If your business doesn’t have a website, you might as well be out of business. The majority of consumers turn to the Internet in search of products and services, and if they don’t come up in the search engines (let alone have a professional-looking website), your competitor will stake a claim to the customer base you could have captured.

There are a lot of website companies out there. Choosing the right one can be an overwhelming task if you don’t know what to look for. Start by researching the various companies. By doing a simple Google search you can learn all about Yodle and other great website providers that nurture small business growth.

Once you have found a company that looks promising, you will want to study their product in more depth. The following article will provide business owners with the essentials they should look for in a new website, and the company that provides it.

The Look
If you were walking the street looking for a place to grab a quick bite and you saw a shop with old produce sitting out front, would you be inclined to go inside? Your website is no different when it comes to keeping up appearances. Your virtual storefront must look modern, inviting and clean.

Some website companies use generic cookie-cutter templates that look like a resurrection project from 1999. Even if these sites are cheaper, avoid them at all cost. You can still find an inexpensive website out there that offers a great product that will draw people to your business. A modern website attests that you are current in your field.

Marketing support
Nobody wants to be given the keys to a new website and part ways with a good luck handshake. Make sure the company you consider partnering with has a support team that can help you with your marketing efforts.

Your new website should be indexed to work with the search engines. You will want to get established in Google Places, Yelp, MSN, and a number of other standard starting points to get your website’s domain out there.

But you don’t want to stop there. Hiring a search engine marketing specialist can get very expensive. You will want to make sure your website company has an SEO department that can help you get better organic placement in Google, Yahoo and Bing. This team should also be able to help you with other online marketing areas, such as social media.

In a recent article published by The Huffington Post, the author examines how businesses use social media to make money. By having a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms, companies and brands can allow avenues for better communication with their customers.

Social media also helps companies and their clients better identify with one another. Any good website company will know this, and will have the manpower to set you upon this path.

Interview
Be sure to interview the companies you consider hiring to build your business. Make sure they have the ability to reach deep into the offering sack and provide you with an exceptional website with all the add-ons you need to grow your site as your business grows. It must be scalable, built on the best technology, and be cradled with stellar customer support.

Image source: Bamwebdesign.co.nz

Opening a restaurant can be a great way to pad your bank account if you are up to it. But it can come with a price tag higher than you could imagine.

The first year of any business is always one that sees added stress. More work is required as the “trial and error process” of launching a new business is in full force. Knowing what works and what fails is a vital part of business growth.

However, there is a great degree of risk in this, especially in a downed economy with scores of local competitors nipping at your heels.

Having the funds and the know-how to bring brand recognition to the community amid a sea of competitors can be that final point that can make of break any business. But what if someone approached you and presented an option that was already promoted, branded and had a proven success record?

Instead of taking on massive risk by launching your own restaurant from the ground up, you can own a Quiznos franchise, or a Subway sandwich shop. Why could this be a low-risk option for bringing in added revenue?

Branding
No need to spend loads of marketing dollars — the corporation already does this for you. Television and print adverts are already in circulation. The majority of a new restaurant’s startup costs can be in marketing and advertising.

When investing in a franchise, you are taking a massive head start by nixing the cost and time required to branding a business in its crucial startup period.

Training breeds success
When you start your own restaurant, nobody steps in to train you, nor do they give you a blueprint to a proven successful business model. However, when you invest in a franchise you get just that.

It may be your restaurant, but you are borrowing a corporate logo that doesn’t ultimately belong to you. Rather, it belongs to the corporation and all the others who invested in opening franchises under their grand umbrella. In order to protect the brand’s reputation and the reputations of other investors, companies provide training to franchise owners to ensure they will be successful.

In an article published by The Observer that profiles a young franchise owner, it is clear that his investment paid off bigtime. The investor says that the secret to making franchise ownership pay off is hard work and smart investing. In fact, he states that he plans to buy a second franchise in the near future.

Where to invest
Investing in any franchise restaurant regardless of type will provide you with the branding and training you need. However, by focusing on some special considerations and doing a little research you can make an even better investment that is more tailored to your community.

For example, health concerns and nutrition are subjects that are now more focused on than ever. In fact just this year the state of New York has banned the sale of extra large soft drink beverages in their endeavors to help keep people healthier.

Investing in a brand that offers healthy menu items with fresh ingredients in a kitchen void of fried food may be a better investment in areas where residents lead healthier lifestyles. Also, consider buying a franchise that sells food that working people can easily take back to the office.

When trying to decide between buying a recognized sandwich brand or a KFC, these considerations may help you make a better investment that will benefit both you and the community.

Image source: www.mbagateway.com

Today’s market is fierce for new business. Entrepreneurship has boomed, and it seems like the competition is right around the corner. Promoting your brand and services is detrimental to your overall success—without paying clients you will sink.

Ways to promote
Business promotion can fill a coin. In other words it has two sides: online marketing and offline marketing. Focusing on one while neglecting the other is never a good thing to do. Ask any successful business owner and they will tell you that they researched their options, tested the waters, and initiated that which proved to work best.

