Business: Determining the Best Web Site for Your Business

Determining the Best Web Site for Your Business

Written by Merrily Orsini

The First Step towards making your web site work as an important marketing tool.

Establish your web site’s purpose and function

The Internet is an ever changing, global marketplace and library. People research and purchase products or services, read to gain more knowledge and sometimes browse for pure entertainment. In figuring out repparttar best way to showcase your business on repparttar 137700 Internet, you must first answer repparttar 137701 following questions:

What do you want your web site to provide?

•Provide information only? A web site can make inquiries about your services easier, or attract inquiries from prospective employees. •Sell a product or service? Do you want to sell something that is unique or something that is cheaper than competitors? •Provide an “after hours” store front for your loyal customers?

How do you want your visitors to function while at your site?

•Do you want to survey potential customers to see what features and/or benefits most interest them and at what price? •Do you want to offer a private log-in area for your distributors or customers to purchase items, obtain product information or access technical support? •Do you want them to download a demo or coupon, subscribe to your newsletter, look up repparttar 137702 nearest store location, or actually order a product?

What you want your web site to provide as well as how you want repparttar 137703 visitor to function while browsing your site are key questions to answer when designing a site as well as repparttar 137704 key to making repparttar 137705 web site fit into your overall marketing/sales strategy.

Understand your customers' online user behavior

Forrester Research studies predict that U.S. e-commerce will grow at a 19% compound annual growth rate over repparttar 137706 next five years. Most significantly, online retail will reach nearly $230 billion and account for 10% of total U.S. retail sales by 2008. These figures represent a lot of revenue being gained from successful online exposure. In repparttar 137707 realm of web site marketing, a company has to keep up with their customers' online know-how to compete. And, these numbers do not reflect repparttar 137708 growing tendency for Internet users to use repparttar 137709 web for product or service research prior to purchase.

In today's high tech world of e-commerce, nearly every business plan includes some form of web site marketing tactics. But most companies do not have repparttar 137710 in-house expertise, time or resources to build web sites that make repparttar 137711 most of their online presence with a design professional who understands their unique product or service and how it can best be showcased on repparttar 137712 web. At repparttar 137713 same time, repparttar 137714 companies' online users are wasting less time on web sites that fail to meet their online expectations. How does your business stack up? Do you have a web site? Was it designed by a technician or a marketing/design professional who understands sales, your product and/or service and marketing strategy specifically related to your business?

Optimizing your cash flow with proper accounts receivable management

Written by Marc Eskew

Businesses miss on growth opportunities and even close their doors every day, not because they aren’t profitable enough, but because they are strangled by poor cash flow. The problem is that while their profit and loss statement shows success, their bank account cries poor. Excessive money tied up in delinquent receivables, bad checks, and bad debt write-offs, rob businesses of valuable cash flow, handcuffing their ability to grow or even stay in business at all.

It doesn’t take long for a business to get caught up in a spiraling trend of increasingly late receivables, only needing a few additional delinquent accounts to start repparttar process. Most companies lack repparttar 137699 expertise and manpower needed to handle a spike in delinquent accounts. Soon, their staff is doing more work chasing late receivables, and they end up neglecting repparttar 137700 easier to collect, more current accounts. Eventually, a higher and higher percentage of accounts become delinquent and more and more accounts become uncollectible, forcing companies to employ expensive collection agencies to recover at least some of their money at a big loss or they write off repparttar 137701 debt completely. The end result is a loss in profitability and a serious strain on cash flow.

There are some more obvious, common sense practices that companies can employee to maintain a healthy accounts receivable portfolio. A few examples include:

1. Perform a credit history check before extending credit. 2. Set and adhere to credit limits. 3. Establish your credit terms in writing on statements and invoices 4. Require all sales and money management staff to know and follow credit policies.

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