Any business, regardless of size, will benefit from having a website. The internet has made communication and exchanging information easier and cheaper than it was before. Promoting businesses online is opening another gateway of income revenue.
Today, businesses from many industries around the world are promoting themselves to the internet. With the capabilities to target consumers efficiently and with less cost, company website is becoming one of the most common website available on the World Wide Web.
The most important components for a business website are:
- Information about your company.
- Descriptions of your product(s) or service(s),
- Contact information (company address, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.
- A form that customers can fill out to request more information
A more comprehensive website might also have some or all of the following:
- A tool that allows customers to buy your products online (shopping cart).
- More detailed content about your company and products: white papers, press releases, testimonials, information about your company's owners and/or management, etc.
- Sales campaigns, such as coupons or (if applicable) free trials.
- A company blog
A good business website must be effective in three areas: 1) Getting prospective customers to your site, 2) Providing content on your site that gives them a positive impression of your company and your products, and 3) Getting the actual sale, whether that means filling out a request for a quote or making a purchase right on the site.
Getting prospects to your site requires a little search engine optimization (SEO). That means arranging your site so that it tends to show up in relevant searches from Google, Yahoo! and other major search engines. Like building a website, SEO can be as simple or as complicated as you prefer. SEO experts have dozens of tricks to get their websites into the top search ranks.
Anything and everything related to your company and products can be helpful. One reason that company blogs have become quite popular is that they tend to be quite entertaining, and they are updated frequently – providing lots of new content for search engines and human visitors alike.
Converting your prospects to customers is the trickiest part. That's why website promotions like discounts or gifts can help. If you can motivate visitors to give you their contact information, then your human salespeople get the chance to make a pitch. And because they've already expressed enough interest to take the step of asking for more contact, these website prospects are inclined to listen. If you decide to add a shopping cart to your site, then the buying cycle becomes even shorter.
The sooner you get your business website up and running, the better. Once you have a site on the Internet, you can then gradually work on building up its content and adding more pages.