Τρίτη 24 Απριλίου 2012

Getting Started with Internet Sales

Any business, regardless of size, will benefit from having a website. Fortunately it's easy to set up a basic site. Many hosting companies offer their customers website-building tools and templates that make building a simple site quick and easy, even for someone who knows nothing about HTML.
The most important components for a business website are:
  • Information about your company
  • Descriptions of your product(s) or service(s)
  • Contact information (company address, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.)
  • A form that customers can fill out to request more information
A more comprehensive website might also have some or all of the following:
  • A tool that allows customers to buy your products online, aka a shopping cart
  • More detailed content about your company and products: white papers, press releases, testimonials, information about your company's owners and/or management, etc.
  • Sales campaigns, such as coupons or (if applicable) free trials.
  • A company blog
A good business website must be effective in three areas: 1) Getting prospective customers to your site, 2) Providing content on your site that gives them a positive impression of your company and your products, and 3) Getting the actual sale, whether that means filling out a request for a quote or making a purchase right on the site.
Getting prospects to your site requires a little search engine optimization (SEO). That means arranging your site so that it tends to show up in relevant searches from Google, Yahoo! and other major search engines. Like building a website, SEO can be as simple or as complicated as you prefer. SEO experts have dozens of tricks to get their websites into the top search ranks. However, you can do fairly well just by putting a lot of relevant text on your site. Content is King on the internet.
And by posting relevant and useful content, you will also help keep your prospects interested once they reach your site. Anything and everything related to your company and products can be helpful. One reason that company blogs have become quite popular is that they tend to be quite entertaining, and they are updated frequently – providing lots of new content for search engines and human visitors alike.
Converting your prospects to customers is the trickiest part. That's why website promotions like discounts or gifts can help. If you can motivate visitors to give you their contact information, then your human salespeople get the chance to make a pitch. And because they've already expressed enough interest to take the step of asking for more contact, these website prospects are inclined to listen. If you decide to add a shopping cart to your site, then the buying cycle becomes even shorter.
The sooner you get your business website up and running, the better. Once you have a basic site on the Internet, you can then gradually work on building up its content and adding more pages.


By Wendy Connick
http://sales.about.com

Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:

Δημοσίευση σχολίου