So you have an excellent product or service. You know how to sell it and increase sales by traditional methods - word-of-mouth & direct mail to name two. Now which
of following is you:-

- You know that you should be using the internet to grow your business but you are not sure how. You know that if you don't your competitors are going to get an upper hand. Or .

- You are convinced that the internet is total waste of time as it has already burnt a whole in your budget and wasted a lot of your time. Your internet presence is an embarrassment to your company and detracts rather than adds to the value of your products or services. You want to get rid of it but you know you can't. You don't know what to do. Or.

- You have a web site that attracts potential customers that you would not otherwise had access to, a good proportion of them become your customers and repeatedly buy from you. You measure results & know how effective your marketing budget is and you are able to confidently spend more on marketing that works.

If the third description fits you - Congratulations. You will Knock Out The Competition With A Web site To Die For! If its one of the first two descriptions that fit then you need to do something about it.

Web site Objectives
Your web site is just one tool in the toolbox of your company that is used to market & sell your product & services. That is, a web site MUST sell. All sales & marketing
processes have two simple steps and web sites are no different. For web sites those two steps are:-

- Visitors from your target audience arriving at your web site, i.e. a steady stream of qualified leads.
- Conversion of your visitors into customers - and the web site may only be part of that process.

Miss out either of the above and your web site is ineffective. Everything else revolves around these two objectives. Converting interest into action is the only way you turn
a marketing budget into real sales.

Business not Technology
Too often, you will hear web companies preach to you about virtues of each of these areas but as a business owner what you need to know which of these areas should receive your attention and budget to achieve your business objective of getting qualified prospects and converting them into customers. There are no hard and fast rules but one component outweighs all others. And that is content. Good content will have the most effect on both the search engines and you human visitors.

Content is King
Copy writing, is probably the most important item on your web site. It is said that Content is King and it is absolutely true. Why, you have to ask, do so many companies, pay thousands to develop a web site with smart flash animations and graphics and then write the content themselves then? It can only be that they have not grasped the importance of the words on their web site. After all it's the words that people read, it's the words that call people to action, it's the words that sell. The rest helps, but a site with poor words is as bad as a site with no words and that is just unheard of.

There is a plethora of "top ten's" about building a good web site and there are two themes that run through them all and one of them is that Content is King.

Search Engine Optimization Experts may well be able to rewrite parts of your web site to appear attractive to the search engines, appear on the first page of Goggle and get you more visitors. But the resultant text & layout is so unfriendly to the human reader that they are immediately turned off and hit the back button. Content is a double-edged sword because it is used by the search engines to provide search results and the very same content must compel the human visitor in to action.

Let Your Prospects Get To Know You (Build a Relationship)
Earlier I mentioned that two themes run through web site "top ten's". The second theme is to develop a long-term relationship with your potential customer. The web is an inherently distrustful medium and you have got to instill confidence into your potential customer that you are a real personable organization worth doing business with. None of this is rocket science but it is so often not done. Some ways of doing
it are :-
- Testimonials from previous clients
- Independent Product or Service Reviews
- Awards
- Case studies
- Worthwhile original content

Once the initial confidence is built up you can focus on building a long-term relationship with your new prospect. Again there are many ways to do this where the aim is keep in constant contact with your prospect. Easy and growing in popularity are :-

- Regular Electronic Newsletters
- Free Reports
- Free mini-Courses

Once produced they cost nothing to keep sending to your prospects and the technology is in place to allow you to do this with minimal time involvement from yourself.

Foundations
A web site is too often seen as a product, something delivered at a point in time. It is true that there is a point in time when the web site goes live but this is very short- sighted to see it this way. And you can be sure you will never wipe out the competition this way. Beating the competition is a long-term strategy . It takes time and it takes a process that starts way before any discussion about the technology takes place.

Conclusion

You need someone to understand your business, take you through a proven process, talk business not technology and then develop a solution to match. Your business needs to attract the attention of its target market (niche) and then convert them to customers. How do you do that? Be personal, develop a relationship, show them you are real and can be trusted and are worth getting to know. Time is precious and your audience is thinking "Are you worth giving up my time for?".

Once done, its just a matter of time before they buy. If they are the right audience then time is the only variable.

So the word web site is insufficient. The phrase Internet Marketing Solution is much better. Don't buy a web site it will cost you. Invest in an Internet Marketing Solution it will reward you. After all, that is your objective to market your product & services on the internet. And you want a solution that provides everything - the core web site
design & development, good graphics, copy writing, search engine optimisation, pay- per-click, and Email marketing.

© Rugged Rhino 2005

About the Author

Jeremy Curtis is Managing Director of Rugged Rhino - The Small Business Web Design Specialists. He can be contacted at www.ruggedrhino.co.uk, jeremy.curtis@ruggedrhino.co.uk or 0845 201 1946