1. Capture leads – Any lead system starts with getting leads for your business. You have a variety of ways to capture leads such as buying leads, advertising, using pay-per-click, setting up a lead generating website, mailing postcards, networking, etc. There are plenty of ways small businesses can promote their products and services on a limited budget. The trick is to figure out what works for you and tweak your campaigns for the best results. Regardless of your method, you need some way to collect leads so you can follow up with them.
2. Lead follow up via phone calls – Ideally one of your lead capture methods involves people telling you they want to talk with you. They might request a free consultation, info session or analysis, for instance. Or they might have questions about making a purchase on your website. Most people want to know that there is a real person running your business before they will buy from or hire you. Before you call someone, take some time to create an agenda with a few simple scripts you can use to start the call, transition to different subjects or if your recipient has objections. You don’t have to read the script word-for-word, but use it as an outline just in case. Then, listen and take careful notes about what your prospect says.
3. Lead follow up via email – No matter what lead capture system you use, you should always get an email address. On the web, you can capture leads through your website with email service providers like Aweber. They give you the subscriber form code that you can copy and paste into your site. Then, when someone signs up, you can follow up with them. Only follow up with people who opt-in to receive correspondence from you. However, once someone opts in, you can set up an autoresponder to automatically email them at regular intervals.
4. Lead follow up via information kits – Direct mail is also an effective tool if you capture your prospect’s mailing list. Consider using direct mail for prospects you speak with over the phone or who have requested an information packet from you through your website or via email. You can put an information packet together pretty quickly with a business card, flyer about your services, a helpful article or two, a case study or list of clients, list of frequently asked questions and other information. After you send your information kit, follow up by phone within a week to see if they have questions.
5. Lead follow up via postcards – If someone doesn’t specifically request an information kit, you may choose to send something less expensive like a postcard. Postcards can be sent quickly and don’t require your prospect to open an envelope to view the contents. By putting together a postcard campaign of several follow ups, you will convert more prospects into sales with repeated exposure.

Keep in mind – it usually takes 7-12 exposures to get someone to do business with you, so having a good lead follow up system is extremely important. Whenever you follow up, always include valuable, educational materials mixed in with your sales literature so prospects read your follow up materials.

A great small business publicity campaign requires courage, planning and persistence. You need courage because you will be the front-facing representative of your company and must speak on its behalf. You need planning to determine what types of press releases to send, which journalists to talk to, and how to implement your campaign. And finally, you need persistence to keep up your publicity efforts until you start to see results.

Ready to get started? Here are 5 steps for creating your small business publicity campaign.

1. Create your press kit – Your press kit is a package of content about your company you can give to journalists. Traditionally, it is a folder of information, but you can also deliver your content digitally on USB drives if you prefer to be “green.” You would send a press kit whenever an editor or journalist wants to learn more about your company.

   A good press kit should contain: an intro letter, some recent press releases, a company fact sheet, bio sheets for key partners, copies of published articles, business brochures, and a businesses card.

2. Press releases – Putting together several newsworthy one-page press release are key to the success of your small business publicity campaign. Your press releases should be written for journalists and sent to publications that would be most interested in your business. Keep them concise and on-point. Ideally, you will want to send it to media contacts you know and follow up with a phone call, but initially, you can use online press release services like PRWeb.
3. Get published – Look for targeted newsletters and trade publications (online and offline) where you can submit articles about your subject area. Start small and work your way up to larger publications. With just a few published articles under your belt, you will feel more confident pitching article ideas to bigger publications.
4. Start speaking – Look for public speaking opportunities and start presenting on your area of expertise. Start small and locally to get the hang of it, then work your way up to radio talk shows. The more you speak, the more opportunities will come your way.
5. Pitch ideas – Once you find several targeted publications that are receptive to your articles, you can start pitching article ideas and outlines to editors. Editors love this because you save them time while delivering great content for their readers.

