Honestly, you don’t need a website. Many companies have had a lot of success without ever having one. Like everything in marketing, it depends on what you want it for.
Place to Put Information
The first obvious reason for a website is to give you a place to put more information on. If someone Googles your company name, ideally your site shows up first. It is pretty common for a customer to research you prior to hiring you. However, there are a lot of other places that will show up with they search. You might have a Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any number of review sites. If these are properly filled out, they may suffice for getting information out there. Websites are expensive, but most social media profiles are free.
Contact Us Form
It doesn’t necessarily benefit you as a standalone, but a contact us form is a valuable part of any business site. If people are already on your site reading about you, you need to give them an easy way to reach you. The more ways someone can reach you, the better.
Web Store
Got stuff to sell? A web store is a great way to do that. If your product is something that can be shipped or downloaded, an online store could really boost your revenue. You need to balance the cost and time it takes to maintain and ship with the extra revenue it brings in.
Content Marketing
This is how I take full advantage of my website. Content marketing is the branch of marketing where you put valuable content into the world in order to entice people to visit your site. Content marketing takes full advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing in order to get high volumes of traffic to your site you otherwise wouldn’t get. From there, you need to convert those viewers into paid customers or capture ad revenue from them.
You can do a certain amount of content marketing solely on social media platforms. However, those platforms control who sees your content. They’re notoriously bad at changing the rules in order to get you to pay to have your own followers view your content. In my nonexpert opinion, they’ll keep going that direction, making it harder to take full advantage of their platforms without paying. Therefore, I’m sticking with my content being on my website, where I have full control.
Costs
The cost of having a website boil down to only a few things. Domain & hosting price, website building & maintenance, and content creation.
The domain should be between $5 and $30 per year, but the hosting (for a decent host) will be closer to $50 per month or more. You can usually build your own website fairly easily using something like WordPress (what mine are all built on) or you can hire someone. Hiring someone to build a low end, but decent, website will cost a couple thousand dollars. Finally, content creation can be free (if you do it yourself) or $10-$50 per article if you hire it out. It all depends on what areas you feel comfortable doing yourself and what areas you’d prefer to spend the money.
On a final note, it is more important to have a halfway decent website than it is to have one with a lot of bells and whistles. Therefore, you should get the main site up and running before you try to add in a lot of extra features. It’s also better to not have a website at all if you can’t have one that looks professional. A bad website can scare away customers.
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