Is Your Small Business a Diamond in the Rough?

The sheer vastness of the cyber economy is staggering. There are well over six billion web pages vying for the attention Internet users around the globe. Needless to say, millions of these sites are owned and maintained by people just like you—small business entrepreneurs and managers hoping to improve the public profile of their organization and, ultimately, increase sales.

Given that only a fraction of websites are search engine optimized or even adequately marketed at all, chances are that many of you are not making much return on your investment.

While there are a multitude of reasons for this problem, one stands out as remarkably simple: Most small-office-home-office (SOHO) websites are virtually invisible to the surfing public.

The old adage “build it and they will come” is charming but remains, quite sadly, used and abused by entrepreneurs hoping to push their wares on the World Wide Web. A website, like anything else in a society overloaded with information and plagued by consumerism at every level—B2B included—must be marketed.

And smarter marketing is the only way your website will generate a respectable ROI.

Simply creating and publishing a website and then waiting for the phone to ring (or your inbox to flood) is akin to printing off maybe 25 brochures and then purposely leaving the whole pile on your seat before you get off the subway. What do you think are the chances any of those brochures are going to sell anything to anyone? They could be the flashiest and cleverest brochures ever published, but if no one ever sees them, it doesn’t really matter how much time or money you spent on the things.