With any small business publicity campaign, you will experience rejections, but don’t take them personally. With courage and persistence, you will build momentum and start to see great results.

Mistake #1 – Trying to Sell Your Services From Your Ad

Too often, small businesses try to sell their services from small ads. You will often see ads that describe a laundry list of services and the opportunity to “call now for your free consultation.”

With small business advertising, you only have limited space and can’t make a complete case for why prospects should hire you to solve their problems. Rather than offering a free consultation – which prospects view as “sales pitch” and avoid – offer free information like reports, white papers, or audio/video content that prospects can download via your website in exchange for their contact information. Sell the information in your ad and sell your services in the follow up.

Mistake #2 – Not Writing for Your Target Market

What problems, concerns or frustrations do your prospects have that would compel them to seek out your solutions? Too often, small businesses focus on themselves and the services they provide rather than what prospects are looking for.

• Focus on benefits – What is the key benefit prospects will receive when they respond to your ad?
• Create a compelling headline – Your headline is an ad for your ad, so it must grab prospect’s interest and make them want to keep reading.
• Use the principles of AIDA – Your advertising copy should follow the principles of AIDA: attract attention, generate interest, spark desire, and offer a call to action. People take action because of two things: the desire to gain and the desire to avoid loss. The latter is usually more effective at getting people to take action.
• Use offers and calls to action – Why should people respond to your ad now and how can they take advantage of your offer?

Mistake #3 – Advertising in the Wrong Place

Take some time to research publications. Even if you have the most compelling ad, if the right people won’t see it, you are wasting marketing dollars. Knowing where and when to place your ads is just as important as what you say. To generate more responses:

• Research your target market – what print publications, websites, and newsletters do they read?
• Consider bigger ads – Larger ads work better than smaller ads because they give you more space to make the best case possible for your products and services.
• Consider ad placement – Where within the publication will your ad run? Will it be near the front or back? Right or left side? Top or bottom of the page? Beside relevant content? The best ads run at the top of the page near relevant editorial content.

By avoiding these 3 small business advertising mistakes, you can create more effective and more profitable advertising campaigns. Advertising doesn’t have to be a cost for your small business. With the right advertising strategy, you can know that for every dollar you spend, you make more in return.

Two key examples of false advertising include:

• Hidden fees or surcharges – The company advertises a specific price but fails to disclose added fees and surcharges.
• “Going out of business” sales – Sometimes, the liquidators hired to sell the closing store’s merchandise will actually raise the prices before discounting them.

False advertising is regulated by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). If your prospects feel they have been misled, they can send a copy of the original ad to the FTC, which will then determine if they can get their money back or if changes must be made to your advertising campaign.

To protect yourself against false advertising, follow these guidelines:

• Be truthful. - Keep your ad truthful and only make claims you can back up.
• Use accurate pricing. – The price you advertise is the price you must honor. Don’t try to deceive prospects by including hidden fees or surcharges.
• Don’t put down competitors. Don’t make misleading or erroneous claims about competitors or alter their logos or trademarks.
• Use legitimate testimonials. The testimonial must come from someone who used the product the way it was intended to be used. Disclose if you paid for any endorsements or if results are not typical. See the FTC’s guidelines for using testimonials and endorsements for further information.
• Get permission. Make sure you have the rights to use photography and graphics.
• Get releases. Make sure to have written releases for anything or anyone in your ads.

If you blog, make sure you disclose if you got any product for free that you might review. See Wired’s article FTC Tells Amateur Bloggers to Disclose Freebies or Be Fined for more information.

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide legal advice.

If you’ve ever cold called someone, you know the drill. You call someone up, introduce yourself and explain what you do. Perhaps you might offer a benefit of your product or service. When you’ve finished your spiel, you hope the person on the other end will say something like, “We were just talking about hiring someone like you.” In reality, what you usually hear is “Sorry, I’m not interested.” Here are a few small business sales tips for improving your cold calling success.

