It’s 2013 and the days are long gone where your business could get away without having a website. Newspaper listings and traditional directories doesn’t work anymore. Having a website just for the sake of having one will also not work. Having a website that doesn’t generate any leads or sales is useless. A website that works as a lead generating machine is an income generator for your business.

Where do you start to make your business website work for you? What I do when I help clients is first explain to them what it consists of and what they should look out for. Once they know all the barriers associated with having a website, it’s time to start planning how to put a website to good use.

Website planning tips

I don’t have any experience: How are you going to know what works and doesn’t work with a website? What is the best solution to make your website work for you? To get the best results from marketing your website on the web, hire an internet marketing professional that can guide and help you with this process.

What action will my website visitors take? With a website and any other internet marketing strategy, it’s very important to have a clear purpose and action sequence you want your website visitors to take. Your website should have a clear purpose and include call to actions that can guide your visitors on the next steps they must complete.

Where will my visitors come from? There are millions of websites and channels on the web. Are you going to optimize your website to get traffic only from Google? Are you going to use social media to drive traffic to your website? It’s important that you decide where you want your traffic to originate from before you start building your website.

Where will I get time to update my website? Your website is part of your business and so it must be seen as a business tool. If your website is built on a user friendly CMS framework, updating and adding new content on your website is easy. If you don’t have time to update your website, I recommend you outsource this because it’s very important to stay fresh, relevant, and on topic with your website.

Your business website needs a plan so that you can use it to generate new sales or leads for you. Do you have a plan for your website?