In this day and age, it’s rare that I ever meet a business person who does not believe that a business should be represented on the Internet with a website. What is not so rare, unfortunately, is the understanding that the business website is either a business asset or a business liability.

Allow me to explain.

Whether your business requires a website which allows customers to buy from you, or to obtain information and services, when we are ready to sell our business or pass it down to our children, the value of your business can be positively or negatively impacted by your website.

A website which has been neglected for a period of time, barely serving as a means of allowing people to contact you, is not going to be of any value whatsoever to a prospective buyer or investor of your business. As a matter of fact, this kind of website is going to result in an under-valuing of your business.

On the other hand, a website which uses current standards, hasn’t been allowed to become dated, and obviously gives the appearance that it has been a valued investment for your business, will indeed maintain or, better yet, increase the value of your business.

As a business owner, I know which I would prefer.

So, what can we do to help maintain the value of our business or even enhance it when the time comes for us to get out of it?

I’m glad you asked!

Here is a short list of simple things you can do, or hire a professional to handle relatively inexpensively:

• Update your site with fresh content. Everybody has some news which could be of value to your customers. Think about some of the things which have been happening in your industry, new projects you’ve completed, etc. This is good content to continually add to your site.
• Keep your site optimized. This is one of those things where most people I talk to respond by saying, “Well, duh.” The truth is that very few actually do it and then wonder why the ranking of their site fluctuates.
• Market your site. This doesn’t mean expensive advertising, necessarily. It’s relatively inexpensive to publish syndicated articles on other websites, write blog entries, and so on.

Making sure your site and the content and services it offers are relevant to your prospective customers is an on-going, vital component to ensuring the long-term value of your business. For this reason, we strongly recommend discussing a website maintenance program with your developer. It will be an investment which pays dividends!

I was going to title this post “Marketing Tips for Your Web-based Business,” but I got to thinking.  Dangerous, I know.

Why do we draw a distinction between the 3-dimensional aspects of our businesses and the Internet presence that we’ve established?  Isn’t the purpose for both to be successful?  Don’t we give just as much time and effort to establishing and evolving our Internet presence as we do to our traditional business activities?

Maybe I’ll leave that side of the discussion to another post for another day.  Right now I would just like to offer 3 really effective ways to maximize the Internet and our web presence in such a way that they each keep our businesses in front of prospective customers and clients.  

Nothing bad can come from touching prospects, right?

I am often in conversations with business owners who are under the impression that all they needed to do was build a website and the phone would ring off the hook.  Sometimes they arrive at this conclusion because of their own pre-conceived ideas, and sometimes it’s because they met a designer who doesn’t fully understand how all pieces of Internet marketing fit together.

Allow me to say for the record that Internet marketing is a symphony and your website, Search Engine Optimization, and Internet advertising (e.g. Link Building, Syndicated Articles, Pay-per-Click, etc.) are members of the orchestra. 

As the conductors of the orchestra, we need to compose and arrange.

It is absolutely true that we require our web assets to be optimized and tested.  What we tend to forget, though, is that we are required to spend time developing marketing and promotional strategies.  To this end, here are 3 ideas to help grow our web-based assets and improve the bottom line for our businesses.

1. Great calls to action result in sales.
   Sales drive business, and prospective customers respond to attractive calls to action.  Exploring different calls to action and executing the ones that work is an on-going process for those wishing to make sales.
   A call to action is quite literally anything which appears on a web page, in an email, or any other form of communication which inspires action from our prospects.  When producing a communication piece intended to boost sales, we often forget about the construction and placement of calls to action.
2. Maximizing Your Marketing Dollars
   After your initial research (i.e. identifying your target audience and determining a promotional strategy) decide on the best path for maximizing your marketing budget.  I strongly recommend working closely with your web developer or Internet marketing consultant to find ways that will get the biggest bang for your buck.  After examining your business needs, you might find that link building is an attractive marketing solution, or you might choose to publish syndicated articles.  You might even choose a combination of both, but one thing is certain, different businesses will each require a different approach.
   Remember, whatever strategy you decide upon, the goal is for more prospective customers to be touched as often as possible.  It is widely understood that the average prospect will see a product or service up to seven times before taking the desired action.  That is, taking action and making the purchase.
   Instead of spending your budget on a single promotion or marketing opportunity, it’s much better to appeal to our customers with multiple promotions.  Use a combination of link building, syndicated articles, and perhaps a small pay-per-click campaign to get the best mileage from your budget.
3. Use email to convert “suspects” » prospects » customers.
   When done right, email is an economical and reliable way of building and maintaining relationships with the people who come into contact with our business.  Over a relatively short period of time, these people become customers, and your ever-growing and evolving email list continues to work for you.
   Your regular or semi-regular communications should be about education for your prospective customers, as well as being a call to action for your particular goods or services.
   I would be remiss at this point if I didn’t caution you to understand, or find a scrupulous Internet professional who understands the laws pertaining to spam, so-called “opt-in” programs and other means for the collection of email addresses.  Nonetheless, a well thought out, easily read note that provides value will also position you as an expert in your field for those may not already be exposed to you or your business.