Warming Up Small Business Leads

If you do decide to add cold calling to your small business marketing strategy, a better approach is to warm up leads before you cold call. If you have several prospects you would like to work with, send each of them a personalized letter explaining how your services could specifically help their business. A few days later, follow up with a call.

Or, provide a valuable incentive such as a free report, access to a members-only section of your website, or physical CD for anyone who will give you their contact information. Then, follow up with a call and ask them if they had any questions or let them know their order is on its way.

In both cases, you are offering something of value first and then following up with a call. The valuable information you offer warms them up to you and your services so they are more likely to be receptive to your call.

3 Cold Calling Mistakes Small Business Owners Make

When you do follow up with a call, here are three small business sales mistakes to avoid.

1. Talking about yourself – Once they get someone on the phone, most cold callers immediately break into a pitch about who they are, what they do, and why their product or service might interest them. Unfortunately, most people aren’t interested in the caller who just interrupted their train of thought. They are too pre-occupied with their own business challenges and daily to-do list to care about who you are and what you do. If you don’t engage them initially, you’ve already lost them. To get a better response, ask them a question about an issue or problem they may need to solve. Focus on uncovering a need rather than pitching your services.
2. Conveying cockiness – It’s one thing to be confident in your product or service. It’s another thing to expect that your product or service is the end-all-be-all solution to everyone’s problems. Yet often, cold callers put immediate sales pressure on prospects to open their wallets. While you should be enthusiastic and confident about your products and services, keep in mind that your prospect on the other end didn’t ask for a sales pitch. They don’t know anything about you, and won’t be receptive to your message until you’ve actively engaged them. Focus on holding a conversation to see if what you offer can help them solve a problem they are currently having.
3. Overcoming objections – When you first call up a prospect, you likely won’t know much about their problems, concerns, budget and time constraints. It’s possible that what you offer isn’t a good fit for this company or that they don’t have the means to hire you at this point. If you go into the call ready to overcome objections and convince this prospect to give you a chance, you will create an adversarial relationship off the bat. It’s better to listen to and validate their concerns rather than trying to counter whatever they say and putting them on the defensive.

Making a successful cold call can be challenging, but by warming up leads first, you can improve the odds that the person you talk with will be more receptive to starting a dialog with you.

The worst part about this failure to communicate is not knowing what happened. Did you do something wrong? Is the sale lost? And what is the best course of action since you don’t want to be perceived as a pushy salesperson who never knows when to give up. Here are a few small business sales tips for handling prospects who stop communicating.

Let Go Of Expectations

If you’ve ever found yourself in this situation, take heart that there is a pressure-free way to re-establish communication with your prospect. But to do so, you must switch your focus from making the sale to learning what went wrong.

When you are focused on making a sale, it’s easy to fall into the trap of anticipating how your prospect should act and expecting things to go as you hope. In that sense, it’s a lot like the early stages of dating. You might have a few dates with someone and then suddenly, they no longer seem interested. You can feel mislead, frustrated, or confused and can become preoccupied with where you might have gone wrong.

Just like with dating, your prospects may not want to reveal the truth about why they stopped contacting you – but with a business relationship, it’s easier to gain feedback than with a non-committal guy or girl.

The trick to uncovering the mystery is to take a laid back approach to contacting them. If they are avoiding you, it may be because they aren’t yet ready to move forward, they’ve had internal issues that have halted the project, a key decision maker is on vacation, or they have decided not to go with your services. Or it may be something else.

If you really are interested in learning why your prospect is no longer interested, your first step is to let go of the idea that you will get the sale. By approaching your prospect as if a sale might still happen, you unconsciously add sales pressure to your relationship and can destroy any rapport you’ve build so far. Instead, accept that you are ok with their decision not to move forward before you contact them. The truth is, you don’t yet know what the situation is.

