Do you have a home based business, or small business, with no web presence? Are you operating a successful business but not a successful website? Here are some suggestions to make your business site a profit center, instead of a cost center.
Free Hosting: A Smart Move for You?
There are many ISP's offering free hosting services today. Many of them are first class and offer upgrades to a more substantial range of services for really affordable monthly fees when you are ready. Free sites usually have some sort of advertising tacked onto your site, or email, to cover their expenses but few - if any - inundate your visitors with ad's or pop-ups like they used to.
When would you use a free site? Free sites are a viable alternative for any business that wants a "brochure site" and does not intend to use the net as a source of customers, clients, or sales.
Brochure sites are designed to take the place of a traditional paper brochure and are vastly superior to them in many ways. They are cheaper. They can be changed or updated without requiring an expensive print run, and they serve the function of providing your business a minimal web presence.
Have a Presence and Make it Pay Too!
The old saying, "You get what you pay for", is as true on the net as it is in the offline world. If you want your website to be a source of customers, and revenue, you need to spend a little time, money, or both.
How much money? Not as much as you might think. Certainly not the thousands of dollars you hear about, but if you want to make money none of the "get rich quick" schemes will work either.
You can build a profitable site that will generate traffic and bring cutomers to the door of your local business. For less than $400 you can have your own domain, site hosting, site building tools, search engine optimization (SEO) and support. Of course, you still have to put in the work. Plan on about 100 hours for site development, keyword analysis and SEO. Then a few hours a week, maybe 2-3, to keep it fresh.
Its Traffic, Traffic, Traffic.
There's an old saying in the real estate business that the three most important things to consider in a property are location, location, and location. A website site is similar, but the defining term is traffic. Traffic is oxygen to your site's cash flow. Cut off the oxygen and the cash doesn't flow.
A whole industry has grown up around methods and products to build site traffic. Begin to research search engine optimization (SEO) and you will soon be drowned by a tsunami of instant success programs, SEO software solutions and the offerings of SEO consultants. Keep your wits when you are swimming through and remember "caveat emptor". If the traffic problem could be effectively solved by spending a few hundred dollars on a mass submission drive or finding a few optimized keywords it wouldn't be a problem. Keyword and search engine optimization are part of the solution - not the single magic bullet.
Traffic built? Add Google Adsense
Google adwords aren't for everybody, but they are a clean, simple way of making your website produce a cash flow of its own. I say they aren't for everybody, because it is recommended you have at least 20 pages of valuable content and are getting about 50 visitors per day before you apply. The ads in Adsense are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site. You can get more information and make application to Google for AdSense at https://www.google.com/adsense
Jess Huffman is a Business Consultant and Coach working from his home office in Calgary, Alberta. Jess has helped hundreds of his clients start their own successful home based businesses.
http://www.home-business-and-entrepreneur-tools.com