In this day and age most businesses consider having their own website; from informational based to the most advanced and complex e-commerce site. For the large enterprise, this become a vital part of their day to day operation, their web site embeds complex applications that exchanges critical information between their partners and clients. Web services are sometime employed in order to simplify their transactions and easily exchange critical information across their suppliers, clients and partners.
Small businesses however face a different situation, majority of them don?t really utilize their web site?s full potential, and they become satisfied with just having a dot-com after their business name, important factor are then ignored and become enslaved by their own contentment.
Time constraints and financial consideration are among the reasons
Major small business owners find it difficult to upgrade or enhance their website and place useful tools and simple applications that would help visitors or guess feel more comfortable using it. Study shows that 80% of them don?t want to do it because of financial issue, 20% however, didn?t want to spend time to revisit and look at what?s lacking on their site. The cost of hostings, domain registrations and setup-fees has probably just gone to waste because many of them looked at it as totally marketing cost, when in fact it is also an investment that needed a return.
A website if managed properly would bring additional revenue for the business. How is this so? If you know how to unlock the obvious money maker capability of your website then its not only going to help you get more clients and make them happy, but would also give you extra revenue on the side.
It?s all about the hits
Can you imagine if your site is doing 100,000 hits per month or more because you exerted enough effort to enhance and polish your website? Yes, its all about the hits, opportunities arise when you have this kind of visitors or guests every month. Why? - Simple, marketing, advertising and revenue. That?s right, this is where it comes down to, by having hundred thousand hits a month, it?s a piece of cake to approach certain advertisers and make extra revenue on the side and increase potential leads for your business.
Increasing the Hits will allow you to minimize the cost of advertising expense by doing them online as well as all your promotions thereby increasing your revenue. Happy customers and impressed prospects can bring leads to your business and increase sales.
So how can you really increase the number of visitors? Or hits? By applying some of the strategies below that you may feel mostly fit for your business.
Always update your website especially if your business releases new products all the time. Obsolete information can cause confusion to your visitors. Enhance your site and make it more professional looking this invites visitors. Offer tips and information regarding your field of expertise or your business expertise. Your visitors or guests are your prospects and potential clients so why not take advantage of it and provide an eye-catching ad copy to get them interested in any of your ongoing specials. Email list is one of the most important part of your website, if applicable, you should provide email list to visitors /guests so you can update them of new events or promotions you?re currently running. Contents vary from business to business, not all contents are applicable to any business, make sure that yours are useful to your visitors and the information must straightforward. Submit your site to search engines, they?re usually free but takes a long time, but if you link your site to someone already registered to say google, then it just takes days when google reindex the sites yours will be included. Exchange links with different sites that are making the top searches on google or major search engines. Always include your website to any promotional ads in the newspapers or magazines. Place a ?refer to a friend? form on your website, because if they enjoy being on your web then definitely their going to refer them to friends. When you?re done polishing your site, don?t fail to take note of the changes by using website traffic analyzers or counters. You can sign up and download them for FREE or pay for it as part of your hosting service.
Results can vary depending on how well you implement the above, but there are plenty of books and articles out there that discuss this subject, I recommend you check them out to increase your knowledge in this area because its important that you use your website as a tool not only to interact with your clients and prospects but increase your business as well.
Guil Tabasa is a consultant for Altertek Solutions; he has been in the consulting business for more than 7 years now. He has helped small and medium businesses add value to their business that directly contributes to their revenue.
