Your small business does not need a website!
"What?"
What is a blog about websites and making money online doing saying your brick and mortar small business does not need a website?
Perhaps it would be best if I clarify.
You don’t need a website for your business. You need a marketing funnel. You need a web presence that creates a desire for your product or service as well as advertises your existence. The websites of many small businesses often fail at both.
If your a small business owner you probably either have or are constantly offered one of two different types of websites.
- An online storefront for selling products directly online
- A "Name, rank, and serial number" type of site that really just states facts about your business to create an "online presence."
Neither of these web presence ideas really helps make your small business more profitable.
The first is fine if you have a product or service that can be shipped to the customer at a financially feasible price. The second is not much different than phone book ad that fails to make you different to the potential customer.
At least once a week, I received calls by web developers for my small business.
Some wanted to create an online store for me. Great, but my business did not have something that could be sold online. The others wanted what I still consider obscene amounts of money to design a fancy looking site that would basically put my phone number online so I could get more useless calls like theirs (I am not saying don’t put your business phone number online, just make sure you will get more than telemarketers calling when you do it). This I could have done myself, I just failed to see the point.
I bet you get these calls too.
I also bet, that, if you have had one of these website developers create a site for you, at least one of the following is true:
- You paid over $1000 to have the site made
- You are paying over $50 a month for hosting
- Your website does not rank first place on Google for your own business name (instead some national site like CitySearch does)
- Your site only gets traffic when you pay for ads
- If someone is really trying, they can find your website if they need your address or phone number
- You cannot update information already on the site easily if you need to
- You cannot add new stuff to the website without paying more
- You have at least one perpetual "Under Construction" page
- Your pages sometimes look funny because the graphics don’t load
- You are wondering where all the money this website is supposed to bring in is
Most likely several of the above statements are true.
Some of them may be true even if you did not get a telemarketer call, but decided to find a website designer yourself. OK, maybe you paid even more.
Too often, businesses get a website designer that creates fancy graphics and a pretty looking.
Fancy graphics will not get you more business. A pretty looking site does not make more people come to it. In fact, some of the most profitable websites are somewhat ugly (Wal-Mart stores for the most part are too, and they make a lot of money).
What do you need from your small business website?
- Reasonable ranking in search engines like Google
- Give basic information about your business to those looking for it
- Be simple and fast for updates or additions by you or your sales and marketing team/person
- Most importantly, your website should share what makes your business unique – why should the potential customer come to you
- Your website should have testimonials from your other customers
- Share benefits of your product or service
- Hopefully, get some information from the potential customer so you can contact them with more information (including a well written sales letter).
- Create a desire for your product or service
Too many small business websites fail to provide a real reason the customer should come to you.
Too often, small business websites share the same trait most phone book ads share-nearly identical and have no unique selling point. You can often just change the company name and a competitor can use the website. Sometimes, even a company in completely different field could use the much of the site. If the customer does end up calling or contacting you they are only left with one question, "How much does (insert product or service here) cost?" Price then becomes the only factor the customer can judge by. All you can hope for is that you have the best price of the places they call. They usually end up going to Wal-Mart.
This is true in most small businesses.
It was true in my profession (photography) and I know that I have been left with the same choice by other small businesses. Unless your website separates you from the other businesses like yours, price becomes the only real factor a customer can judge you by.
You do not need an expensive website to do this.
It can all be handled extremely well by WordPress. No expensive software to buy. Once set up, it is easy to use and update. WordPress also has some advantages that you can use to make your site even more popular.
Over the next few weeks and months I’ll be going over in detail how to set up WordPress for your small business website.
I’ll include everything you need to use and download to do it. I’ll have video on how to set up the site. My goal is to show you how to do it so you can spend your time making money and not fooling with your website. You can do this without spending huge amounts of money and save that money for your family.
Your website can be an effective marketing funnel in bringing in new customers and keeping old customers for your small business.
I like this post. It gives pretty valid points and has me thinking if I were to approach small business how I might go about it.
I wouldn’t normally approach a company who does not have an online business unless I thought it would help them.
I am more willing to help a business update their look to something that doesn’t look like it was created using FrontPage by a 4 year old. I would also look at making it easier for them to do their own updates. (I personally love backend development than front end design). I like making people more efficient in what they do.
