Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Last post we discussed why Small Business Internet Marketing was created – the need to help small business get a presence on the internet. We quickly realised a lot of our small business clients could not afford to have a website built for them. We say couldn’t afford for 2 reasons – one was cost, but the second more importantly was the lack of any marketing strategy behind the website or blog.

The most depressing comment we see again and again from small business owners on website builder’s testimonials is “Our customers love how it looks”. Well that is great – but isn’t its main purpose to find new customers for the business. The existing customers know how to find you, and what you do – all you are communicating to existing customers is existing and new products (plus brand awareness).

As we searched around for answers for clients, we became attracted to the flexibility, low cost and authority created by a blog. Whilst many website designers love to tell clients about content management systems and how a client can maintain the website once built, we wanted to go one step further. We wanted to give our client the tools to build and maintain their own blog so they had control and could set-up a new blog if desired whenever they want.

We have found that the internet tends to be populated by two types of people – those who know everything and can tell you how to change the HTML coding behind a website to make it do wonderful things, and then those who have a computer and use Google to search the internet and that is about all. We found that the majority of our small business clients fell into this second bucket.

So to all you super internet savvy people out there, our blog will appear to be very basic. And do you know why? Because it is! We want to help small business owners to use the internet to help their business – to become seen electronically and convert this into new customers. We want to hold their hand for the tricky bits but we want to coach small business owners so they can do it themselves. That is why we called it Small Business Internet Marketing.

Next post – Learning from Internet Marketeers

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary