savvymarketingsecrets/blog » 2010

Should you hire someone to build your small business website? Part 1

By Marcia Ming on Sunday, February 28th, 2010 | 28 Comments

globe with www sign depicting a small business website

An effective website can be a real asset in your marketing. But before you pick a web designer, here are several issues you should consider.

Think about the purpose for your website and the role it will play in your ongoing marketing strategies.

Will your small business website serve largely an informational purpose of pre-selling prospects before they visit your physical store or offices?
Or will your customers be able to purchase your products and services directly from the site?
How frequently will new information need to be added to your website?
Is there someone at your company who could be trained to update content as things change?

Next, you should sit down with your staff and decide what you want your small business website to do.

How do you want it to look?
What features should it include?
What pages and content will you add to it? Who will write that content?
What special interactive features will you add to make your site “sticky”? A sticky site is one that people return to again and again as new content is added. Amazon.com, for example, is one of the stickiest sites on the Internet.

Building your website is just part of the equation. Marketing it is equally important. If no one knows your site exists, it will not succeed. So tomorrow’s post will discuss the factors you need to consider regarding site promotion. You need to address those issues too before you hire someone to build your small business website.

Should you build a static website or a blog?

By Marcia Ming on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 | 1 Comment

A few years ago, things were relatively simple for the average small business looking to take its business online. You could use a site builder or web template to create a simple static website with 5 to 10 pages and you had a web presence.

Not so today in the world of Web 2.0. It’s no longer enough to put up a simple, static website. A static website is one where you do all the talking. You tell site visitors all about your company, your staff, its products and services and how to contact you in just a few pages.

Today, interactivity is an important feature.

Image of a man and woman standing at oposite ends of a telephone receiver

Metaphor for two-way conversation

Companies are creating blogs, forums and other interactive vehicles that let consumers talk back. Managing your website also means updating your profile on Twitter, Facebook LinkedIn and other social media. So it’s a lot more complicated to create a web presence today.

Whether you build a website using a standard html site building tool or use a blog platform, be sure you plan a way to get your site visitors involved in the conversation. Static websites – one way conversations with the public where consumers have little or no input – are so yesterday.

The social media revolution demands that you include some sort of interactivity in your small business web presence. With that in mind, what is the best way to do it?

How do you make your website interactive?

The easy answer is to add a blog to your website. But adding a blog is a good option only if you plan to post on a regular basis. Blogs need to be updated frequently as my visitors often remind me.

You can assign the responsibility for blogging to several people within your company, hire a writer to blog about topics related to your company and its products or encourage guest bloggers.

Another option is to add a forum to your website if you have a large following of people looking for a place to communicate about topics related to your business. Of course, you may need a techie on your staff and a forum may require you to add moderators, or someone to respond to questions people raise in the forum.

A third idea might be to link your website to a Facebook fan page where you encourage your customers and prospects to interact with a company spokesperson. At a minimum you should add a comment form on your website, to make it easy for people to ask a question or make a comment.

If you are selling lots of products on your website, you probably should provide a help desk to deal with the issues your customers may face. In short, don’t expect your site visitors to suffer in silence. They are more likely to go away and never return.

Creating an effective web presence for your small business

By Marcia Ming on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | 6 Comments

Announcing a special series in February:

.com symbol - creating an effective web presence for your small business

Having your own .com is critical to creating an effective web presence for your small business

If your business is in the real world – sometimes referred to as offline – it’s vitally important these days for you to have an effective web presence.

Let’s face it, unless most of your customers are seniors, your yellow page ad probably is not pulling its weight. I live in a college town where most of the residents don’t even bother to carry the yellow pages into their homes.

Instead, they (your prospects) comparison shop the websites of major retailers before they set foot in a retail store. By the time they do, they know exactly which brand they want and who is offering the best features for the lowest price.

In short, your business will not survive long without a web presence. But creating one that helps your prospects find what you are selling is a big challenge. It takes considerable marketing savvy and the right tools.

So, Savvy Marketing Secret’s blog will launch a series of posts to help you build a web presence that works.