If someone approaches you and asks to develop you an eCommerce solution but you obviously wouldn’t benefit from it, then that person hasn’t researched your company properly. If I am selling say Bayliner boats, I’m obviously not going to be taking orders online right?
WordPress as a CMS works wonderfully and more people are using it. Also Drupal is great too though I haven’t had much experience with that yet. With templates and plugins widely available WordPress is relatively easy to setup and maintain on your own.
Right?
Thanks for commenting Tyler,
I don’t think I could agree with you more. I really think WordPress is an excellent solution for many small businesses. They need to spend more time thinking about what they are putting on the site as far as content and how that content will market their business.
A friend of mine who owns a guitar store fell for this trap. He paid $5000 for a fancy Flash based site that has poor SEO so he doesn’t rank on page #1 for his store name. Plus he doesn’t own the domain name, the consultant who did the work does. He pays $250 a month for support and the hosting, which is on a GoDaddy shared account, once again owned by the ‘consultant’. He’s essentially locked into this mess unless he wants to go to the trouble to change his store name.
Sadly, I wasn’t able to free up any time to help him build the site because I was working 60/hrs a week on a new software development contract at the time. It’s too bad for both of us. I would have done the work in trade for a new American made Fender Telecaster.
Frank Cs last blog post..Vintage Fondue Pots – Buying Guide
Frank- I got offers like that at least once a month. Not to mention the offer for banner ads on pages with no PR or Alexa rank at all (for just $100 a month). Oh yeah, the pages were just pages of banner ads.
Talk to your friends who are in business if you know anything about blogging or websites-you can do both or you a favor.
Ugh %250/month for Support and hosting? I pay $5.91/month for my hosting and it’s great! I do my own support so whatever. When I’ve registered people’s domain names in the past I registered them using their contact information so that they own it. I also explained to them how the registration works and asked them how much they want to register it for etc.
I also set up web hosting for clients with their credentials so that they own the hosting. It’s a bit unethical to keep things like their domain name/web host accounts for yourself.
I also explain things like basic SEO techniques and how content can be king etc. School them a bit into what they are getting into etc so they understand how the web works and how it can work for them.
Tyler – You would not believe what is being pushed on small businesses. Many of them think theses expensive websites are their only option and either pay for this extortion or never build a website for their business.
I have successfully used WordPress as the CMS for business sites and I am very pleased with the ease of the use and the natural search engine optimization. Also, the abundance of plugins means I can do just about anything I can think of.
Louises last blog post..Grilling Lobster Tails with Shallot Butter and Cucumber ‘Noodles’
As you say, there is a pressure these days on a business that they ‘must’ have a website. Website developers are using the ‘hard sell’ at time to try and get business – a small company could spend $1000′s on a site with no use. The company I work for gets approached all the time but we simply don’t need one. For us, the money would be much better spent on local paper ads or even as bonus to the workforce to boost morale – certainly not on a website.
Chris -Despite the title of this post, I actually do think a business needs a website these days. For many people and most cases, Google and the Internet have long replaced the phone book (the Yellow Pages) for finding a business. If you do not have a website, those people will go to your competition.
A business most likely does not need to spend $1000′s or even $100′s for a highly effective website though. That is what this series is about. A much more effective website for very little (nearly none) money.
I got those phone calls for the overpriced or useless sites myself for years. It was not until I learned how to have a website that could bring in clients effectively that I even saw the use of one for that business. If I had the knowledge or knew of the tools I have now 3 years ago, my studio would have been a much different business. In fact, a well known photographer (in the professional portrait market-and he is a very successful marketer also) is using pretty much the same techniques I’ll be explaining here.
A well done website – and I will be showing how – can extremely successful in generating huge business for nearly any small business. It need not be expensive or difficult to do.
So many companies just publish a webpage bythemself without any designer involved. They look, feel and operate like a garbage. Without any UI, SEO or at least an idea the page is approved and is been forget. Sadly this is the case in so many small firms that could really make a mark in their sector with user friendly website full of great content.
You will not believe what has pushed for small businesses. Many of them think theses sites are expensive in their only option, and this is paying extortion or never build a website for their business.
I have successfully used WordPress as a CMS for business sites and I am very pleased with the ease of use and optimization of natural search engine. In addition, the abundance of plugins means I can do almost everything I can think of.