We build "Hard Working" web sites for Small Business

If you thought I was going to talk about shopping carts you are dead wrong; in fact a shopping cart should be the last thing you think about if you want to make money using the Internet.

An e-Business is a business that trades almost entirely over the Internet; ordering and payment is completed entirely online; most e-Businesses spend 100’s of thousands running their web sites and have dedicated Internet Specialists running them.

A traditional small business (YOU) is not, and will never be, an e-Business. So what does this mean for you..

You don’t make money on the Internet, You make money with the Internet; for you the Internet is not about how much “e-business” revenue was created, its about how much stronger your overall business is because of the Internet.

Indicators of a hard working web site:

• Existing customers talking about your web site.
• Increased sales to existing customers.
• Improvement in referrals from existing customers.
• Increase in new customer sales.
• Increases in email and phone enquiries.
• Increases in sales through the door.

Now we have a mutual understanding – Small Businesses make money with the Internet, they do not make money on the Internet – we can get started on how to do this.

The exact solution for each small business varies, but in general terms it can be broken into the parts shown in the table below.

Type of Vistor	What your web site should be offering
Existing Customers	CONVENIENCE: Its all about ensuring your existing customer find it easy to do repeat business with you – they should be able to repeat buy, download information, make enquiries, etc.
New Customers	THE BUYING DECISION: The web site must provide all of the information needed for new customers to make a decision to buy. All the questions you get asked when people are buying from you – new customers on the Internet have the same questions. TRUST / CONFIDENCE New customers need to be able to trust you will deliver on your promise; and be confident the information they are reading on your web site is accurate.

The Journey to success
Lets recap..
You are a small business who wants to make money “with” the Internet not “on” the Internet (although a little bit of ON would be ok too); in order to do this you need a web site that makes it easier and more convenient for customers to buy and get help with the the products/services they purchased from you. The web site must portray experience and demonstrate your trustworthiness; plus it has to provide all the information new customers need to make an informed buying decision..

Sounds easy..
If you haven’t done this before then it is incredibly difficult, we found it so difficult in fact we had to develop a methodology to ensure we got it right every time.The methodology breaks the process up into three stages:

Stage 1: The Foundation

See the article “How to create a successful Small business web site” for more information on the foundations of a good small business web site.
The Foundation is designed to do three things:

1. Demonstrate you are a real small business with a wealth of experience.
2. Start the journey of getting you ranked highly in the search engines.
3. Start to create the trust components needed.

Stage 2: The buying decision

This stage is about ensuring visitors to your web site have all of the information needed to make a buying decision. We look at things like commonly asked questions by product; product comparisons; competitor comparisons; looking at the types of supporting information both technical and non technical needed to make a buying decision.

Stage 3: Buying convenience

This stage looks at the convenience factors, online orders and payments, renewal notifications, repeat buying through user accounts, etc.
To most people it seems strange this is the last thing we do (shouldn’t it be the first), and here is why we do it this way:

• You are not an e-business so the cost of not having and online ordering, etc is minimal.
• Most people buying will search the Internet first, even if they intend to walk into a store and buy it; the cost of your business not being found is significant, for this reason we try and create the content needed to make an informed buying decision as quickly as possible.
• Stage 2 can take some time, but time is advantageous at this point because it allows your search engine ranking to improve as more content is created, so when you do get to Step 3 there is a significant volume of traffic coming to the site.