So you’ve had your website put together, and it looks great. Your friendly web designer guy did a good job, but that was a while ago now.

What do you do now?

If you’re like most small business owners, you tick that box as done and forget all about it. That’s not such a good idea though. Things change, and technology faster than anything else.

The content of your website will probably not be out of date for a long time. Particularly if it is mostly a ‘business card’ type website. That is, it’s there so you exist online, it tells people who you are and what you do. Plus gives you a proper professional email address.

That, however, is the least of your worries. Unless your website is incredibly basic and built using very minimal HTML, there’s a good chance it will need maintaining and updating. Here’s 5 reasons why – and if reading that scares you then it’s probably a good thing.

Now I’m not talking about redesigning your site to cope with new technology. That’s a given. If your website is 10 years old then it will probably look terrible on a mobile device, and Google will even penalise you for that. After all, they don’t want to show results to their customers that are unreasable and therefore not useful to them. So you need major updates from time to time to cope with these changes. That’s where your friendly web designer guy comes in useful again.

What I’m referring to is the ever changing code hiding behind your website. Continue Reading…

Setting up a Facebook page for a local business is very easy to do. Do you have a business email address? If not, you really need one anyway, but you can also use a separate personal email address to sign up for a business Facebook account. Everything is pretty much going to work the same way it would as if you signed up for a personal account, but you’ll feel restricted if you’ve been a personal Facebook user.

You see, as a business user, you can’t access everyone else’s profiles the same way you could as a personal user. This is just a slight difference you’ll notice, but of course it doesn’t matter because this business Facebook page has nothing to do with personal use of the social media site. Now, while it’s pretty much the same process, I’m going to give you some steps to follow.

It’s really only going to take just a few minutes to do this – just head over to here to start creating your own page. The first thing you have to do is to choose your business category once you click on the arrow to create a business Facebook page. You’re going to be asked to provide information related to your business, including a business description and site URL. You might not have a site URL yet, and while you aren’t required to have one for the Facebook page, you’re going to want one later for other reasons. Continue Reading…

Small businesses must recognize how important social media is to their ongoing success if they want to stay competitive. When social media was first introduced, it was more for personal use and younger consumers. Of course, anytime people start using a particular platform in large numbers, the advertisers are going to find them. Big companies started taking advantage of social media first, but in this day and age, small businesses are greatly missing out if they don’t follow suit.

If you don’t have a social media presence, your business is going to look boring to millennials. All joking aside, social media provides businesses with many advantages to help get people in the door. If you’re not using multiple social media platforms, then you’re allowing your competition to have the advantage. Why would you want to do that?

Simply signing up for social media by the way is something that any business can do. If you do that and fail to establish a strong presence and good communication with your targeted customers online, then you are better off not engaging with them on social media at all. In other words, don’t just make the move but get excited about it. Continue Reading…

Every local business should have their own website, but more so than that, they should also have their own webmaster. A decently talented web designer can bring the company website alive and make it a tool that can be far more than just a business card, it can bring in sales and new customers too.

Most small business websites that are in existence today fall far short of that goal. Of course it is very helpful if you can get ranked at the top of the search engines, but there are other aspects of getting your website to go to work for you.

Gone are the days where you could hire your neighbor’s teenage son and have him slap together a nice website. The entire process has become far more important than that, the online presence for your business deserves more tender loving care than the neighbor’s son can give inbetween playing Call Of Duty. It’s shocking but as much as 60% of small businesses have no website presence at all let alone a poor one. Continue Reading…