Do I Really Need a Website?

Unless you live in a cave and sell your products and services to other cave dwellers, you need a website. As my friend once said, “I have to have a website because everyone else has one.” He is right. While he may not be the most technology focused person I know, he is a small business owner and he sells products and services to every day people. Since most of his B2C (business to consumer) prospects use the Internet to research their future purchases, the company must have a website for prospective customers to review information about his company and product offering.

If you are a small business, how grand does the website need to be? In actuality, the average small business does not need an overly elaborate website. For businesses that do not sell their actual products via the Internet, like home builders, dentists, or accountants, a good website needs to provide enough information to obtain a phone call or a in personal visit. The website needs to make the visitor feel comfortable and drive further interest. It needs to convert the website visitor to a lead. This could be done in five pages or twenty. It depends on the nature of the business and the product.

The important task is to develop something. Additional pages or content can be added as needed.

This Ain’t Your Nephew’s Blog

Blogs, schmogs. My nephew blogs. They’re for kids. Why does my company website need a blog? This string of unfiltered comments is a realistic example of the response I receive when spewing the virtues of business blogs.

While many smart and intelligent businesspeople question the purpose of blogs, they do server a tangible purpose and they are important to the overall success of a corporate website. The most common misperception is that blogs are solely written and read by the teen set or worse, by unsocial computer nerds who blog about topics no one ever reads. This thought process is 100% incorrect.

Quality blogs provide information to website visitors. Such blogs help communicate a company’s brand, product, or service offering in a less formal manner that is very similar to a discussion or conversation. They are snippets of content that help educate and communicate to potential prospects or existing customers. They are extremely valuable to overall Internet marketing if written in the correct manner. That being said, they are not a platform to write unending examples of how your product or service or company is the best thing since sliced bread. If you do this, no reader will stay with your blog for more than a few seconds.

In addition to providing website visitors with relevant information, blogs help provide fresh website content for Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. Google likes blogs – plain and simple. Blogs help drive search engine traffic and they are worth every effort put forth into the writing and posting of content. 

I have officially been a blogger for the last few years. I will admit, I was also skeptical of blogs. Not long after starting my humble blog, I was amazed at how quickly my subscribers (people who sign up for automatic updates on your blog entries) went from zero to thousands. I was even more amazed when I went to an industry event and someone I did not know, thought he knew me. He was positive he knew me actually. After a few hours of interaction, my new/old friend realized how he know me – or at least the virtual me. He was a faithful reader of my blog. Then to my complete and utter surprise, he then proceeded to inform me of his favorite blog posts. I was bewildered and baffled. And at that fateful moment, I became a true believer in blogging.

So for various reasons, I have continued to blog and continued to see the benefits of blogging. I have found prospects and true qualified leads through my blog. It has helped my Google ranking and it has helped create a virtual persona for me amongst my peers.

What is Organic SEO? I’m Not Talking About Cows!

A friend of mine asked what organic meant when discussing SEO (aka search engine optimization). Well, I’ve paraphrased his question because his words were not quite suitable for my online readers. Regardless, he was confused by the term and so are many small business owners. To my friend, the farmer, organic means the remains left behind by his cows. While the term means something entirely different, it does stem from the same concept.

When discussing Internet marketing, organic means natural. It refers to the process of driving website traffic (aka people) to your domain (aka www dot something dot com) through the natural optimization of your website’s content (aka words). It refers to the process of writing solid content and bringing visitors to read it based on the matching of their search terms and your actual content.

If that is the case, then what does nonorganic mean? Nonorganic refers to the process of PPC (aka pay per click) advertising. It refers to the process of paying for higher placement on a search engine to artificially attract traffic (aka people) to your domain (aka www dot something dot com). For my friend, the farmer, this would be related to fertilizer.

As the farmer plants and tends to his crops, so must the webmaster plant and tend to his website. The process of planting or tending a website is internet marketing, search engine optimization, and other related activities. I’d love a great comparison in here for farming and blogging, but it hasn’t come to me yet. Check back later because it just might appear for a later blog entry.