Internet Entrepreneur and Weekend Hacker

Part of the build your website for your local business series

What is your goal?  Let’s skip “make more money” as the goal and lets focus on how the web can help your company.   The key part is “help your company”, I am not referring to someone who is making the web their business (that is a whole new area of discussion).  You are a doctor, physical trainer, house cleaner … all things that people can/do search for online and businesses that a website can be of some assistance.

So, what do you want to provide to customers and potential customers.  Information and an incentive to become a customer, information for current customers and long term, information for people who may become customers in the future.  Step back for a second and recognize the size of the internet and the size of your market.  If you are a fitness trainer, you may handle 30-40 customers a week.  Your potential clients are people that live with a reasonable driving distance and not someone that lives in another state.  So you want to focus your efforts and information on this local group.  Potentially, your website can add a few customers and also lower the attrition rate of your current customer base.  I am mentioning this because here is where this goes south often.  A fitness trainer decides it is a good idea to start selling nutrition supplements or workout clothes on their site.  So now, not only have you opened yourself up to market to the whole internet, you have now opened yourself up to competition from the whole world as opposed to supporting and focusing on your business … fitness training.  Nothing wrong with selling supplements, but that is not the same mentality and same website and same investment that you are going to make in your fitness training website.  Stay focused, there is no great money making idea that you can add on for free at your local business website that is going to make you money, it will just hurt your website and clientele in the long term.  I think I have made my point.

So what do you want to do?  Let say you are a real estate appraisor and you provide commercial appraisals in your state.  So, you have current customers that look to you for information and services and you have potential customers that are using your website as their first impression of you.  So looks are important but we will get to that later. We are going to want to provide detailed descriptions of your services and where you provide them, who you are, relevant news, possibly recommendations, contact information (not only a phone number).  Anything else that you would provide for your business?

This appraisor makes money appraising NOT with Google Adsense.  Do not put advertising on your site.  Do not put the joke of the day or a news feed that is not relevant about your specific industry.  Make your site clean, easy to use and easy for you to update.

We will talk later about hosting and templates but for now decide what you want to put on your site that will help with customers and potential customers.  In all likelihood your site may be small, a handful of pages so lets make those effective pages.