It is true that a good website is going to set the tone for your business.  Whether you are a child care professional, florist, medical practitioner, or an importer of teaspoons, our websites will either say that we’re serious about our chosen field and that we are here to offer effective, valuable service, or it will say something else about us that we’d rather not acknowledge.

This truth never changes, though.  Marketing our website is a vital piece to establishing our Internet presence and making it a success.

There is no doubt that we’re dealing with uncertainty in our economic futures.  Will Congress finally approve a plan to shore up the flow of credit and availability of money, or won’t it?  Will our clients and customers have the confidence they need to face the future and make hiring and purchasing decisions to move their business in the right direction?

These are valid questions, to be sure, but we also need to make decisions which will help us to stay in business regardless of what the economy or our customers are doing.

In the past we’ve made large splashes by investing banner ads, print marketing, and perhaps social media.  As my wife would say, "who cares if you’re spending $50,000 per month when you’re making $500,000 in monthly revenues?"  The answer to that question and indeed our perspective changes somewhat when we’re spending $50,000 to make the same amount in revenues.  Often the reaction is to simply remove the budget for marketing all together.

In fact marketing dollars are being invested online rather than in traditional ways.  The challenge, however, is getting the biggest bang for your buck.  With so many marketing options available to us today, where do we invest our money?

There are two very affordable components to Internet marketing which I believe offer excellent opportunities for maintaining brand recognition, relevance, and importance in the public’s eye, and, let’s not forget, traffic to our websites.

Targeted Search

The first being strong, targeted search-based marketing, particularly local search.  Search Engine Optimization (including keyword research, and content development) to target local-based searches.  People like to stick close to home, and if they don’t have to spend time or (gas) money to get it, they are more likely to buy our products and services.

Link Building

The second is Link Building.  This is a campaign of establishing links on other websites which direct visitors back to your website.  A strong campaign of placing links of relevant websites, over a period of time, establishes robust and sustainable results for your site.

In fact, I believe Link Building is one of the most important aspects of Internet marketing.  So long as it is done correctly (i.e. links are submitted to websites that are relevant to your business and it is done over a period of time which reflects care and attention to the growth and marketing of your site), a Link Building campaign can be a very satisfying effort in terms of marketing your business.

I was recently speaking with a business owner who understood the concept that his website needed to be an asset. In fact, you could say he was a dream client because he soaked up all our advice and made several decisions based on our findings and subsequent reports about the web-based portion of his business.

Part of our advice was to update the design of his site. Since neither the design, nor the methods used in the development of the site had not been altered since the 1990’s, this seemed like a good time do it for several reasons. First, that the site was not attracting the search traffic the business deserved, and second, we needed to give the site a look and feel which spoke to people’s expectations of professionalism in 2008.

The client felt reluctant to do this, however, because he believed he was enjoying some success with the consistent design. Of course, I would naturally concur with his reluctance if we were talking about a site which had been deployed within the last 12 months, but we’re talking about a site which had been around for more than 10 years.

I can see some of you nodding in agreement with our client.

While you think about whether to re-design your website, or to just spruce it up a bit, consider your audience (this is a common theme to all our discussions about website development), and ask yourself this question:

"If I was looking to spend money with a business after researching its services online, how much faith would I have in a business which did not appear to invest in its website?"

Although existing customers are always the best source for advice on how we should present our business, or in areas we could be doing better, an honest appraisal of the above question should not require a customer survey.

Areas which typically require investment are in the look and feel of the site, user interaction with the navigation and input, and of course "search engine friendliness."

This is a truth in almost any area of business. For example, I don’t know about you, but I’m not walking into a restaurant which looks like the owners don’t hire enough staff to keep it clean.

The same can be said with our web presence.

If you were researching your own business online, how would you judge the investment in your web presence?