If you’re a small business owner, you probably can’t imagine running your business without a website. And if you want to be a successful business owner, you need to have a really great website. This means that before you do anything else, you need to determine your target audience, the website’s purpose, your budget, your design, your navigation, and your content. Just making all of this up as you go along will result in a mediocre website that doesn’t work effectively for you. Follow these 8 keys as you create a great website that becomes the difference between success and failure for your business.

Know Your Purpose. Before you do anything else, you must determine the purpose of your website. The purpose is the basis of everything else, including content, navigation, and design. Is the purpose of your website to educate? To generate leads? To entertain? To make sales? If you neglect to define your purpose at the very beginning, then the rest…

When it all comes down to it, SEO isn’t really that difficult. In fact, it ultimately all boils down to one thing: great content. If you intentionally write great content, paying attention to details and the words you use, you’re not going to have a problem doing SEO. But here are 8 mistakes you may be making, aside from publishing poor content, that will hurt your business.

Using Common Keywords. It’s unbelievably difficult to get high search engine rankings if you’re optimizing for the same keywords everyone else is optimizing for. If nothing else…

One of the great things about internet marketing is that allows you to measure your return on investment fairly simply…if you’re doing it right. The following three mistakes made by many internet marketers, however, make it very difficult to measure your return on investment. If you can correct them, then you can ensure that you’re using your marketing dollars wisely and making the most of your marketing efforts.

1. You’re Not Making the Sale. The whole purpose of a business website is to compel your visitors to purchase your product or service. This means that you have to sell what you’ve got. You can’t just assume that your visitors are going to poke around your site and be so overwhelmed by the magnificence of what you have to…