SmallBusinessNewz

Many small business owners still don’t have a website, nor do they see a need for one. Their reasoning is that they are only a one-man band, or a very small company who sell mostly to their local area, so why should they spend extra on a website when they could advertise in their local newspaper instead? Yet the very reasoning about advertising locally is one of the reasons every business should have a website, regardless of size.

With the Internet now becoming a standard for conducting business both locally and internationally, not having a website is akin to spending all your promotional or advertising budget on a cream cake and trying to offer it to people with sugar allergies - your credibility can suffer. Here are some of the simplest reasons why your business needs a website:

International Becomes Local

One of the beneficial results of the growth in online business is that the global market is really just a larger local market. A business website can sell to customers in another continent - after all, there are no time zone restrictions for customers in Asia to buy from businesses in the West, and vice versa. If you even just get one sale a month it’s profit you wouldn’t have had from a sales area you might never have reached.

Customer Loyalty and Brand Awareness

Even if your website is relatively small with just a few pages, the interactivity you can offer your customers (both existing and potential) can help build their loyalty to your business. A website allows you to have a newsletter sign-up to keep customers up-to-date with your latest news and offers. You can also have a download area where you can offer free reports, white papers and more that help your customers enjoy further success in their field.  This kind of interactivity is extremely effective at showing you have your customers’ best interests at heart and will attract new ones at the same time.

Stop Giving Your Competitors and Advantage

One of the key reasons for having a website is that you can be pretty sure your competitors have one, even if they’re a small business as well. The businesses that are succeeding in today’s marketplace are the ones savvy enough to use all the business tools at their disposal - a website is one of the most powerful.

A Website Offers Authority

There’s no denying that customers looking for new products or businesses to service them are swayed by how they perceive that company to be. With the popularity of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter proving that people are more web-savvy than ever, not having a website suggests that you’re behind the times. And who in their right mind would want to deal with someone that’s following the pack as opposed to leading it?

For businesses that don’t have a website, the over-riding factor in any argument is the size of the business and the costs involved. Yet as you can see, the size of your business shouldn’t matter - after all, a website doesn’t need to state how big your offices are.

Cost is no longer a viable argument, either. With the likes of GoDaddy.com offering monthly web hosting packages from under $5.00 per month and purchasing a domain name costing less than $10.00, even the smallest one-man show should be able to afford that. When you consider that online business transactions in the US alone in 2007 totalled more than $220 billion, it’s a small price to pay for a potentially large return.

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