All website owners should take notice. Allowing your website to go dormant is a sure way to render your website useless. Many clients I have worked with allow this to happen by simply doing nothing to update or grow their website for years at a time. There’s seems to be a misguided idea that a business can design and launch a basic commercial website and then do nothing with it and expect positive results. The Internet does not work like that, and failing to promote, develop, improve or simply update one’s website leads to a obscure website and wasted time and money, not to mention lost opportunity costs.

Why do people let this happen?

It could be for many reasons, but in my experience the most common reason is plain old ignorance. While its true that tight budgets and limited marketing capital are often excuses, if people really knew what they were missing they would find the money and pay for professional services to promote and develop their website. Some people have no time to learn about marketing their business on the web. Others, have a hard time seeing the value in spending hundreds or thousands of dollars per year supporting, developing and promoting their website.

Many think that a website is an automatic marketing tool and once its live on the web it should automatically attract new business. While its true that your website is a marketing tool, it does not automatically do anything to promote itself.  Successful websites develop and promote in an ongoing fashion.  It makes the website easier to find by would-be customers. This is what drives more sales; proactive website promotion.

The Most Common Mistake

Many of the smallest businesses simply don’t have the funds to pay for website marketing. For this reason, they end up doing nothing at all. This is the biggest mistake any website owner can make. If you plan to build a website but then do nothing with it, you might as well put your money in a pile and burn it. Not having a significant marketing budget is not the problem; it is perfectly reasonable for smaller companies to have limited capital. The problem is having no budget at all. Putting no money into the advancement and promotion of your website makes the whole thing pointless. Any website owner must allocate SOME capital to the development and marketing of their website even if it is small. Even the tiniest amount of basic marketing work will result in some positive improvements to your website and business. Doing nothing will result in nothing; end of story.

Entirely Commercial Websites

Many people don’t understand that having a small and entirely commercial website is a mistake. What do I mean by entirely commercial? I mean that the website is nothing more than an electronic brochure which offers the visitor nothing but a multi-page advertisement. Why is this bad? Well, its obvious. Most people do not use the Internet to find advertisements. They are shoved in our faces all the time. People use the Internet to find useful information to solve their problems. A glorified advertisement alone may not always accomplish this. What small website owners need to do is expand their website to offer problem solving information related to their business. This means adding a blog whereby useful information (not just more sales-copy) is provided free to users to find answers to their issues. This could also mean adding free downloads such as PDF whitepapers which describe and solve certain issues that your customers commonly face. There are many other ways to expand and improve a website so that its is not strictly commercial, but will capture an audience and lead them to your commercial offerings.

Spending a few hundred or a few thousand dollars per year proactively promoting and improving your website is a must for any small business. Regardless of how limited your budget is, there should always be something set aside to add value and usefulness to your website in terms of support, marketing and promotion or just general updates and improvements. Doing nothing and allowing your website to remain dormant and unchanged for months or years can make the whole endeavor a waste of time and money. Employing a few basic promotional techniques and adding value to the usefulness of your website can turn your dormant website into a valuable marketing tool for your business.

To find out what Core Web Solutions can do to get you started with proactively promoting your website, contact us today.