That pretty much sums it up. We passionately believe that every small business needs a website. Every restaurant, plumber, hairdresser and electrician. Every lawyer, Doctor, accountant and physiotherapist.

All small businesses can benefit greatly from having a dynamic online advertisement for their business. A website is a great way for a business to tell its story. There are no word limits, no design limitations and no restrictions on what you say. What other advertising medium can you update as easily as a living and breathing website? It is an advertising tool which adapts to you and doesn’t fight you.

We aren’t suggesting that every small business needs to transact business online, as this would be difficult for say, a dentist for example. Listing your business in the Yellow Pages was fine for the 20th century. However, this is the information age, knowledge at our finger tips. You can have an answer to any question within 5 seconds through a search engine, probably less in most cases.

If your business is not on the web, then you are truly missing out on one of the great paradigm shifts in small business marketing. Yes, word of mouth is great, we use it ourselves. But how reliable is it? Can you count on your friends, family members and existing customers to shout your name from the rooftops and provide you with regular new prospects? Probably not. Hence we need to look for new ways to find our next new client.

That is what a website in the information age is for. A website is today’s Yellow Pages. An interesting statistic is that 49% of people in the world are introverts. They prefer to read about a product or service first, before picking up the phone and discussing how to acquire your product or service. What are you doing to accommodate nearly half the market? 49% is a big chunk of potential sales to ignore. Your website can speak to these people directly in a one to many communication form and get these people excited about what you do.

If you are thinking, yeah yeah I know this already, but I can’t afford a website. Perhaps you should ask yourself whether you can afford NOT to get a website? How much business are you losing to your competitor down the road with a professional, clean and successful website? Our websites are very affordable for all small businesses and we are yet to come across a business that honestly can’t afford to get started on the internet. Really, if you can’t afford $1,000 to get started and $100 per month to keep it fresh, then are you in the right business? Perhaps it is time to change tack. If these amounts seem astronomical to you, then some serious questions need to be asked of your current business situation.

Too often owners of small businesses think of marketing and advertising as an expense. Certainly you would lose an argument with an accountant to argue any differently! However marketing can best be thought of as investing $X to receive $Y in return through the form of new sales. Just as you invest your superannuation to receive a return, marketing is a faster and more direct way to receive a return on investment in your own business.

Approximately half of Australian small businesses don’t have a website … yet. Our mission is to change this, by educating businesses about the future of the internet, communicating the benefits of having their very own website and providing a professional value-packed service that is unrivalled in the industry.

Wish us luck.

The yoursmallbusinesswebsite.com.au team
September, 2007
Sydney, Australia