Re-Establishing Contact

The next step is to call your prospect with the agenda of learning the truth, not pressuring them to move forward with you. While there is no guarantee that they will talk with you, you are much more likely to learn what happened if you are upfront and honest. No one likes rejection, yet gaining constructive criticism will help you better sell your services in the future.

One way to do this is to call up your prospect and apologize. Try to get them on the phone if you can, as email and voicemail can be impersonal. When you do have the opportunity to speak with them, say something like “I just wanted to call and apologize for us not being able to connect over the last few days/weeks. I feel like somewhere along the way, I may have dropped the ball or not provided you with the right information. Since I haven’t heard from you, I can only assume you’ve gone with someone else, so I’m not calling to pick up where we left off. I just wanted to see if you had any feedback for where I can improve for next time.”

The Benefits of Feedback

If you are genuine and honest, you may be surprised by what your prospect tells you, and perhaps even learn that he has a good reason for not being in touch. While learning the truth can seem frightening at first, you’ll find you are far less frustrated because you now know why things didn’t work out the way you hoped. Asking for constructive feedback has a number of benefits such as:

1. Regaining Confidence – When prospects disappear, it’s easy to blame ourselves. Often, our inner critic gets the better of us and berates us for doing something wrong while holding on to the hope that somehow, this sale might work out.
2. Getting Closure – By learning the truth about your prospect’s situation, you can make a more informed decision about whether to continue your relationship or move on. Even if your prospect tells you they’ve gone with someone else, you no longer have to devote your time, attention, and worry to what will happen in the future.
3. Improving Sales Skills – When you don’t know if you did something wrong or what it might be, your inner critic is often quick to blame and belittle you for losing the sale. You may have done everything right, yet still lost the sale. By gaining constructive feedback, you will learn what you can improve or if the decision was something completely out of your control (such as the competitor they went with was the boss’ son).
4. Build Client Rapport – While your prospect might not have hired you this time, that doesn’t mean they won’t have future projects. By showing them you are willing to accept feedback and are genuinely interested in their opinion, you demonstrate that this process was more than you making the sale. You wanted to build a relationship with them. When you relax and ask for the truth without sales pressure, your prospects will be more straightforward and honest with you.

As with any relationship, don’t jump to conclusions until you have the full story. The truth is often easier to deal with than the endless stream of possibilities your mind can come up with. By following these small business sales tips, you can learn from your mistakes and build confidence for your next prospecting interactions.

Payment Gateways and Merchant Accounts Defined

If you plan to accept credit cards online for products and services, you will need to set up a payment gateway and a merchant account.

A payment gateway allows online stores and auction sellers to accept credit card payments over the Internet and acts as the equivalent of the point-of-sale device in an offline store. Whenever a purchaser enters a credit card number, the payment gateway protects any sensitive information entered to ensure that information passes securely between the customer and the merchant. It also checks to ensure the customer has enough money on their credit card to pay for the product or services. It then places a hold on the funds so the cardholder can’t spend that money before it is transferred to the business’ merchant account. Two of the most popular payment gateways are Authorize.net, Paypal, and Google Checkout.

Your merchant account will usually charge you various fees such as an authorization fee for each time a credit card payment is sent to the card-issuing bank to be authorized, a monthly statement fee, and possibly a monthly minimum fee if your store’s purchases don’t exceed that amount each month. While some merchant accounts have their own payment gateways, most use a third party gateway. For instance, I use Authorize.net as my payment gateway and Practice Pay Solutions as my merchant account.

Start Accepting Credit Card Payments

If you want to accept credit card payments on your small business website, you have a number of options.

