A Chamber of Commerce is a group of business owners that come together in a community to promote business, promote their community through things like tourism, and who take an active interest in the world beyond the front door of their businesses. Even the smallest Chambers can have a big impact on their communities. Any impact that is made can be multiplied with the presence of strong website.

If a Chamber of Commerce can leverage the passion and knowledge represented within its group and make it accessible to the world through a website, that is a pretty good thing, right? Doing so could result in an online hub for your community, one that promotes, informs, and connects.

Here are some ideas about how your Chamber of Commerce could use a website. I will add more detail in later posts, so be sure to check back.

Promote

Most Chamber of Commerce websites offer lists of members, perhaps with a name and phone number. In an age where Google offers business profiles tied to their map feature, this is just not enough. A big part of what your Chamber site could and should be doing is promoting your members. A great way to do this is with extended profiles. Consider setting a whole page aside for each member. Fill that profile with custom content provided by the business, intended to point the way to their website or to directly drive sales.

On the web, businesses need to seek as many pathways as possible to their business. So, even if the business already has a nice website, a good profile on the local Chamber website will draw in more visits and customers, especially of the local variety.

Depending on the structure of your Chamber, you might consider selling these profiles as a fundraiser, thus creating an additional revenue stream for your organization. For $100, businesses could get a nice profile page on the local Chamber site, which will lead to more traffic. At the same time, their donation will help your group do even more to promote your local community and businesses.

Inform

The web has an amazing power to inform. You can keep up to date on, well, just about anything. Use your Chamber of Commerce website to share stories and news that are important to your organization. This could be anything from local legislation to business press releases. If your community doesn’t have great news coverage, you may even want to provide local news.

Keeping residents informed about matters that interest them, and which are important to your Chamber goals, can help pave the way to great relations and help you meet important goals. For instance, it is easier to get people to attend a local board meeting to voice opposition for a new regulation that will harm local business if you already have an outlet for staying in touch with them.

Any good Chamber website should have a blog that can act as your organization’s newsletter. Share great stories about your community and interview local business owners. Talk up local events as well. Remember, not only will residents read your blog, so will tourists and potential new businesses.

Connect

If you think of a website as little more than an online brochure, you need to update your thinking. Today, the web is all about connection. Your Chamber of Commerce website should encourage connection and help make it happen. There are so many ways to do this, some of them right on your website, others using the website as a home base in conjunction with other tools such as Facebook.

One of the simplest things you can do on your Chamber website is to host a community calendar. This can include events and dates for every group in your community. It is surprisingly easy to do this, with each group adding their own information so that it doesn’t become a management nightmare.

One big goal of any Chamber is to make sure the community it serves is a vital place. Businesses need customers, communities needs businesses, residents, and visitors. The Chamber can take a lead role in promoting the community, indeed it often does. Many Chambers also serve a tourism resource centers. All of this can translate very easily online, helping to connect all of the dots in the community and presenting a unified picture of your town or city to the outside world.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Chamber’s need to embrace current technologies in their continued effort to promote business and community.

But how do you get links?

Stone Reuning attempts to answer that question in an article on Search Engine Guide.

All types of links can impact your search engine optimization results, helping determine where your web site shows up online. Though the hardest to control, inbound links pointing to your site can make the biggest impact.

Read the full article – A Brief Intro to Link Building for Small Business Owners

Reuning goes on to explain linking strategy, what to avoid, and how to build great organic links. He says it comes down to four main areas of effort: directories, press releases, blogs, and link bait.

I encourage you to read his thoughts on this subject, as his article can get you started building out links for your small business website.

I want to add my two cents about building links. First of all, you should think of it as a long term process. Devote a little time to it regularly, and have a plan that you stick to.

Directories and Profiles

When it comes to directories, make sure your website is listed on very important ones like Google Places, as well as any local search directories on the other major search engines. You should also think of social networks as a good place to post a link back to your business. Even if you aren’t super active on some of these networks, you should build out a bit of profile. The link back will help your search rankings, after all.

Press Releases

Press releases are a severely underutilized resource for small businesses. The fact is, a good press release is not that hard to write. Even better, pay someone to write them regularly for you (they will usually have better contacts for getting your release picked up by news agencies). Many press releases are just reprinted on multiple websites. This means your link is getting out there and pointing back to your website. On top of that, you may get a blogger or reporter interested in doing a story on your business.

This article is not about press releases, so I won’t go into great detail here about how to write one (you can listen to an interview on the topic of press releases at All Business Answers). I do want to say that you can create a press release strategy that has you putting out new releases regularly. Your news doesn’t have to be earth shattering. In fact, you may not have news at all, but maybe you can provide a unique perspective on current events. Put it in a press release and get it out there.

