10% every week
Design a great looking website
Your website must look modern – simple, elegant design that looks great on any device. The chances that your website will be viewed on more mobile devices than traditional desktop computers are high and you want to ensure that your website does not look messy on a mobile screen.
Flash displays, splash pages and the likes are relics from 1999, they do not have any place on the modern internet. Work with a professional web designer that can truly project your business to the world
Create a content strategy
Every business must no longer think what they are doing is building a website for their business. What you are really doing is creating an online presence for your business, and so people should be able to interact with your business online.
Therefore, you need to get out there and put some content out, talk to people about your website, post it as a status update on Facebook or Twitter. Create content about your business that people would actually enjoy reading.
