10 Reasons why companies should start doing business online

Written by Nowshade Kabir


Withrepparttar rapid down fall of world economy and dot-com companies in recent years many brick-and-mortar companies and new start-ups ask themselves: To Be Online or Not to Be Online?

Not long time ago, I read a comment of a well-known industry observer, where he stated that companies that are not selling through Internet by 2007 will probably become extinct. As dramatic as it might feel, although exaggerated, but there are some truths in it.

Consider this: Although diminishing due to bad economy, average growth of e-commerce is around 25 % per year. 81% of small businesses that have an online presence during last year’s holiday season reached new customers, leading to an increase in sales and profitability according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive. Thirty percent of small businesses with a web presence and fewer than 20 employees now generate more than 25% of their revenue online claims Gartner research.

If this does not convince you to take your business online, below I pointed out 10 more reasons why you should start doing business online right now.

1. New economy Internet has created a new economy, which by its explosive growth and sheer size already changed our perception of traditional way of doing business. Companies like Amazon and Ebay have successfully created domination on areas, where just few years ago traditional brick-and-mortar companies were kings. However, in order to be successful onrepparttar 108911 net, you don’t have to be a giant like them. Many small and mid-size companies managed to build online businesses quite profitably. In fact, studies show small and mid-size companies will berepparttar 108912 main growth force of e-commerce in coming years.

2. Internet is a perfect venue for business In order to make a sale you need visitors to come to your shop. Onrepparttar 108913 Internet, your shop could be only a click away from your prospective customers. With proper marketing your Internet storefront can have more buyers than you ever can get in a brick and mortar shop. 3. Company’s image Whether you sell products or services online or not, in today’s world you have to have a corporate presence onrepparttar 108914 Internet. Otherwise, as you must have noticed that people simply don’t take your business seriously if you tell them that your company does not have a website. A nice corporate site definitely increasesrepparttar 108915 image of a company especially if it has great product or service related content to go with.

4. Provide better customer support

Customer accusation and retention is one ofrepparttar 108916 key factors of business value chain. Thanks to Internet technology, business can provide customer support more effectively. This means better customer satisfaction and increase of profitability.

5. Make information more easily available to customers. Just a couple of years ago, companies used to require days to deliver products or services update information to their customers. Things have changed since then. Today you can add or make any changes to your company and product related content virtually in a matter of couple of hours, publish on your site and share withrepparttar 108917 whole world. 6. Cut costs New technologies allow you to take virtually any part of your business online, that include supply chain management, billing, shipping, procurement etc. Streamlining these business processes through online systems will allow companies to cut costs significantly in almost every sphere of any business. For example: companies can reduce more than five percents of their maintenance, repair and operation costs by adopting e-business solutions. This five percent savings can turn into 50% of a company’s net profit!

Promote Your Website - Search Tools

Written by Nowshade Kabir


Promote Your Website - Search Tools

Many companies after spending a substantial amount of money onrepparttar development of their websites assume that oncerepparttar 108910 website is published onrepparttar 108911 Internet, people will flock onto it and, therefore, do not take website promotion as seriously asrepparttar 108912 development part of it. Today, with millions of websites around, no matter how great your website is, if you don’t promote it effectively, you will not getrepparttar 108913 visibility that your site deserves.

Effective promotion of a website starts with submission ofrepparttar 108914 site to various search tools available onrepparttar 108915 Internet. There are two different types of search tools – search engines and directories. Search engines index their listings based onrepparttar 108916 information retrieved by their spiders that crawl throughrepparttar 108917 Internet following links constantly looking for new websites. The directory listings are compiled by human editors fromrepparttar 108918 URLs submitted torepparttar 108919 directory. If your website is listed inrepparttar 108920 directories you can be sure thatrepparttar 108921 spiders of different search engines sooner or later will index your site. That’s why you should start submitting your website first from search directories.

Search Directories

Among allrepparttar 108922 search directories available onrepparttar 108923 Internet, Yahoo! and DMOZ arerepparttar 108924 most important ones.

Open Directory Project or DMOZ

DMOZ isrepparttar 108925 second largest human compiled search directory onrepparttar 108926 Internet after Yahoo! Open Directory Project is a huge web directory of Internet resources. All submission torepparttar 108927 directory is evaluated by volunteer editors. There is no fee to be paid to get an inclusion inrepparttar 108928 directory. As a human edited directory it might take more than a month to get your site evaluated. Once you are listed inrepparttar 108929 DMOZ, within two weeks to two months your website will start appearing on search engines like AOL Search, Teoma, HotBot, Google, Lycos, AllTheWeb, Excite, Go2Net and a number of regional search engines. At present around 354 different search engines and portals use data from Open Directory Project. This is one ofrepparttar 108930 main reasons why you must consider submitting your website to DMOZ.

Submitting your site to directories is a bit trickier then submitting to search engines.

Following rules are common for almost all directories:

* Check to see if your website is already inrepparttar 108931 directory * Write an objective description of your website * Search outrepparttar 108932 specific subcategory fromrepparttar 108933 directory hierarchy * Followrepparttar 108934 rules of submission as specified

Make sure you follow these rules while adding your website in DMOZ. This will improve your chance to get your website accepted and reducerepparttar 108935 processing time. Yahoo!

Yahoo! is by farrepparttar 108936 number one destination for Internet surfers. Althoughrepparttar 108937 search results for Yahoo! is provided by Google, many people still prefer to browse through Yahoo! directory to find whatever they are looking for. This makes an inclusion to Yahoo! directory quite valuable for ecommerce sites. Yahoo! presently charges yearly fee of US $299 for each web site submitted. The fee is nonrefundable, which means if for some reasons Yahoo! declines to add your website in its directory you will not get your money back! The only thing Yahoo! guarantees is thatrepparttar 108938 editors will look at your submission within seven days and send you an answer.

Should you consider submitting your site to Yahoo!? It all depends onrepparttar 108939 kind of business you are in. Some sites receive an overwhelming number of traffic from Yahoo!, others hardly receive anybody. My suggestion: list your website in Yahoo! directory for a year and seerepparttar 108940 outcome. If you feel comfortable withrepparttar 108941 result you are receiving – continue. Ifrepparttar 108942 result is not satisfactory you can always cancel their service after one year. LookSmart

Although it isrepparttar 108943 third largest directory onrepparttar 108944 Internet as a search portal LookSmart is not that popular. However, it provides directory listings to MSN search, About.com, Infospace, Inktomi and others. It is probably stillrepparttar 108945 best way to get high ranking in MSN search. LookSmart is a fee based service. You pay US $49 submission fee forrepparttar 108946 site review by their editors and 15 Cents for each click through. Pay per click minimum monthly payment is US $15.

For noncommercial sites LookSmart has a partner directory named “Zeal”. Zeal is a community directory for Internet surfers. To submit a site to Zeal you first have to become a member by passing a quiz test. The reason I am mentioning Zeal here is – you can actually submit noncommercial portion of your site to Zeal and receive an appearance in all ofrepparttar 108947 places that LookSmart listings show up, without paying a pay-per-click fee.

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