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Can Your Business Thrive Without a Website?

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.

How to Start a Local Business Successfully

One of the questions that new entrepreneurs frequently ask, is how to market a local business. The website has been built, products are ready, but there just isn’t anybody buying. If you’re selling goods and services locally, you may not need a website. If you do, then it can be helpful to do a little homework first, before you build the website.

Make a profile of who your customer will be. If you’re targeting other local businesses, try and discover what services or products they already buy that are similar to yours. Is there a niche of this group that would be more profitable than the main target? If you can’t decide if there is one, identifying the sub-niche may be discovered by a little trial and error.

Let’s use a website that helps local dealers sell cars. Looking through the local newspaper and other advertising media sources, you can see if they are advertising in auto-trader magazines. Where else do you see their advertisements? Are they advertising on the radio? What about flyers? What about paper placemats at local restaurants? What about the yellow-pages?

Dealerships that are not spending much money on advertising are probably not going to be your target market. Cross any of these off your list. This doesn’t mean you abandon them completely but what you’re looking for is a segment of the target market that more closely resembles the profile you have created that meets the criteria to be part of a test group. You can always try the ones who aren’t advertising, later.

It’s helpful to discover what you can about the business owners too. Things like their age, marriage status, where they live — just whatever you can find out.

Now that you’ve done your due diligence, and picked a segment of the group (let’s say twelve dealerships) it’s time to go see if there is any interest. The low hanging fruit, of course, is major dealerships, because they are easy to find, and you see their ads every place. After you visit three to four of them, you might find out that they aren’t interested at all. Using a Ford dealership as an example, you find out that their dealership is part of a franchise, and they pay a set fee to the parent company to look after all of the advertising, and company website. You discover that new dealerships can be crossed off your list.

Well, it was a good plan — nice and easy! But the fact remains that new dealerships are not your target market. In order for this list to benefit you, the twelve on the list need to be interviews with your target market. At this point, you realize that it’s a good thing you haven’t built a website, and chosen a domain name.

After you have revised your list you can go and visit these people. Some of them may not want to talk to you at all, and others may ask straight out what you are selling. You’re not there to sell anything. You’re doing market research for a new business you’re thinking of building, that will help dealerships sell more cars every month. You just want their input. Once they realize you just want to talk, most of them will be happy to tell you about their business, their life… and probably other stuff you really aren’t interested to hear. But, let them talk! The more they talk; the more they will like you.

It may be good to have a pen and paper with you. They will offer some ideas, and some of them might be pretty good. You’ll get a feel for how they would like to see the site built and how they would like to see the cars sold. Suggest that you were thinking of a set rate for a specific amount of cars, and a little extra for each one after this number. Ask them what they think a service like this would be worth to them on a monthly basis. Make sure you write everything down. When you have collected all of the information you need, your last question might be to ask them, that if you continue to receive positive responses and go ahead and start the business, would they be interested in being a customer.

Likely you would be told, that if your business can actually help them sell more cars, they will consider signing on with you — if you can indeed prove, you can help them sell cars. Still, there is a chance that some might tell you they intend on staying with their current way of advertising. Others might say to come back sometime later after it’s up and running.

When you have completed your interviews with this market segment, if you have over half of the people interested, it’s time to register an appropriate domain name and start building the business. You can easily find out what their current advertisements are costing them. You’ve been told how much they would be willing to pay for your service. You put your price in the middle so as not to be the most expensive, nor the least expensive, and that puts you in the ballpark. You will have a business with paying customers.