Promotion Tutorial - Part 1 - Re-evaluation

27 October 2009

Perhaps it's time to re-evaluate the benefits of an Internet site for businesses.

In many ways, the traditional Web site has been a failure for many businesses. Any e-mail address listed on your Web site ends up in the hands of thousands of spammers. Instead of receiving requests for your products, what you get iss a flood of unsolicited requests from seedy businesses urging you to buy their products.

What I've learned is that the Web may not be a place to generate sales from a mass audience for a business like yours, but it is a great tool to stay connected to a small audience. Use your site to communicate with customers and employees. Create a special area for clients to get remote support from your help desk.

The biggest benefit of your site may not be for your customers, but for you. You can develop a custom client management system on a secured site hidden behind your public site. Use it to document work in progress, enter timesheets, generate work orders, even write invoices. Because it's accessible from every office you manage, you can use it throughout the day to help improve your quality of service and save time on record keeping.

Gradually, your site can evolve from a mass marketing effort to a communication tool for a few hundred users. In fact, you probably should take it out of the advertising budget and put it into the operations budget.

Many early efforts on the Web failed because they conceived the Internet merely as a mass marketplace. It is, of course. But with millions of sites and billions of pages, it's a tough place to get noticed. As an advertising tool, your Web site may not be hitting the mark. But as an operations tool, it could turn out to be a big success.

So maybe it's time to re-think your website's role in your business. Your Website may still have a valuable role to play in your business. It just may not be in advertising.