Online Experience For Offline Profits
Posted by Martin on 09 May 2008 at 04:27 pm | Tagged as: Internet marketing, The Kickstart Guide to Making Money Online
Part 25 … Online Experience for Offline Profits
I have a bee in my bonnet.
I’m on a crusade and I don’t even own a cape.
Everywhere I look there are businesses who have had websites built for them by flashy high-priced designers who are saying ‘We’ve got a website, but quite honestly, it doesn’t do much.’
What do they expect?
A website isn’t a family portrait that you go to a studio to have taken and then proudly look at on your mantelpiece.
A website should never be built ‘because we’d like one.’
A website should and must be an integral part of your business and a fundamental element of your marketing strategy.
See that word ’strategy’. It’s important.
I have nothing against design and designers (please don’t send me hate mail!). What I do object to is the blind leading the blind.
Unless you have a clear and defined strategy for the Internet side of your business, your website might as well be a flyer tucked at random into the 20-volume encyclopedia in your local library.
Nobody will see it - and the rare person who does will have no idea what it is there for.
In my offline life I deal with businesses who are often in this position. They jumped on the website bandwagon a few years ago, spent huge sums on the latest (then) flashy intro screens and wacky graphics, approved everything because it ‘looked’ so cool and then waited.
They waited for something to happen and it didn’t.
Nobody flooded them with orders. No search engines bothered to list them. No customers said how good the site was. No-one in the business had any idea what to do about it and so the site floundered.
And the CEO is now convinced that it was all a waste of time and effort.
And it was.
But it needn’t be that way if they had bothered to think like marketers and entrepreneurs and not like over-awed design junkies.
I believe that all of those bad websites can be turned around. Sure they will need to be redesigned and rewritten (at a significantly lower price than they originally cost, I expect). But with the application of sound marketing ideas - and a clearly defined Internet strategy - ANY business can and should benefit from an effective online presence.
A hard-working website can be your window on the world. It is such a shame that so many companies keep the curtains closed.
There is an enormous opportunity for you here. When you have built a few websites for yourself and learned the ropes of Internet marketing, your level of knowledge of what makes a website work will be orders of magnitude greater than the general person in the street. And for local business people who are much more interested in the day to day running of their businesses than in learning new skill about the Internet, you will be a shining star. You will literally be their savior.
A book I read (and highly recommended) recently tells you all about how to turn your online experience into offline income. It is called Offline Gold, by Andrew Cavanagh and it is well worth studying. There really is a fortune to be made in helping offline companies make better use of the Internet - and you could be perfectly placed to grab your share. http://www.kickstartdaily.com/offlinegold/
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Building and putting up a website is too easy… My observations and experience is that the hardest part of building a site is what to put on it. Although there is a lot of information on doing research available it isn’t given the priority or importance it should get. There is a “build it and they will come” attitude that seems pervasive in human beings. That might have worked a decade or more ago but today having a good target is most important.
There are too many gurus selling instant web sites in one form or another and they often give little or no advice on finding and evaluating a market. And they almost never give good direction on identifying a niche that will provide buyers with cash or how to get that traffic to your site.
So we are destined to have millions of useless sites clogging up the Internet that don’t provide useful information or produce ant income for the owners.
One man’s opinion…