Many people forget that your website is nothing more than a simple marketing tool and should be treated as such. It’s been pounded into everyone’s head that small businesses need a website. I believe this is true… well, partially true.
I believe that all small businesses can benefit from an internet strategy that starts with a good website as the foundation. Just having a website isn’t enough. The secret is to make sure the website is effective so you’re not just wasting your time and money. Or, even worse, wasting your customers/prospects time and money.
So how do you go about making sure your website is effective?
There are three main goals to an effective website. It should do one or more of the following:
- Increase your Profits
- Save you Time
- Build your Business
Welcome to “Effective Website Goal #1: Increase Your Profits” (part one of a three part series. Can you guess what parts 2 and 3 will be about?)
As you probably know, there are two components to profit, revenue and expenses. To increase your profit you need to increase revenue, decrease expenses, or a combination of both. For some reason most people forget about this when dealing with their website.
Increasing your Revenue
Since every business is different and has a different revenue model, I’m just going to quickly cover revenue and be as generic as possible.
Before you start building your site, make sure you have defined and specific objectives for the site. Will it generate revenue
- via online sales / shopping cart?
- by sending customers into your store?
- by generating phone/email leads?
- from advertising sales?
- other?
If one of the goals of your site is to make money, be sure that you know specifically how it’ll make money.
Decreasing your Expenses
The expenses involved with a website are a bit more universal. Every small business will have the same types of expenses, it’s just a matter of how much they choose to pay for them. These expenses are:
- Domain Name
- Website Development / Initial Setup
- Website Hosting
- Website Maintenance / Updates
- Marketing
Domain Name Expense
Your domain name (mysite.com, for instance) will cost you $8-15 a year. If you’re paying substantially more than that, something isn’t right. Either your registrar is ripping you off and it’s time to transfer your domain to someplace else. Or, your web design or hosting company is acting as a middle man and pocketing a big wad of cash. Again, time to transfer your domain.
Website Development / Initial Expense
Unless you’re building the website yourself you’ll probably have to pay someone to build the site for you. The trick is making sure you only buy what you really need and to buy from an internet marketer.
In the past, there were basically two types of people who built websites: computer geeks and computer graphic artists. Now these are fine people, it’s just that they are no longer the people you want building your site.
Don’t buy your site from a traditional “web design” firm
Go talk to a web design firm full of computer geeks and they’ll tell you your site needs to have all the fancy, trendy, and cutting edge bells and whistles. While these things are cool and all, they usually don’t translate into making your small business any extra money. They do, however, make the web design firm a boatload of money.
Don’t buy your site from a graphic artist
Go talk to a graphic artist, and they’ll tell you that your site needs to be gorgeous and perfectly portray the image of your business. True, they’ll probably set you up with a beautiful eye-pleasing design suitable for framing and hanging on your office wall. But, again, will this translate into making you more money?
Buy from an internet marketer
Go talk to someone who doesn’t just build websites for other people, but also builds and runs their OWN website businesses. Ask them how they build sites for themselves. They’ll tell you to focus on:
- A clean, simple, easy to navigate design. It doesn’t have to be a unique or award winning layout… Just professional in appearance.
- Functional - Everything on the site works toward achieving your goals. No unneeded features/graphics.
- Spend time on writing good content. The words on your site are what sells.
- Act fast - Get something on the site right away. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can always make changes/improvements as time goes on.
- Don’t spend a lot of money on the site. Use it for marketing and getting traffic to your site. (if you really feel the need to spend money)
There are some businesses that do need all the bells and whistles or the beautiful graphic intensive website, but for the mass majority of small businesses, it’s just an unneeded expense. I’ve seen hundreds of small business owners shell out thousands of dollars for a website (a huge expense) without even thinking about how much (if any) revenue they’ll gain from the site. And, they rarely calculate the break even point.
Website Hosting Expense
All businesses will need to have a place on the internet to store their “stuff”. Things like web pages, images, videos, audio files, documents, etc. So, you’ll need to pay for hosting. (Although there are a bunch of free places to store your stuff so if you don’t mind putting up with advertising having things scattered over the net, you could probably run your business without hosting. Maybe that’ll be a future article)
Anyway, hosting will run you anywhere from $2 per month to hundreds of dollars a month. For most small businesses $10 a month should do nicely.
Website Maintenance / Updates Expense
Any successful website will need to be updated frequently. And by updated, I mean added to. You’ll want to regularly add new content to your website to keep it “fresh”. The search engines like new stuff, so keeping your site fresh will eventually drive more search engine traffic your way.
Unfortunately, most small businesses don’t consider this when they have their site built. So, they aren’t able to update the site themselves and they have to pay their webmaster $100 an hour to add stuff. It’s hard to be motivated to keep your site fresh when it costs you an arm and a leg.
When building your site, make sure that YOU’LL be able to easily and quickly maintain your website. You should be able to add content, edit existing content, add links, add images, and other common day-to-day tasks. There should be tutorials / instructions on how to maintain your site. This way, if you do decide to hire someone to make updates, you have the option of paying $8 an hour instead of $100.
Marketing Expense
If you want to have a successful website, you’ll need to drive traffic to your site. This can be done “organically” by hoping and wishing search engines will send you traffic. Or, you can spend some time and money marketing your site.
Search engines are wonderful things but I usually tell people not to depend on them. They are fickle and change the rules quite often. One day you might get 100 visitors from search engines and then they change their algorithm and you get 3 visitors a day.
Be proactive and market your site using a combination of free and paid techniques. This way you’re diversified so if one traffic source dries up, you won’t die of thirst.
We recommend that most small businesses start out with free internet marketing techniques. As they find out what works and what doesn’t, then maybe start expanding to the paid world. So, for most small businesses, the only marketing expense will be your time and energy.
Conclusion
There are two parts to increasing your profits by running an effective website. You can either increase profits, decrease expenses, or hopefully a combination of both.
When building your website, be sure to know exactly how you’ll generate revenue from the site. Just like any other marketing tool, there will be expenses in running your website. Just make sure you keep close tabs on them and that you aren’t paying too much and it’s possible to break even (the quicker the better)
Here’s a common sense example. Let’s say you are getting ready for a garage sale. You gather everything up, put those little price stickers on the toaster, your old croquet set, etc. When you’re finished, you total everything up and find that if you sold everything, you’d make $500. Hurray, you’ve figured out how you’ll make money and how much potential money can be made. Do you now go down to your local paper and spend $2500 on a full page advertisement? I’d hope not, but that’s exactly what small businesses do when they buy a website for thousands and thousands of dollars.
Please leave any comments, questions, or thoughts below.
