Sales And Marketing Advice For Small Business Owners - Take Charge Of Your Web Marketing

A survey carried out in 2009 found that half of UK small businesses still don't have a website. That's a staggering amount of lost opportunity for an awful lot of small business owners. Now we are going to assume that any entrepreneur savvy enough to be reading this article via the Internet is presumably bound to be aware of how important it is to have a business website, but just in case we assume too much, here are 2 basic facts:

1, If your products or services are capable of being sold or delivered via the internet, YOU MUST HAVE A WEBSITE.

2, If your products or services are not capable of being sold or delivered via the internet, YOU MUST HAVE A WEBSITE.

Ok, so you already have a website, so all's well, right? Actually, probably not. The unfortunate truth is that many small business websites are so ineffective as to be virtually useless. And, in some cases, the sites are so bad they actively put off potential customers.

How well do you really understand web marketing?

What typically happens when a small business owner decides that he needs a website is that, quite simply, he gets somebody else to do it. Some people employ an expensive web design company, others get their geeky nephew to cobble something together. Either way, you end up with something that's been designed by somebody else and inevitably the emphasis has been on the way the site looks rather than what it does. In other words, form takes precedence over function.

Of couse, it's important that the website looks good but the problem is that most small business owners don't just delegate responsibility for building the website, they abdicate their responsibility for making sure it does its job and markets the business effectively and productively. Sure, they get involved in how the site looks. They make decisions about colours, logos and images but very often, that's as far as it goes.

As the business owner, you need the knowledge

Don't take this the wrong way. Nobody's suggesting you need to develop the considerable skills necessary to build and optimise your own web site. But think of it this way, if you were running a parcel delivery business, would you choose your delivery vehicles purely based on appearance? Or would you spend the time to fully prepare a comprehensive specification on what the vehicle needed to be capable of, and then make sure that your choice matched up to that specification?

When it comes to your website, you need to take the time and make the effort to properly understand the mechanics of how web marketing works. You need to detail the specification that your website needs to meet in order to produce the goods for you and your business. Sounds daunting - not at all. Web marketing, despite what many 'gurus' would have you believe, is not rocket science. There's a ton of freely available information waiting for you online that will quickly bring you up to speed.

So, bite the bullet, and put in the time and effort to fully understand the issues involved in effective web design, keywords, search engine optimisation (SEO) and web marketing in general. It will open your eyes to what you could really be achieving from your web strategy and, when it comes to choosing website designers and SEO professionals, you'll be able to sort out the wheat from the chaff.