1. Paypal – One of the quickest and easiest ways to start taking money online is to set up a PayPal account. Paypal is a secure payment processor that allows anyone with an email address pay by credit card or direct transfer from their bank account. You can set up an account and connect it to your business banking account in a matter of minutes. And they provide a suite of tools you can use to create a basic shopping cart or “buy now” options for your website. Paypal is great if you only offer a few products or services and don’t need a lot of options.
2. Google Checkout – Google Checkout is Google’s response to Paypal. The service functions similarly to Paypal and allows you to place “buy now” buttons on your website.
3. Shopping Cart – There are numerous shopping cart systems you can use to sell products and services online. Your shopping cart is software that assists customers in making online purchases by simulating an offline “shopping cart” where customers can place items they wish to buy before they “checkout” and make their purchase. At checkout, your customer places their order and enters their credit card number securely through your payment gateway. When the payment gateway approves the charge, it transfers the money into your merchant account, which transfers the money into your bank account. I’ve used 1ShoppingCart in the past and currently use Infusionsoft’s shopping cart system.

If you sell digital products such as PDF files, MP3s, or online videos, you can use services such as ClickBank, PayDotCom, or E-Junkie to act as a shopping cart and to deliver your products to customers. Each will allow you to accept payments through Paypal or your merchant account.

Regardless of the size of your company, there is a payment solution that is right for you. Paypal and Google Checkout are great for smaller companies who want to start taking sales online. If you plan to do a lot of business online, you will probably want to look into getting shopping cart software, a payment gateway and a merchant account.

A great email newsletter builds trust between you and your readers by delivering high-quality content that your readers find helpful. Here are 7 steps to create your small business email marketing strategy.

Step 1 – Competitive Analysis

Before you start publishing your small business email newsletter, do some research on what your competitors are doing. If they already publish a newsletter, join their mailing list to keep tabs on them. Some of the things you will want to monitor include:

• How often do they send the newsletter?
• What types of information do they include?
• How relevant is their information is to their niche audience?
• Is the content valuable and easy-to-read or is it jargon-filled and primarily self-promotional?
• Have they missed any relevant topics you can cover?
• Do you see any opportunities for improvement?

Step 2 – Target Market Analysis

Next, decide who you want to reach with your newsletter, such as your current clients, prospects or the press. What are their demographics and psychographics? What steps must they take to make a purchasing decision? What do you want readers to do when they read your newsletter. Here are a few examples:

• Current clients – For current clients, you might want to upsell or cross-sell them on additional products, send you referrals, or renew their subscription to your services. You can use your newsletter to build client loyalty or promote additional products and services they might not be aware of. You can also remind them that you value their referrals.
• Prospects – For prospects, you might want to generate leads for your business. If you market a complex service that usually takes a few contacts before prospects are ready to buy, you can provide them with useful information that will help them make a better purchasing decision and encourage them to contact you when they are ready. If you sell products, you can also promote and sell those products through your email newsletter, thus encouraging prospects to buy from you directly.

Step 3 – Create Your Newsletter Format

When you create your newsletter, you want to make it a quick-read for subscribers. Don’t overwhelm readers with too much information. Decide what types of sections you will include in your newsletter, such as an introduction, a main article or editorial, case studies, featured products and services, upcoming events, or promotional offerings. For newsletters with many sections, add a table of contents at the top or on the left side so subscribers can preview your content.

Step 4 – Creating Content

Once you’ve decided on your newsletter’s format, it’s time to either pay someone to create content for you or to write the content yourself. Here are some ideas for generating content for your newsletters.

• Case studies – If you have a few great client success stories, write up case studies around the strongest ones. Case studies can be used again and again to promote your services in numerous ways and make a compelling case for why prospects should consider your products and services.
• Articles – If you choose to use articles in your newsletter and don’t want to write the content yourself, you can hire a freelance writer from a service like elance.com or find content from one of the major article directories on the web like ezinearticles.com. Article directories often will allow you to publish their articles in your newsletter for free as long as you include a blurb about the author of the article.
• Industry experts – A great way to generate content for your newsletter is to interview other industry experts about their tips and best practices. Additionally, you can ask industry experts to submit articles to your email newsletter. Make sure the articles are relevant to your subscribers’ interests and provide informative information rather than a sales pitch for their services.
• Customer feedback – You can ask your clients for feedback such as success stories or do a Q&A where you answer reader-submitted questions. You can also conduct polls and surveys to ask your readers what they think.
• Short tips – Not everything in your newsletter has to be article length, so consider adding short tips and quick takeaways. Quotes also work well if you can find one that is relevant to your newsletter content.

