The success of any local business depends solely on sales volume. Its been said in business time and time again that “volume fixes everything.” And these days your advertising dollar is more important than ever. If your current marketing budget is not returning a high enough sales volume to churn out a decent profit, then it’s time to make a change. The first question for most business owners is “where do I begin?”
Let’s start with a few facts. Most local business owners have a limited budget, very little free time and extremely limited knowledge of how the Internet works. But they know for certain they should be advertising online within their local community. Many local business owners have already taken the plunge into the online community but are now scratching their heads trying to figure out why their website is not working as well as they thought it would. And that brings us back to the question of “where do I begin”
The entire online advertising process begins with your website. Over 90% of the websites on the Internet today are not geared properly for success. These days it’s very easy to find a web designer to create a nice looking website but, unfortunately, a nice looking website is only the tip of the iceberg. Your local business success depends on a lot more than just a pretty website. At the very least, your website should contain some sort of “call to action” as well as professionally written ad copy. Most web designers are not business oriented and therefore do not understand what a call to action is. Most web designers are also not professional copywriters.
If you are not properly educated on at least the basic fundamentals of how the Internet actually works, then it’s going to be extremely difficult for you to shop around for a web designer that not only builds a great looking website with a call to action, but also has the ability to make sure your website is optimized for top performance on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. If your website is built on an old platform like HTML, then it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to compete with other business owners in your local area who are using a more advanced platform like WordPress or Joomla.
A “platform” is simply the type of construction that was utilized to build your website. You could actually take two identical websites that looked exactly the same, and if one was built on an outdated HTML platform and the other one on a WordPress platform, they would perform very, very differently on the Internet. And even if you are using a platform like WordPress, there are still over 1 million plugins to sift through to make your site optimized for the search engines. In other words, a Web designer who is not skilled and proven in business and/or who does not understand the intimate details of Google and Yahoo’s algorithms is not qualified to work for you, hence the reason why so many local business owners have websites that are costing them money month-after-month rather than bringing in additional revenues and a significantly higher sales volume.