You might be wondering what the real benefits of a website are for your business.
Admittedly, in the past, a poorly designed website which was never updated was unlikely to generate much, if any, extra interest in your small business.
These days however, the internet represents a fantastic opportunity for your company. You don’t need to sell directly online to make it worth your while; thousands of service orientated businesses have an online presence too.
With something like 60% of people searching online for local services, traditional advertising mediums such as phone directories and newspapers are becoming less important than an online presence.
I recently enquired at a local paper about advertising fees; the answer? £25 per week for a postage stamp-sized text box. The potential readership? About 150,000.
Now, I’m not saying newspaper advertising can’t be successful; indeed for many businesses, it works very well but £25 per week for an audience that isn’t particularly interested in your product/service is a lot of money. That’s £1300 a year!
Unless your website is a huge concern with complex database/backend requirements and a need for continued maintenance, it certainly won’t cost you £1300 a year.
Sure, when your website is new, you might need to advertise it using Pay Per Click(ppc) to get your site listed in search results but you can set a daily budget of just £1 a day and, providing your site has been built with basic SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in mind, your site will eventually be listed organically and the need for ppc will reduce. Read my article for more on this.
In reality, your audience will be smaller than the newspaper’s distribution figures but the people who do visit your website will be a more targeted audience. The reason that they clicked on your site is because they are interested in the type of services/products that you sell.
You can also have more information on a website than a simple textbox in the paper.
You can add a bit of personality to your business, highlight your latest deals, show off some recent work you have done, quote some testimonials and if you’re feeling adventurous start a blog that your customers might be interested in. The possibilities are endless.
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