A Guide to Putting Your Business Online

1. Decide why you need a site. If it's to drive retail sales, you need to look into various e-commerce options. Amazon and Yahoo have tools and services that allow you to easily get started. If it's to drive leads, you need to provide an easy way to allow people to contact you through the Web and enough information on your site to get them to contact you in the first place. If it's because the competition has a site, then that's a good motivator to get started.

2. Figure out who you're trying to reach. If it's prospects, you need to provide information to help them along the buying decision process. Basic information like the prices of your products, where you're located, and what makes your products better is a good place to start. If you're trying to serve current customers, think about what kinds of questions they ask you (or your employees) on a regular basis. Collect those questions, answer them, and put them online.

3. What kind of information does the site for your small business need to contain? If nothing else, put your address and phone number in a prominent place. This might sound basic, but many sites make it difficult for potential customers to find or contact them. You can also try putting a map on your site, too: it won't do you any good if you can't get people through the door. Google now allows embedding of their maps into Web sites.

4. How much should you spend? This is the eternal question. The answer shouldn't be, "How much you got?" Break out your spreadsheet and work some return on investment (ROI) calculations. What are your sales now? What kind of return are you getting from traditional advertising? If you're looking at online advertising to sell products or promote your business, all the search engines including Google and Yahoo! will allow you to see how many clicks your ads might generate based on how much you can spend. From there, it's not tough to figure out how much additional revenue you could generate based on a conservative 1 percent click through rate (CTR) on the ad and a conversion rate of 1 to 2 percent.

For example, if you can get a $2.50 CPM cost per impression (CPM) on the ads you want to buy and you can spend $3,000, you'll generate 1.2million impressions. At a 1 percent CTR, you'll generate 12,000 clicks. If 3 percent of those clicks convert to sales, you'll generate 360 sales. Is that enough to pay for your advertising? You need to figure that out based on per-sale profit.

5. Build the site. Who will build the site? Can you do it yourself? Can you find a good design company with low overheads? Do you need a bigger Web firm or your ad agency (if you have one)? The answer really depends on your budget, your skills, and the time you have to devote to the project. Remember, though: when it comes to design, you really do get what you pay for. Don't cheap out unless you want to make a bad impression and drive people away.

6. Promote it. According to Forrester Research, 80% of Internet traffic begins with a search engine. And DoubleClick reports that 41% use search for navigation, typing a product or brand name in Google or Yahoo to find it. With that said, you'll want to figure out what paid search and organic keywords you'll to use to promote your business via search engines. And no matter what you do online, consider direct mail to your current customers (a postcard is a good place to start) to get them to visit your new site and begin generating word of mouth.

7. Measure. Once your business is up and running, keep on top of the traffic to see if the investment's been worth it. How do you do that? All good SEM companies should provide weekly or monthly reports on the performance of your ads on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

8. Follow up. Finally, you need to figure out how you'll integrate your new site or new online campaign into your business. Who will update the site? Who'll answer incoming inquiries? How will you keep them coming back? Many of the answers to these questions will depend on your business, but remember: unless the site's care and feeding (and the following up of leads and ongoing e-mail marketing efforts) become part of someone's job description, it's not going to happen. Make sure someone (internally or externally) is explicitly assigned to your online efforts. Otherwise, your online efforts will get lost in the shuffle.

Click here to contact us or call (703) 489-7886 for a friendly consultation about Search Engine Marketing.