A lot of people think you will require a website if you’re operating a small business, but depending on your target market, you may not need one. There are lots of examples of small businesses on Facebook, of people doing it without a website.
A couple of examples come to mind.
If you want to get hired to work with your excavator, chances are you are serving a very small local market. A Facebook page is fine. If you want to offer yourself as a pet sitter, then a facebook page is fine. However, if you were offering pet clothing and accessories, then you might need a website like Diamond Collar. Items that are going to be shipped can obviously go anywhere.
Local small businesses can also supplement a Facebook page with other free tools and resources. For example, if you’re cooking baked goods and serve a hungry local market, a free Google calendar can be used to help inform your customers, what is being baked every day of the week, and to remind them that they need to put in their request in for how packages they would like, twenty-four hours in advance. You can make the calendar shareable by anyone who has the link, so if you use a pinned post on your page that offers the link, they won’t have any trouble finding it.
If you’re using Google Calendar, another free tool that can help your small business is Google Keep. Google Keep is a note-taking service developed by Google. It is available on the web and has mobile apps for the Android and iOS mobile operating systems. Keep offers a variety of tools for taking notes, including text, lists, images, and audio. You can have a link to it and your calendar right from your Gmail in your desktop. If you have the mobile app, any change you make on one of the platforms is synced to the other platform.
If your business is fairly small, and you need to send out a newsletter, there are some free services you can use. Three of the most popular are MailerLite, MailChimp and SendPulse. All the features of each aren’t included in the free plans, but one of these will work fine to get you started.
You’ll still need to advertise but if you’re a small local business you can still do without a website. Advertising is the lifeblood of any business, but small local businesses are ideal for joint venture advertising, business card marketing, networking and relationship marketing. These will give you a much quicker return on your investment, for a fraction of the price compared to online marketing.
One might think that in your free time, you could build the website and do a little social media marketing in the evenings. And you could! But time is a commodity when you’re in business for yourself, and it needs to have a price put on it. It will cost you free time, time away from your family and even time you need to rest. You discover after you start getting really busy that you will have to schedule these type of things into your daily or weekly routine.