4. Creates a Professional Look Not only is your website easy to remember when you have a unique domain name, but your visitors will take you seriously. They know you are serious about your online business, and are quicker to trust… and buy. You've shown them you care about your business and your customers as well by creating a friendly site.

5. Ability to Edit Pages for SEO purposes Many free hosting sites are frowned on by major search engines, and rep sites of course are definitely frowned on. Most company rep sites cannot be edited, which means you cannot add link exchange pages to increase your rankings, nor can you edit titles for SEO purposes. Many potential customers are being lost from search engines with these types of sites.

There are of course other reasons why you need your own website - such as for many directories that do not accept links from anything but top-level domains (like www.yourdomain.com). Domain names are very reasonable, costing around $8 per year while hosting costs as low as $6/month. Domain and hosting companies are everywhere, it just depends on what your needs are. For small websites I recommend Mommy's Helper ( http://www.mommyshelper.com/web-hosting.html )

This is cost you can't afford to cut out of your business budget.

2) Speak to Your Sales Team Sadly, not every business can afford to invest in market research. If your budget doesn’t stretch far enough, try talking to your sales people. They’re out in field every day, talking to customers. And because their livelihood depends on their success in engaging customers, chances are they’ll be able to tell you what your customers want to know. (A word of warning, though… Be careful not to make lofty promises. Unlike your sales team, written collateral doesn’t generate a rapport with your customers. Customers won’t make as many allowances, so you can only stretch truth so far in writing before your credibility suffers. What’s more, if you do push boundaries, you’re more likely to be held to your word!)

3) Make it Easy for Your Customer to Get Buy-In If you don’t have budget for in-depth customer research, and you don’t have a sales team, a good tip is to imagine how your customer gets buy-in from their boss. Quite often, decision maker is someone higher up food chain than your direct audience. Your audience will probably be key stakeholder – they’ll be user of your product, or recipient of your service. But when they find an offering they like, there’s a good chance they’ll have to sell it to someone further up line. If you can make this sale easier, you’ll have a foot in door. Don’t just appeal to sensibilities of direct audience. You also need to ask yourself what they need to know to convince decision maker. If decision maker is a CFO, think Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If decision maker is a CIO or MIS, think performance, technological sustainability, availability, manageability, and ease of integration. If decision maker is a CEO, think liability, risk management, and ROI. And only use jargon to prove you know your stuff. Remember… jargon will probably have ultimate decision maker scratching their head, not reaching for their cheque book.

There are many many more ways to identify benefits. This is just a very superficial snapshot of some techniques you might like to try. At very least they’ll get you thinking benefits.

In end, message is simple. Forget all fancy talk about complicated revolutionary marketing principles. Forget new-age hard-sell advertising quick-fixes. Forget looking to so-called “experts” for solutions. Just think benefits. And if you can accurately do that, rest is just mechanics. Once you know what you want to write about, you just need to put pen to paper. And that’s a whole ‘nother story!

Happy writing!

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.