SpreeMedia.com: How To Achieve Success With Your Website
... by J. Dalton

In the last ten years, SpreeMedia Technologies (www.spreemedia.com) has created and hosted, numerous websites for both individuals and companies, offering all types of products and services. We have noticed that many individuals and big business owners make ONE BIG MISTAKE when it comes to doing business on the Internet... they did not WORK their sites.

These individuals and companies all offered excellent products or services, but they all thought that they could "Build A Website And The Customers Would Come Flocking".

How To Work Your Website
Working your website means getting involved on a daily (or frequent) basis with your online venture. From our experience, your website will not succeed unless you are personally involved. Working your website also means making constant changes to improve the layour and the way your information is presented to the world. You can't build a website, walk away and expect it to sell your products or services.. all by it's lonesome self. Too many people do that.

If you were the owner of a department store, would you expect your store to SELL your merchandise for you? Or, would you begin by hiring the right staff, setting up eye-catching displays, ensuring that you have the correct lighting in all areas to showcase your products, making sure your phone is answered and making sure that your customers were all taken care of?

Any business owner, who is going to use a website as his or her "STORE", has to be personally involved, day after day, month after month, year after year. It's that simple. There's no way around it.

What Do It Mean To Be Personally Involved?
Being involved means checking your "visitor statistics" daily or monthly, reading and responding to your e-mail inquiries and correspondences, checking out the websites of your competitors to look at their pricing, promotions and their sales strategies or ideas... and keeping up on new technology.

The Facts About Search Engines
If you don't continually update the content on your site, you are not making good use of your Internet venture. Remember this: Search engines seek content that is textual in nature. Photos, videos and music are not textual and do NOT count with search engines.

Now, if your site is lacking in text (words that relate to what you are selling or offering), then the search engines will bypass your site and take nothing more than the title of your home page, without giving your potential visitors or customers any idea or clue as to whose home page it is or why anyone would want to visit your site.

You can hire others to help you provide content for your site, however, the burden rests on YOU the site owner to make sure that the CONTENT is appropriate and relates to the products or services you are offering.

What Is The Purpose Of Content For Your Website?
Content serves two purposes. One is to provide search engines with something to index or list that will help bring people to your website. The second purpose is to help you develop more business from the people who visit your site.

Learn this fact: Your content can be used to create an ONLINE COMMUNITY and creating a community can help generate increased sales and more business. A good content or community builder is a DISCUSSION FORUM, that allow visitors to ask questions and respond to questions asked by others... all without your help or input.

A Discussion Forum can be started by any website owner with a little bit of effort, but can provide an amazing return if done properly. Each message in your online forum can be indexed by many search engines, which means more visitors to your site.

Do You Want To SELL On The Internet?
Begin by shopping online yourself. If you don't you will never understand the shopping behavior of people who come to YOUR website. Top New York, Madison Avenue advertising agency account executives purchase the products of their client's competitors, so they can study the products for ideas, strengths and weaknesses.

Are you afraid of getting scammed online? Well, so do the people who come to YOUR WEBSITE! What signs of good business practices do you find on the websites of other companies?
What good business practices do you employ on your own website?
Do you have a SAFE, SECURE and EASY TO USE shopping cart on your site?

How much overhead can you afford to keep your website up and running effeciently? If you are spending more than say $45 or $55 a month to host your web pages and applications, you may be spending too much... especially if your site does not consist of hundreds or thousands of web pages with a lot of applications using numerous databases.

By applications, I am referring to Mailing List Managers, Photo Galleries, Forums, Auto Responders, Newsletter Managers, Blogs, Credit Card Merchant Accounts, and more. You should also beware of so-called "E-commerce Solutions" that offer credit card merchant account for a new business with a monthly minimum fee of $50 or more on a multiple year contract. There are other simple 3rd party online payment processors that offer a minimal or NO setup or monthly fee.

You can gain more information and free resources available from the Small Business Administration.

Please feel free to Contact Us, if we can help you in any way.
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