The Most Important Piece Of Your Small Business Website
March 30th, 2009
If there’s a running theme in my blog posts here, it’s this: If your web site is not generating sales, you need to fix it immediately. The point of a web site for a small business is to make money – not build your brand, not prove your legitimacy, not make it look like you’re all “Web 2.0″ – MAKE MONEY.
You need to treat your web site as an active member of your sales staff. When anyone visits your site – whether you send someone to the site or whether they stumble upon it by accident – it needs to make the sale. It needs to get your visitors attention, pique their interest in your service or product, fuel their desire to buy from you and drive them to take action to close the sale.
It’s this last one that most often gets missed. It’s not enough to provide a phone number and hope someone remembers to contact you when it’s convenient for them – you need to provide a strong, clear call to action that the user can take immediately, otherwise you’ll lose them forever. This action is called a “conversion” – the moment your visitor converts into an actual customer. Nothing is more important to your small business website than conversions, and you need to know how well your web site is converting to know how good a sales person it is.
Dealing With Content Thieves
February 26th, 2009
At the most recent seminar I did at the Contra Costa Library, a number of members from a local writing guild showed up to learn as much as they could about promoting their work online. After the class, I had a fascinating conversation with them in regards to their concerns about putting their art online. Specifically – how do you prevent people from stealing it?
The short answer: you don’t. If someone wants to steal your content bad enough, they will find a way no matter how hard you lock it down. Thus, if you don’t want your content stolen, don’t put it online, not for sale and not for free. Of course, keeping your work offline is like burying your head in the sand – how else will unknown artists build their name if they can’t take advantage of digital distribution?
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