Running A Small Business Website

Are you a small business owner/consultant/service professional?

If so do you know:

• How your website is performing?
• Was it worth the cost?
• How do your visitors find your site?

Its probably true that the majority of small business website owners don't know the answer to these basic questions. Why?

Because most small business website owners have a website designed, and once online they forget about it.

The website isn't maintained, monitored or updated and the owner has no idea if the website is benefiting the business at all.

A website is a promotional and a communications tool. You can use it to attract new clients/customers, and to engage with existing ones.

In order to do this you need devote some time and effort to promote, update, monitor and maintain the site.

Website/Business Marketing/Promotion

As a website owner you have open to you many new methods of cheaply and effectively marketing/promoting your businesses; in addition to the existing offline methods.

It is important that you become familiar with he main methods (SEO, PPC and email marketing), as well as including your website in your offline efforts by including your web and email address on your stationary and other promotions, vehicles etc.

Updating

It is important that your site looks fresh and so you should ensure that you update the home page from time to time. The easiest way of doing this is to include news/blog headlines on the home page.

Because you will need to update your site it is important that you know how, or employ someone who does. This is why I always advocate that you become familiar with basic web site technologies as it makes running your site much easier.

Maintaining

It is important that your site:

• Is online
• Contains no broken links
• No missing images
• That the sitemap is up to date.
• That it displays correctly in various browsers.

Monitoring

This is perhaps the most important part, and the one than very few website owners do. How is your site performing?

• Is your traffic increasing or decreasing?
• Where is your traffic coming from?
• What keywords are your visitors using?
• How is your traffic converting to customers?
• How profitable is your site?
• etc