Free Marketing: 101 Low and No-Cost Ways to Grow Your Business, Online and Off

PART 2

SIMPLE INEXPENSIVE WEBSITES YOU MIGHT NEED

The fact is, building a large informational website is where most businesses start and stop their online efforts. The Internet is clogged with these sites, as nearly every business has either put up a site themselves, or they've paid (or overpaid) to have a web designer build one for them. You may have heard the apt analogy of billboards in the desert, and that's exactly what most informational websites are. Imagine thousands of huge beautiful billboard signs posted in the desert pointing nowhere. That is the state of the current business landscape online.

It's a sad fact, but most of the business informational sites being built are worthless for driving new business. You don't have to look far to find business owners that are unhappy with how their $5,000 to $50,000 informational websites have turned out, and they are even less pleased with how much business the site is generating for them. It's an even uglier picture when you consider the trends I talk about later on in the book, regarding mobile marketing and how our cell phone screens are forcing the entire Internet to fit on a small and simple screen. In other words, you'd better have a good reason for building a big, pretty website, because most of them are a waste of space.

TOUGH QUESTIONS

How profitable is your informational site? Is it helping you grow your business? If not, why not? If so, how can you improve your online efforts?

Having a website stuffed full of general ...