Another resource you should consider using is Help a Reporter Out. You can subscribe to regular emails that include calls for information from reporters. If you can fill the reporter’s need, you can get a mention in a news story and often a link back to your small business website.

I have also noticed that many small businesses are hiring PR firms to help out in this area. It is an investment that can really pay off.

Guest Post

The next resource to consider is blogs. You may have some luck getting bloggers to link back to your site if you write really great content yourself on your blog. A better, more controllable, method is to start guest posting. Find the blogs that speak to your market and send them some great articles. Blogs that accept guest posts are always looking for new content. One site I have found to be really help in this department is My Blog Guest.

Link Bait

The last area Reuning mentions is writing link bait articles. These are articles that have a better chance to go viral. They are often list posts, or an article with a unique twist, or funny in some way. This is not for everyone, but you can have fun with link bait articles. If you have an article that you think people will like to share, be sure to promote it on social networks, like LinkedIn, and article sharing sites such as Digg and BizSugar.

You can build links back to your website. Doing so will help you build an audience and get ranked higher in search engines, so it is a worthy effort.

Do you have any questions on this?

If you ever dine at a fancy restaurant (I know because I have seen them on TV) you will notice that they take the presentation of their food as seriously as the quality of the food itself. I have been working on a client’s website and I got to thinking about this issue when it comes to a small business website.

You need quality content on your site, that much is a given. But it is also important to present that content in a way that makes sense and which converts visitors into customers. Here are a few thoughts on presentation.

Don’t Overwhelm with Content

The big mistake a lot of small businesses make is that they try to cram too much content on one page. This is not necessary, and in fact it can be counter-productive. Instead, try to focus on just one topic per page. You will complement that content with links to other information, but the main body of content should focus on just one thing.

Even the main page should be simplified as much as possible. You can think of the main page as the welcome center for your website. Use graphics and linked lists. Also, a welcome video or screen capture video tour of your site can work really well.

Keep your navigation menu simple as well. Don’t include every single page on your site in your navigation menu.

Present Like Things Together

One of the best ways to organize a lot of information on your website is to present like things together. This means that if you have a page that explains the energy efficiency of your windows, for instance, that you would include a link to the page that explains Energy Star ratings and the page which includes information on the Federal Energy Tax Credit.

This is a better way of organizing your information than including everything in a long list format. You anticipate the needs of your site visitor and present them with other information that you think will be helpful to them on any give page.

Think About Flow

By thinking through the path you would like site visitors to take, you can arrange your presentation in a useful manner. In general, you will want visitors to work their way from general pages to more specific pages. For instance, if someone comes to your website trying to figure out a Quickbooks problem, you will of course present them with the information they are looking for. But on that page you will also include other information that could be helpful and which might lead them to become a customer.

Of course, you cannot anticipate the needs of each visitor. You should think in terms of your ideal customers. What information do you think they will need? How can you educate them and move them to a sales process? And, perhaps most important, how can you keep the information that the visitor doesn’t care about out of the way?

Go for Simple, Clean, and Crisp

This goes back to not loading up too much information. The fact is, visitors come to your website with very specific needs. First, meet their need. Do it well and you may be able to attract their attention and get them to dig further.

Don’t fill up each of your web site’s pages with graphics and special offers and a ton of links. Instead, present one bit of information as the central piece. Include a related call to action off to the side as well as some links to related information. Do this, and you will have served the visitor well and you will have a greater chance of making them a new customer.

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photo credit: omar_chatriwala

Gee Ranasinha talks about building a content strategy in a recent post at his blog, Business Value Matters. Here is part of what he says:

In order to maintain their relevance and develop a valuable online experience for their customers, any organization developing an online marketing presence (or arguably any marketing presence) needs to have what is called a content strategy. Key to developing your brand’s online reputation lies in the ability for your company to produce relevant and valuable content. Without interesting content, why should your target audience keep coming back for more?

Read the full article – Strategizing Content

It is no longer enough to put a few pages on a website and hope that it will sell itself. Every business, especially small businesses, should add a content strategy into their marketing plan. The reason is simple. Good content attracts people in to your website. It is akin to maintaining a constant awareness amongst your market segment. Keep people interested for the long term, and when it is time for them to buy, they will automatically turn to you.

