Making e commerce work for you

No matter how good your idea and how well made your product, unless you have an Internet presence you will not get noticed. There is nothing you can do, no form of advertisement you can buy, and no amount of giveaways and sales you can hold that will make up for the failure to adequately and properly present your business on the Internet. Following a uniquely crafted ABC approach, you too now have the ability to quickly and easily compete with the heavy hitters and make the ‘Net work for you! * The letter A will remind you to be mindful of your addressees, and thus allocate funds for reaching them. This includes online marketing including email promotions and also affiliate marketers. * B alerts you to the fact that your web site is like a traditional building and it needs to be easy to locate. Before you focus on the nationwide and worldwide search sites, focus on the local sites that will get the local customer to find your building. * C stands for creativity which may or may not be something you posses. If you lack it, your website should be professionally designed. Small business entrepreneurs are especially at risk for chancing the latter step and create websites that are slow to load and overdone and therefore scream out that they are not professional. Pictures and flash applications will not load quickly for consumers who are still relying on the old dial up method of Internet access or who are shackled to a network that is nearing the limits of its available resources. Be mindful of these consumers and keep flashy presentations to their own pages within your site. Similarly, avoid the obviously home grown website design elements such as hit counters and guest books. They might have been de rigueur five years ago but this no longer holds true. What you do want to add to your site is sticky content. This is the kind of information or content that will cause even unqualified leads to bookmark your site and come back time and again. These are also the web surfers who will turn on others to your site and help you build your traffic – free of charge! Sticky content is easy to identify: at this point in time blogging is the new rage and offering blogs on your site will guarantee you an increase in visitors and therefore potential customers. At the same time, this kind of addition to your site is ridiculously easy to maintain and cheap to run; thus there is no reason why you should not add them to your sites. As you design your site, keep in mind that search engines love text while consumers need some pictures thrown in to make it a bit easier on their eyes and to divide the content logically. Finding the golden middle ground can be difficult but with the help of a web consultant or by doing ample research yourself you will be able to tread it with your site as well. Make sure that the text on your site is relevant, keyword rich, and of course grammatically and typographically correct! Even though the latter is self explanatory, it does bear mentioning, especially considering the sheer volume of sites that sport errors! Understanding now how crucial a successful web presence is to your business, and how little it really takes to get online, there is no excuse why your business is not on the ‘Net!