Is Your Website Making Money or Just Occupying Space?

A website is a company’s premises just like the physical office of your business in the real world.

There are millions of websites on the internet today but the question that comes to mind is how many of these websites are actually generating money for their owners? the honest answer is “few”. The reason for this is simply because such websites are either not rich in content, not well managed or are not consistently updated. Some sites are so dull and uninteresting that visitors are not even attracted to stay up to 2 minutes before they move on other more interesting sites on the internet.

For the small business owner, your website is a major marketing tool, if you must profit. It gives you a platform to compete with large corporations. Marketing your business can be a very expensive venture but it’s a necessary and important aspect of your business which if neglected can lead to the untimely demise of your business, capital for marketing can be a big problem for small businesses.

What then is the solution? A rich content site.

• A content rich site is one with lots of informative articles usually centered on a particular subject or theme. Having a content rich site attracts visitors to your business again and again. The content is what attracts or drives sales from your traffic. If the content of your site is rich, good and convincing enough then be rest assured that surfers will come back to make purchases from your site and even recommend your site to others.Therefore, your content must be useful, valuable, informative, educational or just simply entertaining while pointing towards your product.

There are three basic things to do to create a content rich site.

1. Be disciplined to maintain your site constantly
2. Update your site regularly-this you can do by setting a schedule for updating e.g. weekly, biweekly ,every 2 days etc
3. You must be able to adapt from other people’s articles or use them out rightly but make sure you obtain permission before you use them and ensure that such articles are relevant to the theme of your site

Your site content can be anything from politics, editorials, news stories, art, galleries, business, reviews, romance,interviews etc

Getting content for your site requires you to carry out research and have a fairly good knowledge of your theme. You can do that in the following ways:

• Write the articles yourself
• Exchange articles with guest author’s sites
• You can purchase exclusive rights to an article
• Take advantage or reprint rights. You must ensure you have obtained permission, once this is done, you can make the articles more interesting by putting in your own additions e.g. you can write an introduction on the subject or comment on the opinions or conclusions. Avoid at all costs overused or over aged articles.

If you can make your website content rich, it becomes easy for you to advertise whatever products you have and since your visitors now see you as an authority on that area it becomes easy for them to trust you and subsequently make orders form you and when you deliver on their purchase, you simply earned yourself a referral from them to their friends, remember word of mouth is still the best and most potent form of marketing for any kind of business.