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Small Business Websites - Is Yours Doing Everything It Can to Help?

As you no doubt know, having a website is a critical component of doing business in today's marketplace. More and more people are going online to find their service providers instead of opening up the old Yellow Pages or one of the various knock-offs. Since that's the case, it's become increasingly important for you to be there when your potential customers come looking for you.

But having a website that actually works for you is more than just a bunch of fancy graphics and some information about your company. If you want a tool that works for you 24 hours a day 7 days a week to help grow your business, here are a few keys to keep in mind about your website:

* Have you made it easy for the visitors to your site to leave their contact information? If not, how do you know who's coming to your site and how do you plan to stay in touch with them once they leave? It's mission critical to have a mechanism for easily capturing the contact information of the visitors to your site, otherwise you don't have much more than an online brochure.
* Are you losing potential visitors even before they make it to your site? While many things such as splash pages (those fancy graphics that dance and sing then have a button that says 'Enter Site', or something similar), annoying animation, large graphic files, or other 'eye-candy' techniques used by many web designers might look nice, they often do nothing more than scare away over half your potential visitors. Believe it or not, there are still a large number of internet users that use dial-up, which means their connection is slow, which means anything that slows down a site from loading any slower than it already does will limit the number of potential customers that actually stick it out to see your site.
* Does your site talk enough about your prospects and all the benefits they'll gain by using your service, or does it spend too much talking about you? Remember, no one cares about you. The only thing your visitors are concerned with is what can you do to help solve their problems or satisfy their needs? Answer that question, and your site becomes infinitely more powerful.

Now, these are just a few of the questions you need to ask yourself as you analyze your current website or the site you're planning to build, but they should provide a good starting point for creating a website that truly does become an integral part of your overall marketing toolbox.

The internet is such a powerful medium for getting your message to many more potential prospects that you could reach traditionally and if you learn to use it correctly, it will help keep your pipeline full of eager prospects waiting in line to put your services to the test.

About the Author:

Chestin Salisbury is President of Lawn Care Marketing Magic, a direct response marketing company located in Charlotte, NC that focuses on the lawn care and landscaping industry. He has been helping small businesses grow for 7+ years by creating magical marketing systems that use time-tested direct response marketing principles to grow business by 100-500% in 120 days or less. Guaranteed.