The top 5 reasons why a website is essential to any small business

There are a lot of small businesses out there that believe that owning a website is a complicated and difficult to maintain proposition and so they remain web-less. In my opinion a company isn't taking full advantage of the free advertising and publicity they can create using a simple website and email. The following list of the top 5 reasons to get up on the web ASAP is meant to encourage small to mid-sized businesses to start thinking about increasing their profits and doing it as easily as possible online.

To be completely open about my intentions, I run a domain name registration and webhosting business at http://www.1websitesolution.com and recommend our services to anyone interested in very inexpensive yet reliable websites.

1.) All websites on the internet are constantly being indexed and catagorized and made available on search engines without any work by the website owners.
Google (and others) have special programs (called bots) that search and index the web for content and make it available on their search pages. What this means, is that once you have a website up with some pertenant content regarding your business, Google will index your website in a matter of weeks and make it available in searches. Now this doesan't mean it'll show up as the #1 listing within search results for your market, but it's a start. All of this is done automatically without any work from you. If someone is determined to find you by, chances are that they will. Make sure you include as much detailed information about your business on your website as possible in order to make this easier for people to find you. Other than just the basic name and mission of the business, you should also include things like street addresses, phone numbers, name of employees, management, owner, anything unique about the business or the people who work there and anything else that may set you apart from the rest.

2.) Websites are cheap.
Let's face it. The internet has been around for a while and the cost to own a website and domain name have gone WAY down. You can purchase a .com domain name for around $9/year and a place to host your website for $9/month. At those prices you can't afford NOT to own a website. You can by either or both at http://www.1WebsiteSolution.com.

3.) You don't have to be a computer nerd to build a website.
If you only have limited information about your buiness or it is a business not suited for ecommerce, then you might get by with just a simple one page site and most web hosting companies have a way for you to create a look and feel for your website by selecting from a variety of templates. Then you can update the content of the web page via a simple interface resembling a text editor like Microsoft Word. This means you don't have to learn HTML in order to update a web page. It's extremely simple and easy to use.

4.) Email marketing can bring customers to your business at little to no cost.
Make sure you have a way for people to contact you via email on the web site and don't forget to check you email everyday. Then you can simply state on the website that you can sign up to receive speical discounts available only to internet customers by emailing you their email address. This helps you build an email marketing list. Make sure you also offer this at you actual place of business too! A simple sign up sheet at your place of business for customers to leave their email address will help. Again you need to give them some incentive to leave their email address, like special discounts. Then once a month send out a blast email to your list and make your email a coupon for 2 for 1 or whatever you'd like. Do not OVER send to your list as this will become annoying to some users and they'l want off, so try at most once a week.

5.) Contibute to the web and it comes back.
The more you post text offerings that include info about your business to forums, blogs, reviews or anything else that places your words on a website other than your own, the more you increase your web presense. This also increases your ranking within search engines. The more you plug your business on other sites, the higher up your website will appear when someone does a search. This is how Google and yahoo calculate results. It's actually a complicated formula that give a website it's rank within search engines, but basically, more exposure will bring you more exposure. So, whenever you get a chance, plug your business on a website, write a review on Amazon, post an ad on http://www.craigslist.com and submit your opinions on the wide variety of forums on the internet and always include your business websiute address and name of business.