There are very few businesses these days that don't have
websites, and as a home business your website is one of the most
powerful tools you have at your disposal. A good website can
really work for you, but you need to know what you're doing.
Hire Foreign Designers
Web design really is something that you shouldn't try to do
yourself, unless you really know what you're doing -- I'm sure
you've seen what happens when people try this. Hiring a web
designer, though, can be prohibitively expensive. Luckily for
you, the Internet puts you in touch with designers all over the
world, and it's easy to hire one of them very cheaply to design
your website. They don't do any worse of a job than someone in
your country would, it just happens that your few hundred
dollars is worth as much to someone in India as a few thousand
would be to you or I.
Use Search Engine Optimisation
There are a heck of a lot of websites out there, and search
engines will return everything relevant to a user's search. How
can you possibly get your site above the thousands of others
that the search engine thinks are relevant to your keywords?
The answer is to use basic search engine optimisation
techniques. For example, make sure you often use phrases that
you think your target market will be searching for (your
'keywords'), and make your web addresses contain them too. For
this article, for example,
www.website.com/home-business-website
would be a much better web address than
www.website.com/articles/205. That's just a brief introduction
-- there's a whole SEO industry out there, if you go looking for
it.
Have Lots of Useful Content
When you have a website, you're not just trying to reach people
who were searching for you -- you're trying to get people to
check your website, read your latest news and offers, and the
rest. The best way of doing this is to have fresh and useful
content on there. Write short articles about the kind of things
your customers might be interested in. If your home business is
computer repair, for example, you could keep track of the latest
virus threats on your site and offer help to anyone affected.
Make It Easy to Update
You should make sure that whatever software you're using to
write your website makes it easy to post new articles without
too many problems. If you have go to around putting HTML tags
into your articles before you can upload them, then you should
think about changing the way your website works.
Keep a Weblog
One of the simplest ways to have fresh, useful content on your
site is to keep a weblog (or 'blog'). A blog is a series of
entries, like entries in a diary, that are displayed on your
site starting with the most recent first. It is easy to log in
and quickly write a new entry, and it can be as short or as long
as you like.
For your home business' blog, the only rule to stick to is not
to post anything there that isn't related to your industry and
your work. It might be great that you've got a new baby or sad
that your cat Mr Tibbles died, but you should start a personal
blog on another website if you want to post about that kind of
thing.
Let People E-Mail You with No Hassle
One of the worst mistakes people often make when they're
starting a website is to think that it would be a good idea to
give their customers a 'contact form' to fill in. People really,
really don't like filling in forms, and you'll lose a lot of
interested customers if you require them to tell you all sorts
of things before you'll even talk to them over the Internet.
The best thing to do is to simply list your email address on
your site, as a clickable link, and advise customers near the
link of the kind of information it would be useful for them to
include in an email. It might sound strange, but people are far
more willing to go to the trouble of typing things in when it's
on their own terms, and not into an annoying web form.
About the author:
Original Source:
Articles-Galore.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of The Home Income Portal
Home of Serious Online Business Options.
