Building a website is the first step to ensuring you get the most out of promoting your small business online.
As a small business owner, you are no doubt beginning to explore the world of promoting your business online. You may have heard of pay-per-click advertising and email marketing, and you have probably begun to dabble in social media.
These are all important tools and platforms, but they can be expensive and ineffective if you haven’t got solid foundations for your online presence. Building a quality website is the first step to ensuring you get the most out of online promotion. In this first instalment of a two-part series on promoting your small business online, I will look at how to build an effective online presence.
Your website is your round-the-clock shop front, so you need to invest in one that is professional and represents your brand. Your website needs to communicate what you do, who for and why customers should use you.
Ensure your website is easy to manage, using a content management system that you can update without any hassles. Relevant and fresh content is a very important way to drive visitors to your site, so you need to be able to add new content regularly.
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It is also important to consider how your website looks on a mobile device. Use the Go Mo Google app to help with this, and consider building a mobile version of your website using Wire Node. You can also use a tool called Lucky Orange to see how your website works from a customer perspective.
Finally, remember to include a call to action on your website. If this is missing, then you are wasting your money. A call to action is the step you would like your visitor, prospect or customer to take. It needs to be appropriate to what you offer, and might come in the form of a free trial, download, meeting or sample.
Remember, it is not only about generating traffic to your website: the name of the game is getting leads and converting these into sales.
What tips do you have for building a website that is effective?
