How important is a website for my business?

Opening up your online business can be a daunting task. Certain bigger websites that instantly pop to mind, ebay or amazon for example, fail to provide any real vision of your brand or any real information about your business outside of an individual product. The natural conclusion is often to default to social media in an attempt to fill in these gaps of knowledge. Here too, however, potential customers might miss the opportunity for whatever reason to follow the bread crumbs, falling short of the goal you desired for your product and your business. Some are skeptical of having an online presence at all, but having an online business with you’re a personal website is absolutely crucial for the longevity of any venture.

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Here are a few reasons why:

  1. Almost everybody is using the internet and there’s nowhere to go but up

According to the latest stats in a Pew Research Center survey, 87% of American adults are online with those aged 18-29 coming in at 97% and those aged 65+ at 57%. With the only two certainties in life being death and taxes, you can be sure that the proliferation of the internet will only look more like the former group than the latter.

  1. Your website is made in your image

Displaying other websites to display your product might be sufficient, but it’s not optimal. If you want to promote your business in any way that doesn’t fit in to the big domain sites’ format, part of your image is lost. If there’s one thing we can learn from Apple, taking a firm stance on how you promote yourself visually can lead to staggering results.

  1. Social media sites are subject to trends

While you might feel content with a simple facebook, twitter, instagram, or any other social media site that’s in right now, they might not be around in the near future. This puts an unnecessary risk in a sunk cost through these sites. Hedging any wherever possible should be the concern of any business and through consolidation into a single cogent website avoids the trend wave entirely.

  1. Your site, your rules

City ordinances, tax codes, labor laws, state mandates, and the list goes on with all the rules any business needs to abide by in the modern world. Using another website comes with another lengthy legal document in the form of terms of service. With a personal website the rules are clear to you since, of course, you make them! Additionally, there’s no sure fire way to meaningfully affect your SEO while being based anywhere that isn’t your own site.

 

Having a personal website is necessary for any budding or long-established business. The age of the internet is here, and the numbers can’t be ignored. Building your online presence is sure to give you the potential to hit markets unimaginable. Without one, the only sure thing is that we’ll all have a much harder time trying to give you money.

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