Are You Using The Full Potential of the Web?
You would think that any business person worth their salt would have embraced the power of the web by now but I still meet people who think using the internet and running a business have no correlation.
Recently I did some PR work for a firm of solicitors who didn’t even have a website. The partner in charge proudly told me he had never sent an email. Dealing with this firm was like stepping back in time to the 1950s. How any business can exist today without a website is totally beyond me.
If you are a business person reading this webpage I’m sure you don’t belong to that tiny minority who fail to recognise that the internet is an essential tool for modern business.
But I wonder how many of you are fully harnessing the power of the web to it’s full advantage?
Just yesterday I was chatting to an entreprenuer who was launching a website with just the co.uk domain. The corresponding .com was available but she hadn’t thought it worth picking up.
This is crazy. A modern British business needs both the co.uk and the .com if they are available. If you don’t buy both you could be letting yourself in for major hassle down the line.
Suppose a competitor bought it and used it to point accidental traffic to their site? You would effectively be giving your competitor free marketing.
Not only should you invest in both the .com and the co.uk versions of your website, you should also think about generic terms you could buy to drive traffic to your site.
For example http://www.greatpublicity.co.uk/ points at our website and we get a fair bit of traffic through it. You would be surprised how many people put terms like that into the address box rather than into a search engine.
So think about what terms you can use to bring new customers to your site and, if they are still available, snap them up. The internet is still very young and in another five or ten years it will be much more difficult to buy these domains. Right now, at about a tenner a year for a .com and much less for a co.uk these domains are cheap as chips and offer one of the most cost effective means of marketing. You’d be mad to pass them up.