I hope you’ve enjoyed our “Top 10 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make Online” series. Having a website for your business is one of the greatest marketing assets you have as it has the ability to market your business 24/7 to a wide variety of audiences, including those outside of your personal reach. The thing is though that you’ve got to spend time and effort making this marketing asset work for you. This is where BLKMGK Go-Live comes in.
Go-Live is the culmination of my 14 years experience as a website developer and I’ve put together the best tips and tricks to educate you on how to build and promote your own website in 3 weeks. It’s a really cool course. Here check it out:
So if you want to avoid making all of the “Top 10 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make Online” and want a little help in doing so, check out BLKMGK Go-Live now! Can you afford not to?
One of the first things we ask on a website brief with a potential client is “What is the purpose or goal of your website?” because we want them to be crystal clear what they are hoping to achieve when they hire us to do their website.
Too many small business owners are not really clear on what they want their website to achieve and as a result their website often brings them results they weren’t expecting – not in a good way.
There are three main purposes of a business website (there are more, but here are three main ones):
Provide information to people about the business
Sell products and services online
Prove areas of expertise through information
There are different ways and means to design and develop a site for each of these main purposes. For example if our clients main focus was on selling products and services online, we’d build them a site that is very “product” intensive so something that would highlight all their products and services.
You need to know the purpose of your website and test to see what works and what doesn’t work when trying to achieve that purpose.
p.s. Want to avoid making mistakes like this? Join the ICT Guru email list to receive great tips to help you get more out of technology. Don’t worry we hate spam just as much as you do so your info is locked down for our eyes only.
There’s a large amount of small business owners out there who have realised the power of the internet but still aren’t too sure exactly how it works. As a result they realise that they need to put their business on the internet but instead of developing a website themselves, they are contacted by a website directory company that offers to put a link to their business on the internet under a directory. This is not the same as having a website!
Sure their business name is there along with a phone number but seriously is that really going to bring in any tangible business? What if a competitor is listed in the same directory but has a full blown website to showcase products and services to people? Disaster!
Online directories are great but think of them like an introduction service. You always got to back up an introduction with your credibility and capability of your business and having a single line listing in a directory does not achieve this.
Get a basic website done and then submit your details along with your website address to any directories that you like and get traffic flowing to your website.
p.s. Want to avoid making mistakes like this? Join the ICT Guru email list to receive great tips to help you get more out of technology. Don’t worry we hate spam just as much as you do so your info is locked down for our eyes only.
I see this one a lot in small towns as everyone feels they know everyone else already and this brings in work. Anyone who isn’t known to the business owner will find their business by using the phone book. That’s always worked in the past but here’s the thing.
There is a whole new generation of people who are comfortable using the internet to search for products and services. These people would be able to find your business on the internet much quicker than the time taken to find a phonebook, open it and look for a business inside.
Now the problem is that if you don’t have your business online then they will find someone else’s business and deal with them instead. This is the number one reason why you need a website!
For the Northern Territory specifically we have a VERY transient population. Which means that we have a lot of people who now live here that came from somewhere else. The other place that they used to live in had a lot of businesses that could be found online so they’re quite used to searching for products and services on the internet. The best example of this mistake in practice is those take-away restaurants that have their menu online are instantly ahead of restaurants that don’t. Imagine sitting at your desk in front of your computer one afternoon wondering what to order for dinner, couple of clicks from your mouse and voila you’re looking at tonight’s take-away menu and know exactly what you want.
So get a website sorted for your business immediately!
p.s. Want to avoid making mistakes like this? Join the ICT Guru email list to receive great tips to help you get more out of technology. Don’t worry we hate spam just as much as you do so your info is locked down for our eyes only.
I know it sounds quite ridiculous for someone not to be in control of their website but over the past 14 years in the website game I’d have to say this has to be the biggest mistake that small business owners make.
Most of the time Small Business Owners are so busy working on the operations of their business they don’t have time to handle the website so they hand over the entire thing to someone else. The “someone else” then has full control over the website including username and passwords and hosting information.
I’ve had so many meetings with potential clients that have started with “yeah we hired someone else to look after the website and they just disappeared and I don’t know what to do!” In fact the worst horror story that I’ve heard was a case of a business owner hiring a website developer to develop a website for them but unfortunately the website that was developed was hideous and not at all what they wanted. Then to make matters worse the developer disappeared and the owner had no idea how to shut down the terrible website and had to leave it up there for everyone to see!
At BLKMGK when we undertake a website development project we hand over all website infrastructure information such as usernames and passwords to our clients so that they know exactly what’s going on with their website and if they decide to leave us down the track (heaven forbid!) then they’ve got something concrete to pass onto the new developer to get them up and running quicker.
So always be in control over your website – no matter how busy you are. If you don’t know your username and passwords for your website, hosting and domain name then immediately fire off an email to your website people and find out this information now!
p.s. Want to avoid making mistakes like this? Join the ICT Guru email list to receive great tips to help you get more out of technology. Don’t worry we hate spam more than you do so your info is locked down for our eyes only.
