7 Ways Your Website Can Help Your Business, Part 1

I find that many people could better understand how, exactly, a website could help their business. Many folks are too busy running the day-to-day operations of their existing businesses to spend time researching this sort of thing. Many people still see websites as a sort of “brochure on the internet.” That sort of website does almost nothing for your bottom line. Not only can your website pay for itself, it can become indespensible to your customers and be very profitable. How? Here are seven of the ways in which a website can help your business:

1. Make more money by selling your products or services online
2. Save more money by using technology to make your business operations (purchasing, reporting, project management, etc.) more efficient and cost-effective
3. Create entirely new products or services
4. Attract more customers through search and internet advertising
5. Strengthen the business relationships you have with existing customers
6. Provide customer self-service with information so they don’t have to wait on hold and you don’t have to spend time & money dealing with people on the phone or in person
7. Cross- and up-sell your existing customers

Starting with selling online, I’m going to cover each one of these points in this multi-part series of blog posts.

Selling Online

This is the most obvious way a website can help you, and with good reason: you can make good money selling online. Selling online can be the entire business or it can supplement (in some cases, eclipse) your business’s existing revenue streams. There are business acquaintances of a friend of mine who closed their downtown shop—because they were selling so much online they didn’t need it (or its expense). Selling online need not be expensive or require that you be a computer nerd. You can sell things with relative ease through PayPal or by setting up a Yahoo! store. Both of these services offer to handle the sales transactions. Yahoo! Stores gives you a full ecommerce store and they handle the payment processing (though you have to get your own merchant ID). Other options may come from the company that hosts your website. GoDaddy is a popular web host with services that add ecommerce to your site.

Understanding the Long Tail in Relation to Selling Online

Uh… the what? The more you know about how internet business is or can be done, the more it influences what you do for business, as well it should. There are things you can do online you simply can’t do any other way. It’s a mistake to think of selling online in the same terms we use for selling in a retail store. One of these unique qualities to selling online is your ability to take advantage of what’s become known as the long tail.

Let’s say you haven’t yet started your business and you’re still thinking about what it is you’d like to do. And you really, really dig antique and collectible fountain pens. Could you open a shop in your hometown that sells only fountain pens? Of course not. You could never get enough people to shop at your fountain pen store to reach a breakeven point, let alone profitability.

But what about online? The cost of setting up an online store is miniscule compared to opening a physical storefront. And there are enough fountain pen enthusiasts all over the entire world to make selling fountain pens a profitable venture. You’ve found a niche, which is a word you will encounter a lot when reading about successful internet business selling and marketing.

You Already Have a Business

The long tail effect is brilliant stuff if you’re still in the early stages of figuring out what business you want to get into in the first place, but what if you’ve been running your business already? You have facilities, a local clientele, and, more importantly, what you sell is somewhat generalized and not a niche market. What benefits you in this situation is that you are one of the few businesses in your local geographic area that does what you do. In the next county, state, province, or region there are thousands of other businesses run by other people that are nearly identical to yours. Can the web still help your business? Absolutely! But it may require one or more of the other seven ways, such as using technology to make your business operations (purchasing, reporting, project management, etc.) more efficient and cost-effective or strengthening the business relationships you have with existing customers. I’ll cover those in future installments of this series.

Learn More

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More is currently (as of August 2006) on the New York Times top ten bestseller list. It is groundbreaking research presented in a very accessible and readable style. It just may be one of the most important business books you will ever read, because it so squarely addresses the new realities of the internet marketplace.

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