What should your content strategy look like? In simple terms, you need a schedule of when to post new content on your website. The more regularly you can do it, the better. At the same time, you need to develop a plan for what type of content you will post. This will depend on your customer base, but it could include news, case studies, advice articles, how to videos, or any number of things. What you need to focus in on is what the customer wants and needs. Put that on your website and you will start to develop loyalty with your customers.

The better you can connect what you are saying on your website with what customers want to hear, the better. So get out there and find out what needs and desires your customers have. Find out their passions. Study their search behavior. And make every effort to turn your website into a valuable resource for them.

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photo credit: derekGavey

Debbie Weil talks about the importance of a call to action for a blog, but the same insights hold true for a small business website.

Think about it. Your blog reader, if a first-time visitor, has most likely typed in a keyword phrase and ended up on your blog through search results. He or she may not even know that it’s a blog. So you’ve got her attention, at least for a few seconds. This is your real-time moment to prompt your visitor to take the next step.

Read the full article – What’s the Call to Action on Y0ur Blog?

One thing that Debbie points out in the article is that much of your traffic from search engines is first-time, and likely one-time, traffic. This means you have to hook them quickly in some way.

You should base your call to action on something that will be of interest to ideal customers, something that is easy, and usually something that is free. Make it easy for strangers to walk into your business, so to speak.

Are you currently asking site visitors to do anything? Are you giving them an easy way to start down the path to becoming your customers? If not, start experimenting with a call to action on your website. Finding the right one will turn random visitors into loyal customers.

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If you would like help figuring out a call to action for your website, contact us. Be sure to include the link to your website, and we will send you a few suggestions, free of charge. Use Call to Action Ideas as the subject.

Here’s what I know. If I search for a company and can’t find them online, I make certain assumptions. Either they’re a small-time operation, they’re brand new, or they don’t want to be found. Now, the last possibility — not wanting to be found — is the only acceptable reason to not have any Web presence.

Read the full article – Where is Your Website?

The question about whether or not a business should have a website is a moot point to a lot of us, but not so much to the many small business owners who have decided not to go that route. I can think of a lot of reasons a small business decides not to put up a website. Among them are the (perceived) costs, the time needed for maintenance, and the fact that they seem to be getting by just fine without a website.

But, of course, these are often just excuses. I find that when a business says it relies solely on word-of-mouth marketing it is because they don’t know how to do it any better. A website is a marketing tool, make no mistake. Done right, it can even be a marketing engine.

Not that I don’t have sympathy for small business owners that don’t see the point of a website, or can’t justify the costs. Many business websites are useless, even when they are professionally designed. That is why I focus so much on usefulness here. For a small business, a website can be a great tool, but it does take knowledge and dedication.

I would love to see every small business get a website. It would be good for my business, for starters. A good website shows that you mean business. Communicate your benefits on a website and give a call to action, and you will have prospects moving through a sales pipeline in no time.

Businesses that have held off getting online are running out of excuses. Even word of mouth marketing is moving online, with people giving their recommendations on Facebook and Twitter, along with a whole bunch of business review and ratings sites.

If you still don’t have a website, now is the time to consider getting one. Trust me, it will help your business.

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Ready to get your first website? Read this or fill out the form below.

This is a regular feature of the Broad River Creative Blog. I randomly pick a type of business and a city, and then look for a website that could use some improvement. I don’t usually have to look very far, as too many small business websites fall short. My goal is to make small business websites more useful.

For this random website search, I decided to look for an accountant website. I landed on this for my search term: “accountant, eagle river wi”. This brought up local search results, including one for Reach & Schwaiger, Ltd., Certified Public Accountants.

Here is what the home page looks like:

I thought the last website I reviewed, Wilson Plumbing and Heating, was sparse. This website takes the cake.

I wonder what this CPA’s sales material looks like. I am imagining they just print out the same basic information on plain white paper. I will give credit, there is absolutely nothing confusing about this website.

Lets dig in to the content a little. The big problem I see with the copy on this website is that it is boilerplate. I could take the same content, change a few names and places, and apply it to any accountant anywhere in the country. A website should be used to differentiate your company from the competition.

Secondly, we are provided with a list of services, which is great. But there is no detail on any of the services. I would like to see a page of content for each service describing it and explaining why Reach & Schwaiger is the place to go to get that service met. This will also help bring in some additional search traffic to the site.

They do provide their phone number, which is a good move. But in addition to a phone number, a small business website should have a contact form to fill out. What if someone is browsing at work and can’t call right away? Maybe they will come back later, or maybe they will find a site where they can easily email for more information or to set up an appointment.

