Сентябрь 2009

Importance of Online Presence For Businesses

While it is extremely important for all kinds of businesses to have a website, it is even more important to be able to get customers to visit your website. What’s more, you will need to do offline as well as online advertising in order to achieve this.

When advertising offline, make sure that you always put your website as a method that can be used to contact you. The name of the website is very important. You should use something that describes the business or company. Try using a name that is catchy that people will be able to remember. You need to put your website out there in front of customers as much as possible. It is possible to create business cards or place ads in a newspaper or phone book.

Doing this will make your business look more professional and more modern. Nowadays, it is very common for all businesses to own a website. It can reflect pretty poorly on a business if they do not have a website.

One of the advantages of a website is that you can place much more information in front of your customers using a website as opposed to print media. You should use a print ad as a way to brint people to your website. Then you will want to use your website to tell customers about your business, products, company, services, contact info and hours of operations. You should think from the customer’s perspective when building the website. Answer all of their questions on the website.

Many potential customers will visit websites that they have seen advertised in print media in order to find out more information about a business. This is why it is extremely important to have a website up and running. And this is why it is equally important to advertise online and offline. We have spoken with an individual who operates a small business that caters to residential and small commercial clients. The business owner placed an ad in their local yellows that listed only the business website address which also happens to be the name of their company. Here is the result:

Potential customers who need the offered service will go to their local yellow pages and see a number of business and companies listed there. Many of these businesses will only list their names and phone numbers. This information really tells nothing to the individual looking at the businesses. This particular business owner listed their website address. Therefore, potential customers can jump on their computer and surf to this business’ website. This already gives this particular business something unique. The website was created by the business owner in a short period of time. The potential customers have already put a little time and effort into looking up the business. This business owner has put much more effort forth than the other business owners. Using the website, potential customers can determine who the owner is, what the company offers and reasons why they should do business with this specific business.

All of the information available on the website is much more than what can be displayed in a phone book ad. Customers who visit the website call the business owner and he closes the deal. The business owner often asks the customers how they found out about the business and most of them reply that they saw the website in the yellow pages. This is a very effective method of using both online and offline advertising. A website is capable of doing much more than any print ad. In order to take advantage of the website though you will need to direct customers there.

With a powerful online presence, you can dominate the local search engine results and have a major advantage over the competition.

Is Your Business Ready for making and listening to Podcasting?

Everyone seems to be making and listening to podcasts nowadays. At the beginning, podcasting seemed to be associated with the so-called computer geeks. These days however, it is not uncommon to see podcasts from businesses and corporations trying to widen their horizons and get a hold of a larger market. As podcasts inherently surpasses the limits of traditional broadcasting and advertising, they present a feasible alternative to businesses as a means of making their presence felt all over the world.

Could podcasts possibly be what your business needs? In order to help you answer that question, it may be helpful to first understand what a podcast can do for your business. The most obvious thing would be promotion. A podcast can serve to promote your business just like advertisements do. This application in itself covers a wide range of possibilities. You can do virtually anything on a podcast to promote your business. Diverting from the usual advertisements, you can use most any content and format to promote your business. One such example would be to offer in-depth information to your customers. They need not be overtly self-promoting but the whole effect would be to make the consumers aware of your business. If you are an educational institution for example, you may give weekly tips to students or to parents. For medical-related business, podcasts may focus on different health issues. In this way, you not only promote your business but you also provide a service to your customers. What better way to advertise your services?

An internal application of podcasting is for training. Podcasts are fast becoming a viable alternative for companies to provide training and information to their employees. Business executives often have a huge amount of work to be done at such a short period of time. With podcasts, they have a more portable way of perusing information. All you need to provide is an MP3 player (a laptop would work just as well) and anyone in your company can have access to training materials and other documents anywhere, anytime.

Of course, as with most any other commercial endeavor, using podcasts for your business will cost you some money. You need people to create podcasts on a regular basis. These people would have to know some of the technical aspects of recording and podcasting. Then you need your talents – people who would actually be recorded for the podcasts. You will have to analyze the cost benefit relationship before deciding to start a podcast for your business.

There are some ways to offset the cost of creating a podcast. If you are making podcasts for your customers, you may opt to charge a small fee for each download. You can also choose to provide a subscription service wherein the listener will receive the podcasts in their emails regularly for a fee. Of course, this might be not be the best option as people prefer not having to pay for podcasts.

Whatever you decide to do, the bottom line is to create podcasts that will serve their purpose. Be it for consumer awareness, added customer service, or employee training, your podcasts should have relevant content packaged in an appropriate manner. Even if you shell out money for this project, the returns may be more than what you expect!