What Is the Purpose of Your Web Site?

To succeed, a small business Web site must be a carefully targeted, wisely designed, pay-its-own-way tool, which adds to the bottom line. To achieve this you need to ask: What is the purpose of our Web site?

Be precise about what you want to achieve and you have a good chance for success. Let's examine
concepts behind various types of Web sites, as you look for the model that fits your organization the best.
The main tag is to provide with Prospect generation -
* Direct sales
* Business-to-business sales
* Customer support
* Education

TOO MANY WEB MARKETERS work on the if-you-build-it-they-will-come model. They won't. Once you
build a Web site you must give them a reason to come. A Web site is a passive form of marketing: providing a signboard, which points visitors to your products and services. To be most effective, a Web site should be
used in conjunction with seven active forms of marketing, which we will examine briefly in this article. Just
how do small business people on a limited budget entice visitors to their Web site? There are some
certain things which helps to hook a customer to your website.

You must give them a good reason to come:
The Internet brought a great deal of benefits to our life. Access to a lot of free and useful information is, probably, one of the most important out of them. Every person in this world is running for “free” because
today you are paying for a bottle of purified water, a day may come when people have to pay for
breathing fresh air. Standing onto that point of view everyone is looking for the term ”free”, everyone is
running for the term FREE.

This single word means a lot. A tried-and-true marketing approach is to
offer something of value for free. An online customer is not loyal to you from the very first time, you have
to render the possible ways to make the customer feel comfortable and be loyal to your concerned online store. As a online customer is not getting a chance to deal face to face, you have to give out all the information
in such a way that he/she feel the best comfort. Not only that an online business should provide some freebees or trial versions, so that the customer gets a chance to go into that particular product and see whether
the product satisfies his/her need.

Customer Support is also a vital tool for a perfect website. Customer support is your real purpose. A Web site
is a great place to provide all sorts of in-depth product information. Let's say your customer has a
technical question, a troubleshooting problem, or a special application. You can provide a huge volume
of information at low cost. Microsoft's Knowledge Base (http://www.microsoft.com), for example, allows you
to enter search words to locate detailed information on dozens of software programs, hardware platforms,
and program versions. What if you offered spec sheets and repair manuals for each of your products on
the Web? Wouldn't that be a great selling point to put you ahead of your competitors? You probably have
the information in computer form already, which is the bulk of the work involved. But be sure about your objective -- customer support -- and keep your focus on it.

To make the site more flexible and attractive you can provide Ebooks, Audios, DVD’s, Online Videos etc.
as advertising tools. These tools will give more information about your site and customers will also enrich
with the gathered information from the same. These days, sales by education is proving effective.

As you supply customers with more information, you get orders for upgrades and new products. You can provide up-to-date industry and product information on your Web site in the form of an on-line
newsletter, which gives people a reason to come back month-by-month. This may be the Web version of a print newsletter you already send to your clients. You may find, however, that the Web audience, which
reads the newsletter, grows much larger than your physical mailing list. And you pay no postage for
those readers!

As Face-To-Face interaction is not in attendance, therefore the site should be placed such a way that one
can reach to the global audiences’ one at a time and satisfy the customers by rendering them with
proper information and acquaintance. The site must be Error free, Understandable & User friendly.
This above features can enrich any website.