Your website should be an extension of your sales staff. It should help generate and nurture leads by educating prospects, something your salespeople usually do. Like a good salesperson, it shouldn’t just sit around and wait for the phone to ring.

So, are you using your website as an opportunity to solve problems for prospective buyers, or is it a brochure all about you? Are you demonstrating in a clear, honest way how your company and its products and services can ease their pain?

A real website is now the most important tool in your arsenal!

If your website is not helping you …

We have been writing about business blogs lately. We are focusing on using WordPress to produce branded business blogs or blog-sites, leveraging the inherit search engine optimization advantages WordPress provides.

I gave a presentation at the Partners In Success chapter of BNI on 3/17/10 on why blog for business and what MB/I brings to the table. Here’s the narrated version.

MB/I Presentation on Business Blogs
(9-minutes)

Are you already using a blog to market your business? Let us know how it’s working for you.

Are you interested on starting one? Attend our FREE webinar.

At a marketing workshop I attended recently, the subject of web sites naturally came up. One attendee was feeling the pressure to create a web site for his insurance business. Although he knew he “ought” to have one, he was obviously reluctant (indeed, suspicious) about the need, the cost and the benefit.

His reasons for not getting a site boiled down to:

Today, I’m going to examine reason #1. I’ll address reason #2 next week.  So let’s …

Time to freshen up your web site? I’ve just finished updating mine! I’m delighted with the new and improved Blue Ribbon Writing.Com but-whew!-getting it done was a challenge. Oh, MB/I did a sterling job on the design and production. My challenge was with the content. And I was the writer.

I write Web site content professionally but preparing my own was an eye-opening experience. Now that I’ve been my own customer, I offer you three pieces of advice as you work on your site:

Know Thyself. If you are planning to write your site content yourself, please sit in front of …

Summer is here and we are seeing business people exploring the opportunities. Some want to re-structure their business to adapt to the current market; others want to start anew and follow their true passion. In today’s marketplace, any business endeavor involves the online world. Whether a website is needed just for informational purposes, or whether the website is the business itself, a website is needed, period.

But… not just a website… a good website. And, what makes a good website? Good planning. A website is a tricky thing to plan for.

• It needs to be flexible so it’s successful today and as …
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Last night one of my friends organized a potluck on two hours notice.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened, but when I saw the various dishes we’d prepared, it reminded me of the various ways that people will approach their website design.

One person brought a pair of French baguettes and some nice cheeses.

Another looked about her apartment, saw what ingredients she had available, opened up a cookbook and made us an eggplant/Poblano pepper relish from fresh ingredients, making substitutions as necessary.

Me, I heard what the other participants were making, ran off to the supermarket, saw some …

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For a website to become a true marketing tool it must have a strategy behind it. To start designing or programming before having an agreed upon strategy usually ends up increasing the budget significantly, delaying the site’s launch, and making the development process frustrating and inefficient.

A true web developer… not a designer, not a programmer… but a developer who understands both business and the web will provide the guidance needed to develop such strategy.

A strategy should cover:

• Business research
• Market/industry research
• Competition research
• Website goals
• Tracking mechanisms
• Detailed scope specifications
• Site map
• Budget broken down by phases
• Time to launch
• Cash flow requirements plan
• Maintenance & marketing plan

The larger the business, …

The term “site map” has multiple meanings when it comes to websites.

First, there is the site map we create when we start planning a website. This map is a visual representation of all of the pages on the site and of their organization. It typically looks like an organizational chart, with the home page at the top, the main site sections underneath, and the individual pages right under each section. Here’s a sample:

This map helps both clients and web developers to see the whole picture and to understand the hierarchy of …

In order to start the design process, your web developer will need to receive a few materials before getting started. I’m talking about actual files and internal documents… not the business discussion that should have already happened.

What do you need to prepare?

1. Your logo. If you already have a professionally designed logo, you will need to provide it as a vector-based file. This is typically an Adobe Illustrator file. A jpeg or gif won’t work because they have already been compressed and can’t be re-sized. They might also have a background color that conflicts with the new web design.

2. Your …

At MB/I, a lot of our competition is not the other web development firms you would expect. We actually compete a lot with the friends and family members who know a little code and with the template-based solutions out there. This is because of cost. Small business owners look for less expensive options. The problem is that they typically don’t look at the big picture.

In our experience, the alternative “solutions” we end up hearing about are very problematic. They take months to complete and launch the site. And I’m not exaggerating. There are currently 2-3 businesses (no to mention all …