Step 5 – Mailing Your Newsletter

Email service providers like Aweber.com make sending email newsletters easy and cost-effective. Not only do they let you set up and schedule your broadcast ahead of time, but they will monitor who opens and clicks on links in your emails so you can measure your results.

Step 6 – Commit to a Publishing Schedule

Decide when and how frequent you will publish your email newsletter. Frequency can make or break your email marketing success. If you publish too frequent, your newsletter may be perceived as spam. If you don’t publish enough, your readers won’t remember they subscribed.

How frequent you publish your content will depend on

• Content type – Readers are more tolerant of helpful editorial content than a barrage of promotional content.

• Content length – The longer your email, the more time it will take for subscribers to read it. If you send daily emails, keep them shorter. Monthly emails can be longer.
• Timeliness – How relevant is your newsletter content to current events in your subscribers’ lives? When are prospects likely to make purchasing decisions – for instance, is it seasonal or following a specific life trigger?

You may find it is best to let subscribers choose how often they receive content from you. For instance, if you offer a daily email, you may want to also offer a weekly digest that highlights the best content sent over the course of the week.

Step 7 – Test Your Results

As with any marketing campaign, testing is crucial to your success. You should monitor which days get the best open rates and which subjects get the best responses and sales. Specifically, look at:

• Your delivery rate – How many active email addresses do you have on your list? Email addresses become inactive over time so at any given point, only a percentage of your list will receive your email.
• Your open rate – How many people open your email? Open rates are estimations of the number of people who at least skim your email. They aren’t 100% active because email service providers often can’t track every possible way someone might view your email – such as on a cell phone or in your email reader’s preview mode. It is also virtually impossible to tell if your email ends up in your reader’s junk mail folder, so the open rate will give you an idea of how active your list is.
• Your click-through rate – How many people click the links in your email? Do certain offers get more clicks?
• Your sales rate – How many sales can you attribute to your email newsletter?
• Your list growth – How fast is your list growing?

Your small business email marketing strategy is a work in progress, so make sure to set benchmarks and monitor the success of your campaign. As you learn more about what your subscribers want, you can incorporate those changes to improve your success.

Too often, the reason why businesses fail is because the business owner prefers to do the day-to-day activities of servicing his clients to the detriment of running a business. Many service professionals hate the concept of business development or rainmaking. They don’t want to be out there getting clients. They want to be working with clients.

Unfortunately, this mindset can only lead to frustration and chaos. You will never know where your next client will come from nor what your business will look like in a year or five years. You might dream big, wishing that you will suddenly get your big break and clients will flood your doors, but you don’t actually have a plan to make that happen.

In fact, when you look at your business objectively, you don’t really own your business. It owns you. What you’ve really created for yourself is a very demanding job that barely pays well given the number of hours you work. You must work to make money and if you stop working, your income ceases.

Developing a Marketing Mindset

Nothing happens until a sale is made. Selling is the process of getting prospects to exchange dollars for your products and services. Without selling, you have no income.

Marketing is the process of profitably finding and attracting qualified prospects to your business. I say profitably because most small business owners see marketing as an expense they have to do because everyone else is doing it, but they have no idea why their marketing doesn’t work as well as it should or even how well it is working. They know they have to get clients somehow, but they just aren’t sure what to do.

Rather than thinking of yourself as a consultant or lawyer or accountant, you must change your mindset and see yourself as operating a business that happens to market certain types of services. Developing a marketing mindset is the number one key factor to business success.

