Thursday, September 8, 2011

Online or Offline: Location Is Everything

The Internet has changed the face of business in many ways. You are no longer restricted to selling products only to those who walk through your front door. If you have a strong online presence, you can market your goods and services all over the world. In that scenario, it almost seems that location no longer matters in the same way that it used to. While it's true that marketing has changed in some ways, location remains important, even if your sole presence is online.

Just as it's still important to have a good physical location if you have a bricks and mortar business, your online location also matters. Setting up a retail business involves buying real estate and evaluating the kind of traffic you can hope to attract there. Setting up an online business means you don't have to pay as much attention to real estate, but you do need to make sure that the traffic on the Internet is made aware of your presence. There are several ways to do this.

One is through good, old-fashioned advertising. It doesn't really matter where your website is hosted, as long as you have reliable service. Buy purchasing advertising and placing it where you think your customers will see it; you should be able to draw people to your website. One of the most popular types of online ads is click-to-pay. You put up small ads and only pay those who host it for the number of clicks that go through to your site. You can also arrange to pay a percentage of sales to those hosting your ads. This approach has the advantage of giving hosts the incentive to make your ads prominent and drive traffic to them. You also don't have to pay if no traffic comes to your site.

Another way to draw attention to your online location is by using search engine optimization (SEO). This method uses keywords to increase the likelihood that your site will appear when people type those words into search engines. The benefit of SEO is that it doesn't cost anything to do it yourself. You may find it beneficial however, to hire a professional firm to do your SEO, since it can take some time to learn how to do it very well.

Having an online presence means that you no longer have to worry about people bypassing your physical location, but in order to be effective, you will have to take some steps to make sure that your presence is just as visible online.

Online or offline, location of your business is everything. To learn more on how to build an effective online presence for your business visit Business with Success.


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