A Website That Will Change The Game

Whether you’re an individual or a business, the single most important reason to have a website is to own your signal.

Chris Pearson

I have to start out by saying that I wholeheartedly agree with the above statement. I only wish I could help more small business owners realize this. So many old school (sorry folks) business owners just don’t understand the importance a website can have on their bottom lines. If they did there wouldn’t be a business in the world without a website or social media presence.

Instead we live in a world where everyday businesses are going under and they’re owners blame it on the economy, on the president, globalization, etc. The reality is they just didn’t know how to bring in customers and turn them into repeat buyers. Did you know that companies like Burger King, HP, Microsoft, FedEx and CNN were all started and prospered during recessions? I’m going to let you in on a secret.. Ready?

These are the steps to success in any business at anytime.

1) Attract new customers and sell them something, anything, just sell them so that they can start to trust you.

2) Treat your customers well, strive to have the best service not just the best product. If you focus on service first, people will care less about the quality of your product. I’m not saying sell junk, I’m saying great service builds greater loyalty.

3) Sell to your already existing customer again! Most businesses focus on always getting new customers instead of nurturing the ones they already have. It seems simple but rarely do you see this being put into action and the businesses that do, thrive.

Now, back to what we we’re here for.. A game changing website, right? What site is this you may wonder and the answer is simple; yours. The site you already have probably started in one of two ways, as a me too effort or as a poorly thought out addition to your PR strategy. Both reasons are serious liabilities for your business.

Your site needs to be the center piece of your marketing. It’s the place your customer should refer to when he thinks of your industry. Your site has to make it easy for your customer to interact with you and find the value in doing business with you. All these things should come from your website and all that online benefit will translate into the client “thinking if that’s their website imagine when I actually go to the store.”

Your website gives you another great advantage, it allows you to build celebrity around your brand. You can and many have gone from complete obscurity to national fame in a very short time. All it takes is a viral video or a well planned marketing campaign that builds momentum on its own. Does the name Groupon ring any bells? It should. They went from zero to hero practically overnight because they had a well thought out strategy and a website that was easy to use and having an innovative product always helps. But where would Groupon be without a good website? Nowhere that’s where.

So, whether you learn to build it yourself or have someone build it for you, build it the right way and you can make it the secret weapon in your arsenal.

Here’s a short list of the things your site needs to compete:

1 – A domain name with your keyword in it.  For example “www.joesplumbing.com” the keyword for a plumbing business would be “Plumbing” easy right?.

2 – A fast hosting service. Like VPS.net people hate to wait for websites to load and that could mean losing clients if your website is slow. Add to that Google hates slow websites and you can lose ranking in the search engines if your site is slow. So don’t go for the “el cheapo” web hosting service. It will cost you more in lost business in the long run.

3 – A reliable autoresponder service like Aweber.  If you don’t know what an autoresponder is, it’s simply an email service that lets you send prescheduled emails to a list of subscribers. You place a optin box on your site asking people for their email in exchange for  a free report or video and build a list of potential clients.

4 - A good SEO company. That’s people like me and others you can find online who specialize in getting people to your website. We do this by implementing proven search engine optimization strategies, pay-per-click advertisements and social media promotion. SEO companies live and breathe this stuff and hiring an SEO guy let’s you do what you do best and leaves the heavy web lifting to us.

5 - A strong social media presence. If you don’t have a Facebook fan page you need one, today! Facebook has over 700 million users and a fan page is your quickest way to start converting some of those 700 million into new customers. Twitter is a household name and for good reason, it can keep you up on the news as it happens. More importantly it’s one of the best customer service tools most businesses never even thought of. There are tools that let you know as soon as your business is mentioned on twitter and you can interact with your public almost instantly, Dell and Zappos are just two of the many companies who use this to their advantage.

So there you have it a whole basketful of pearls to start your business off on the right foot. Hopefully you take these strategies and they bring you great success. Be sure to let me know so we can dance in the end zone!

Image by: curtiskennington

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Tagged as: autoresponder, SEO, social media