Both types offer their own unique sets of challenges, but both have one thing in common: a goal to drive more people to your business. Since it is already proven that the majority of one’s business comes from the Internet, it goes without saying that the majority of your efforts will be directed to this outlet. However, there are a few proven things you can do via offline marketing to gain new business.

Online marketing
For starters, you will want a GOOD modern website. I can’t tell you how many times I have stumbled onto a company’s website that has animated graphics from 1999. When people see old websites they are immediately presented with the assumption that your ways of conducting business are just as outdated as your site is. After all, a website is a virtual reflection of your storefront. Having an updated website is essential to capturing new clients.

You will also want to invest in a search marketing plan that revolves around blogs and a social media-marketing platform. Having enriched content on your website will give you better organic placement in the search engines, and will place your name up the ladder where clients can find you.

You also need to consider the fact that utilizing these sources will help you control your online reputation.

According to The New York Times, 84 percent of Americans say that online reviews influence their purchasing decisions. With platforms like Yelp, this is not surprising. Business owners must be made aware that their reputations are at stake, and having them properly managed with content and social media activities will help place them in the driver’s seat to driving their online reputation down the road of business growth.

Offline marketing
We have all heard of print marketing, fliers, door hangers, postcards and bench adverts. But do these things really work? You may have a catchy “call to action” on a bus-stop bench with your face and phone number shining in the sun, but today’s shopper is asking “what’s in it for me”?

A great method for promoting your business is to offer a gift. Coffee mugs are the perfect option. Everyone uses a coffee mug and minespress cups offers them in bulk for extra savings. A coffee mug is viewed as having more value than a promotional pen, and therefore your potential clients will feel like you have more to offer them. Order several dozen of these in bulk and give them out to potential clients who show a genuine interest in your services. Giving them a gift such as this will secure a bond, and hopefully bring you more business.

Image source: Ibrandstudio.com

If you can’t make up your mind what business area you want to occupy, why not become an Originative Intellectual Worker, a phrase coined by H.G. Wells.

It is said that most blogs are read exclusively by other bloggers. At first sight that may not seem very remarkable. After all, there are more than 100 million blogs out there and like generally attracts like. But at a deeper level we’re seeing an irresistible convergence. A convergence of supplier and buyer, of producer and consumer. Communication is becoming conversation, not lecture. Big Media is downsizing into widely-distributed personal media.

Essentially, what we’re now observing is the whittling away of the conventional categories that have sustained literature, journalism and, more recently, broadcasting, for centuries. Top writers do still write and let their agents and publishers manage the rest. But they are becoming a smaller and smaller minority, held in thrall by the big guns of marketing and the “blockbuster” mentality.

Increasingly — down there in the long tail — writers typeset and copycheck their own material themselves, and often publish it on a blog, or through on-demand printers. They are now the largest revenue earners for the new open-market mechanisms, like Amazon and eBay.

At the limit, as the mathematicians say, writers are also photographers, graphic artists, publishers, and the principal marketers of their work. Writers are no longer just writers but, in H.G. Wells’s term, “originative intellectual workers”.

Finding a top-gun agent or publisher is all but impossible these days. On the other hand, the originative intellectual worker (OIW) quickly masters a skill-set allowing proficiency across crafts and technologies. The OIW emerges on both sides of the track, as producer and consumer. In blogging it’s almost impossible to separate the two. With the demise of Excite, the long tail is beginning to wag the beasts of medialand. The world will never be the same again.

Addendum : Here are two extracts which refer to the term “originative intellectual workers”. The first is from H.G.’s autobiography :

“Most individual creatures since life began have been ‘up against it’ all the time, have been driven continually by fear and cravings, have had to respond to the unresting antagonisms of their surroundings, and they have found a sufficient and sustaining interest in the drama of immediate events provided for them by these demands. Essentially, their living was continuous adjustment to happenings. Good hap and ill hap filled it entirely. They hungered and ate and they desired and loved; they were amused and attracted, they pursued or escaped, they were overtaken and they died.

“But with the dawn of human foresight and with the appearance of a great surplus of energy in life such as the last century or so has revealed, there has been a progressive emancipation of the attention from everyday urgencies. What was once the whole of life, has become to an increasing extent, merely the background of life. People can ask now what would have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can say, ‘Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but what do you do? . . .’

“In studies and studios and laboratories, administrative bureaus and exploring expeditions, a new world is germinated and develops. It is not a repudiation of the old but a vast extension of it, in a racial synthesis into which individual aims will ultimately be absorbed. We originative intellectual workers are reconditioning human life.”

Here is an extract from Colin Wilson’s Beyond the Outsider:

“H.G. Wells had another explanation for the unsatisfactoriness [many of us feel with our lot in life]. Men like himself, he says — ‘originative intellectual workers’ — find normal human existence boring because they long for a more meaningful kind of existence. ‘We are like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that have hitherto covered our kind, into the air, seeking to breathe in a new fashion and to emancipate ourselves from … necessities. At last it becomes a case of air or nothing. But the new land has not definitely emerged from the waters, and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon.’”

Interesting stuff, and just as relevant today, and applicable, I would say, to the modern world.