Why Go Online if I am Local?
“If I’m local, why do I need to be online? My customers are all local based foot traffic, not international web surfers.”
A valid point definitely, but in this day and age, supremely out-dated. Think of your website as your technologically advanced business card. People today, local or otherwise want to do things on their own time, at their own pace. That includes learning about you and your company.
So what do they do when they first run across your company? Look up your website to see what you are all about. From there they decide if they are interested in pursuing things further and learning more about your products and services.
The decision to go online with an offline brick and mortar has really become a question of when, not if. It doesn’t matter whether you are targeting only local prospects or if you want to branch out and sell your products or services to the world, a properly set up, SEO’d website can only help you achieve even greater success.
BUT, amateur looking blogs on blogger.com do not cut it. You need a real website, self-hosted with your own domain name, that works as a lead funneling system to convert your visitors into paying customers and capture their information via a lead capture system, so that you can continue to market your products and services to them on an ongoing basis.
As we all know, it’s much easier to sell to a current customer than to constantly track down and convert new ones. So a website that is set up properly does the job of both… converting new prospects, and keeping old ones a satisfied customer who comes back often.
By the same turn, it is absolutely unnecessary to spend thousands of dollars on a fancy website, full of flash and graphics that ‘looks cool’. In fact, you’d be wasting your money because a flash website won’t do you any favors when it comes to Google, and SEO.
That is where so many offline business owners muck up and get burned. But I’ll save that for another day!
To your success!
Ron Davies