Putting an Effective Marketing System into Place

One of the reasons people like to buy franchises is because they already have effective business systems in place. How often do you hear of a McDonald’s going out of business? Not too often. That is because McDonald’s has spent years working out all the problems in their processes until they have a virtually no-fail business operation.

Yet few small businesses take the time to work out a system for running their business seamlessly and efficiently. They take on any client who comes their way, do things differently for each client, hope that client is satisfied, and then send them on their merry way. They have no idea how to continue to attract similar types of clients. They don’t have a systematized way to handle client work. And they don’t have a way to follow up with past clients for testimonials, referrals and repeat business.

The main reason they don’t take the time to put together and test efficient systems is because they believe it takes too much work. Who has time for that when they are struggling to keep their clients happy and pay the bills at the end of the month? Yet a bit of planning goes a long way.

If you can cut down your time spent working on client projects because you handle them the same way each time and are more efficient – and you ensure your clients walk away from you happy – wouldn’t that justify putting in that initial time spent creating your system? If it took you a few hours to create but you reaped the benefits of greater efficiency and time management for the life of your business, isn’t that worth it?

How To Get Different Results

The biggest mistake that holds service providers back is looking to what everyone else is doing and trying to copy them. If the guy next door gets a new sign or brochure, you want one. If you see he’s running ads in a particular newspaper, you run some too. If he puts up a new website, you start working on yours.

You structure your business just like your competitors, set up similar operations, and market yourselves similarly – and yet you expect different results from what they are getting! You’ve probably heard the definition of insanity – doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result.

If you really want to get different results, you have to do things radically different. But what if you don’t want to “reinvent the wheel”? Well, that wheel is the hamster wheel you work in every day in hopes that you will eventually get different results. Do you really want to stay trapped in the wheel?

You will only be able to take your business to a new level when you start looking at it differently. Study successful companies outside your profession or industry and look at what they do differently. What makes them successful? Then, apply those techniques to your business.

1. Use a clean design – Businesses don’t need to use Flash or fancy graphics for visitors to find your site valuable. Your users want a simple, intuitive design that allows them to access the content they need quickly. Your site navigation should be logical. Your page should be easy to skim. Downloads and newsletter sign ups should be prominently featured.
2. Focus on prospect’s concerns – Your small business website should demonstrate your expertise by providing free information such as articles, free reports, podcasts, video, and other media. When prospects first come to your site, they are focused on their problems – and how to solve them right now. Your “about” and “services” pages won’t interest them initially. First, they want to know if they are in the right place and whether they can find the information they need. They want to know “what’s in it for me?” so make your content valuable.
3. Add new content regularly – Keeping your website up-to-date can be time-consuming, but to build credibility with visitors, you should be adding new articles and updates regularly. Take off any outdated information and add new content about upcoming speaking engagements, media mentions and publications to be released. If visitors see that your upcoming events were for 2007, they will wonder if you are still in business.
4. Use calls to action – What do you want prospects to do on your website? Each page should have a purpose – is it to convey information, to highlight a recent event, to get them to register for a seminar you are holding, to purchase your book, or to hire you? Guide visitors through your site.
5. Don’t collect too much information – If you capture leads with online forms, keep them short and simple. You only need a name and email address for people to sign up for your newsletter. If you ask for more, you will get far less subscribers. For mailed products, ask for the minimum like their name and shipping address, but don’t make them answer a full questionnaire about their business. Keep it simple.
6. Test your site – Make sure all features and links work properly and that you aren’t missing content. Then, ask a few clients to look over your site – can they find the information they need? Is your navigation intuitive? Would they know where to look to find your articles, events, or services?

To create an effective small business website, your site must contain more information than your firm’s name, contact information, and a sales pitch for your services. It must be more interactive than your corporate brochure. When prospects visit your website, they want to know what your firm actually does, see proof that your firm is credible, and understand why you are uniquely qualified to help them solve their problems.