This gets me to the call to action. As best as I can see, here is the call to action for this website:

You can find this on the bottom of the page. I suppose it is good to know that this company will accept new business, but isn’t that kind of expected? I suggest a better call to action. I think an appointment box would make a lot of sense for a business like this. Add in something like “first consultation is free” and you are well on your way to a great call to action. Make it a web form that can easily be filled out with name and email, and perhaps phone number. The box should be a different color than the rest of the site and should be near the top, maybe in a sidebar. If the goal is to get new clients, make it obvious and easy.

If I were an accountant, I would blog about things like tax issues, business compliance, and whatever other topics I focused on for my business. I would also host free seminars, both online and locally, on hot topics. There is so much a business like this can do in terms of educational selling to get new clients.

Lets look at the design for a moment. Currently, there is no design. For a few bucks, you could grab a nice accountant related photo on iStockPhoto and incorporate it into the header. For a business like this, which relies on trust and relationship, I would opt for professional pictures of the principal accountants in the header.

After adding a header picture, I would give the website some visual interest with a background color and some formatting of the text and layout. I would add a sidebar for the call to action and other information. The goal is both to look professional and to get visitors to take action.

I might also add separate columns for personal services and small business services. That way site visitors can find what they are looking for more easily.

Reach & Schwaiger currently have an advantage in that there are not a lot of other accountants in Eagle River, and those that are there do not seem to have a website. But since this website does little more than list services, which are probably standard throughout the industry, and a phone number, it isn’t helping them rise above the competition. Prospects can easily find the numbers of the competitors. What I would like to see is a website that draws visitors in and shows them why they should choose this company, and then makes it easy for them to schedule an appointment.

What suggestions would you make for this website?

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A note from Bradford Shimp

In a way, I hate doing these site reviews. I don’t want to personally offend anyone, and I am sure the people that built the site and those that run the business are great people. In fact, it is that assumption that makes me want to help them. But I am on a mission to fix useless websites. My goal is to help as many small businesses as possible develop a revenue-generating website.

If your website is as useful as a tree in the middle of the road, get in touch with me. Broad River Creative can help make your small business website useful. And if you happen to own the business site being reviewed above, I would be glad to offer you a sizable discount for being a good sport and seeing that a new website could really help you.

Call Broad River Creative at 1-866-923-5608 or fill out the form below:

Ask the next ten customers you talk to whether they know you have a website. If they say no, take a look around – is your website’s URL listed on your receipts, your invoices, your business card, your stationery, your posters? Is it listed on your coupons, newspaper ads, your yellow pages listing? If you’re wondering why you should bother telling current customers about your website, consider that these are your best sources for referrals. These days, when someone you know refers you to a business, if you’re like most people, the first thing you do is take a look at the website. If your current customers don’t know you have a website, they can’t offer that information to other prospects.

Read the full article – How to Lose Your Superpower

In my opinion, having a website that no one knows about is worse than having no website at all. Since you probably spent at least some money on your website, you want it to be useful. Whether or not your site is currently attracting search traffic, it should be attracting visits from your current customers.

Since customers are your best source for new business, make sure they know about your website. Then, make your site useful for them and for any friends they refer to it. If they find value there, they are sure to suggest it to others. If, on the other hand, they love your business but either don’t know about your website, or don’t feel your website does your business justice, they won’t be sending people to check it out.

Do a little work to make your website standout, both in terms of customers knowing about it and in terms of customers finding value on it when they stop by.

Before you decide to try out a tactic like this, read what Marko Saric, of How to Make a Blog, has to say.

If you a want to be successful at blogging, you need to create unique content. Every successful blog has unique content. If your blog isn’t unique, you won’t have a personal voice, you won’t gain any trust from eventual readers.

Read the entire article – 6 Reasons Why You Should Avoid Automated Blogging Tools

In an interesting article on Men With Pens, James makes an argument for having a website even if you have clients rolling in.

But he didn’t have the right motivation to make the decision to get online. He needed to know more about why he should spend money on a website he didn’t really need. He was doing just fine offline… was this online thing worth the money?

Oh yeah. Even if he never made one sale through his website, he still needed to have one up there.

James goes on to make the argument that a business should have a website because it is just expected, if you want customers to think that you are professional. I agree, in part. I think every small business should have a website, but I don’t believe in putting one up just for eye candy. The fact is, a good website brings in more business, educates prospects, and helps businesses and business owners greatly expand their reach.

James doesn’t disagree with these points. He just points out that even if you never get a sale from a site, you should have one anyway, because while you may not get sales from having you, you could very well lose sales if you don’t.

Read the full article – Why You Need to Have More Than Your Clients