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Most small-business owners have a web site just because they think they should. All of her competitors have one so she has one as well. And while I would recommend having a web site even if you don’t know the purpose of the website, it’s not worth spending much time on it if you don’t know the purpose of it.

In my mind, there are really 3 reasons to have a website for a business:

• Provide Information about Your Products/Services
• Sell your Products/Services
• Generate New Leads for Your Business

Provide Information about your Products/Services

This is the implicit intention of most small businesses. While maybe not intending to directly serve that purpose, they want to inform potential customers about what they have to offer. They put a web site up, create some basic content, and hope that people visit it.

The problem with this type of website is that there is no way to measure the success of it.

• Does it provide potential clients with the information they are looking for?
• Does the content differentiate your business from your competitors’?

You could spend a lot of valuable time writing content, getting someone to design it, but if it’s not generating new business, is it worth it?

Sell Your Products/Services

If you have a product or service that can easily be sold online, then by all means, it should be sold online. It is a bit more difficult to get a website like this set up but there are great programs out there through websites like Yahoo and also good products that are free like osCommerce, but they require a little more technical know-how to implement them.

If at all possible, you should make every effort to sell your products or services online. Most of the expense is in setting it up and once that is done, it’s not that expensive to run a shopping cart site every month. It might cost you $40 per month, which is about what you’ll pay with Yahoo. There are also some great advertising methods that you can use to get additional traffic to your site.

Generate New Leads for Your Business

This was saved for last because 90% of all business who have a website online should be using it to generate new leads. And the only other 10% should be those who can sell their products/services online.

Notice that I don’t think any percentage of businesses should use the website solely as a means to inform potential clients/customers about their products and services. This is because if you want to do that, then you should be using the website to generate leads. For example, an accountant may want to inform potential clients what services that they have to offer, but the end goal should be to generate leads. This might be as simple as having a contact us form on the website or even just tracking calls that come from the site.

The purpose is to generate new leads, and hopefully new clients. This might entail going through a full sales process but it doesn’t have to be. A restaurant could inform clients about their services, including the location of business and the menu, but they should also offer some sort of incentive like a discount on a meal.

This will do 2 things:

1. Measure the Success of a website
2. Generate Leads to sell to in the future

“If You Can’t Measure it, Don’t Do It”

This is an old business axiom and one that I do not think is applied much with web sites. Most companies just put them out there and don’t measure the effectiveness of them. Two of the EASIEST ones you can do are:

1. Number of Visitors - Fairly obvious. “If you have a website that no ones visits, does it really exist”?
2. Conversion Rate - A little harder to track but if you set up your website to generate leads, you should be able to provide some sort of tracking of the number of sign-ups or page visits that you have. You can even track phone calls from the site using a tracking number and measure the number of calls per visitor.

You can see an example above of one of our sites over a week. The number of visitors increased significantly because of a new campaign that we were doing. But the important thing to note is our conversion rates. The main thing we were going for was Contact Us and Report Request and you can see that combined, we got almost 5% of our visitors to convert - a very good number for the site.

If You Make Just One Change
Start tracking something on your website. Set a baseline and go from there. It could be as simple as visitors for now but have something so that if and when you make a change, you know how that change affected your site - positively or negatively.

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