In the digital age that we are in, every serious marketer should think seriously about obtaining a website or having an online presence. Regardless of whether their business is the brick and mortar type, long gone are the days when people relied on just the word of mouth for marketing and referrals. Today, everyone is online, even your target clients and you therefore need to spruce up your marketing with a website.
So what do you need to have a website?
Having a website is inexpensive. You need not break a bank as most people think. Here is a list of items you will needs
Domain name: The domain name is the brand name that identifies you online. For example this site has the domain name ‘thriveglobal.com’. The thrive global part is the brand which the founder wanted to be identified with while .com means commercial. You can always have other suffixes eg ‘.net’, ‘.org’ or ‘.biz’ depending on what you want.
Hosting:If your site is to be live all through, you will need a good hosting provider. Personally I love Windows VPS hosting that is high performance, has a large ssd storage and goes for an affordable price.
Content: You will need content that is SEO optimized so that you can rank for the keywords that your business deals in. From sites such as upwork and freelancer, you can hire freelance writers to do your web copy.
So why the need for a website?
Helps you rank on search engines
With a good content strategy, you are going to rank for local terms that people could be searching on their search engines and this brings in good free traffic. People will know about you, your business location
Sell out your testimonials
On a website, this is the best place to put word out about what other customers think of your business. Anytime you get written or even spoken reviews and testimonials of people who have used your service or product, put it out on your testimonials section so that everyone can see.
Credibility
When you have a website, people think that you are a serious marketer and they will therefore tend to buy from you as they see you as an authority who knows about what they are doing
Autopilot sales
A website selling digital products can be customized such that it will sell the products on autopilot without your being there to do the sales pitch to the customer.