In February, we’ll talk about building a website if you don’t already have one. Even if you already have a website, you’re sure to benefit from the topics we have planned. Here’s our current lineup of topics:

Should you build a static website or a blog? – Google loves blogs because it lets your site visitors participate in your online conversation.
Should you hire someone to build your website? – And if so, who do you hire, how much will it cost, and what will you get for your money? What challenges will that pose for maintaining your website?
We will tell you how to setup a simple website and blog using the WordPress blog platform.
If you go with a blog, should you pay for a custom blog theme? If you are trying to brand your business to set it apart from the competition, you may want a theme that reflects that unique branding.
What are blog plugins and should you use them? What are the most helpful ones and the most popular?
What pages should your website include? Some web pages – like the ones about your business and how to contact you are not optional. New FTC rules make it important to include privacy statements, terms of service and other disclaimers. You don’t want to miss this post.
We will also explain why content is so important to your website? If you are going to attract traffic to your new website you will need content relevant to your business and lots of it.
Finally, we’ll talk a little bit about selecting the keywords you should put in your content if you want your site to be found – by search engines and your business’ prospective customers.

It would be impossible to cover everything you need to know about keywords in one blog post which is why in March, we’re planning a full series about generating traffic to your website, including how to optimize your website with keywords for search engines and humans.

If no one knows it exists, your new website will be practically useless, so bookmark this blog or signup for our newsletter now, to make sure you don’t miss a single post. If you have a specific question or problem along these lines, leave a comment so we can include your concerns in our post. Here’s to your small business’ success in 2010.

Marcia Ming,
Publisher

With Affiliate Marketing, Start With Your Passion

By Marcia Ming on Tuesday, February 9th, 2010 | 13 Comments

When trying to pick a niche for affiliate marketing, experts encourage you to go with your passion. Why? You have to do a lot of research and develop a great deal of content on the topic. You don’t want to pick something that bores you to tears.

In internet marketing it's important to find your passion - things that tug at your heart.

The heart is a symbol of passion which can make a difference in perseverence in internet marketing.

Well, I’ve been struggling with the issue of passion. Back in the nineties, I worked with a nonprofit agency to bring a brand new program to Delaware where I lived at the time.

It was a microloan program called Working Capital that provided business training and very small loans to tiny companies. Based on the Nobel Prize Winning Grameen Bank model created by Muhammad Yunus, Working Capital was supposed to do for America’s inner cities and rural areas what the international loan program had done for India and some African nations.

I can’t remember a time when I felt more passion than those many evenings I spent meeting with groups of small business owners explaining the program and helping them form loan groups. Once groups were formed, members discussed their business plans and sought the group’s approval for loans.

I was a woman on a mission. I really believed in free enterprise and its potential to transform communities.

What made the whole experience so powerful was the atmosphere we created. We held networking events, brought in special speakers and formed a lot of business loan groups. The energy in our building was so powerful you could feel the excitement. During the five or six years the program ran, hundreds of entrepreneurs joined Working Capital.

Our Delaware program was so successful that we won a Presidential Award and were invited to help form loan groups for street vendors before the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Thinking back, I realized that I poured so much of my heart and soul into that program that something inside me died with the program. I had a vision of little businesses transforming Wilmington in a similar way as successful minority owned companies changed the landscape of Memphis’ historic Beale Street. My hope died hard.

I created Savvy Marketing Secrets hoping to rekindle some of the passion I felt with Working Capital. By helping very small businesses harness the power of the Internet, I hoped to relight that spark.

Of course it’s not as easy to feel passion sitting in front of a computer screen as it was when I was meeting with real business owners. But tapping into that experience helped me remember my passion.

Many of the smallest businesses are not even on the Internet. But the net holds tremendous promise for business growth for those who take advantage of the various marketing tools. So my passion now is to use this blog to connect the dots to help businesses similar to the ones I worked with in Delaware.

I would love to hear your stories about your passion and how you are shaping it into your small business. Please leave a comment below.

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