Let’s start with number 10.

10. A professionally designed website with a little artistic creativity is the least expensive, most effective marketing tool ever created.

9. You can change a website whenever you want. You can only change a yellow page ad in your local phone book once a year.

8. A well-designed website can contain more useful information than you could possibly fit in a full-page yellow page ad.

7. You could put tons of customer testimonials in virtually any website. How many could you squeeze into a yellow page ad?

6. You could easily link your website to PayPal and enable customers to buy products and services directly from your website. When was the last time you clicked on an yellow page ad to make a purchase?

5. You can set up a website for almost nothing in exchange for a low monthly hosting fee in the $15 to $25 range. A medium-sized yellow page ad will cost you $1,500 per month in our area – yes, we said $1,500 per month.

4. Just because the internet is so big, doesn’t mean that it is difficult for people to find you. If you have a website and link it to Google Maps, anyone using Google will be able to quickly discover that you exist - And who doesn’t Google???

3. Ever heard of the Iphone? People can now view websites on their phones. What if you owned a restaurant? Wouldn’t it be great if someone driving by could see your menu on their phone – or at the very least, what type of cuisine you specialize in? It happens every day now.

2. If your business does not have a website, nobody under the age of 30 will know that your business exists. They don’t look at the yellow pages in your local phonebook - never have and never will.

And now for the number one reason:

1. How do people over the age of 30 find out about the latest and greatest in computers and the internet? They ask people under the age of 30 – that’s how.
 

When building a website, you should never ignore the importance of content. Search engines do not search for sophisticated code or cutting-edge graphics. Search engines search for words, i.e., content. The more content you have and the more useful it is, the more likely that someone surfing the web will find your site and discover the products and services that you are selling.

Think of it this way, you can use your free time to create content or use your “free” money (savings) to pay for Google and Yahoo ads. Both will bring prospective customers to your site. If you happen to be a good writer, you should use that skill to promote your business.

You can do this by adding more good quality content to each of your website’s pages. But even if you are already a good writer, we cannot in good conscience advise you to add content to your web pages without having a good copy editor review your web content for grammatical mistakes, incorrect word usage, and misspellings.

Why is this so important? Because the bigger and more established websites that you are competing with have professional copywriters and copy editors creating and editing their content or ad copy. Yours has to be every bit as good, or better, than theirs if you want prospective customers to have the same confidence in your site that they would have in your competitor’s sites.

A weblog, on the other hand, allows you to create web content in an informal, conversational manner. It is a great way to build credibility by sharing your knowledge and experience with prospective customers. And you can do a pretty good job of editing your own content with Microsoft’s Spelling and Grammar checker.

Spelling and grammar checkers cannot be the only resource used to check web page content because they fail to catch so many mistakes. A single mistake on a web page can really adversely affect your site’s credibility, but an occasional mistake in a weblog is not really that big a deal – but remember we prefaced this section of our post with the assumption that you are a pretty good a good writer. The important thing is to develop a strategy for beefing up your content footprint on the web.