[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Back in 2007, a young man named Ryan was desperately trying to increase sales for his friend’s business.

He was finding little success in cold calling or walking into businesses to sell credit card processing services. Eventually, he had an epiphany; if he built a website, customers who were ready to buy would come to him.

Now in his case, instead of paying a web designer, he taught himself how to code so he could maintain his friend’s website and work on creating their online presence.

Ryan learned the importance of having an online presence for making sales and growing a brand image. But most small businesses underestimate the impact their website can have on building their brand image.

With some planning and work, a website can become a money-making aspect of your business.

Interested? Well here are the top three ways your website can generate revenue for your business.

#1 Lead capture or sales

You don’t need to chase down leads when your website can bring the leads to you.

In the age of the internet, people tend to search online to find products or services before buying. Spending time and effort boosting your ranking online can draw in more leads or sales.

Online stores like Etsy have made it easier for an independent creator to get started at selling their product. But to truly strike out on their own, businesses will need to grow beyond using a platform like Etsy or Ebay to sell their product.

For one, using a third-party seller builds that seller’s reputation and brand, not your own. Secondly, you may be limited in how you conduct your business and have less control over your image and product promotion and sales.

If you’re still in the early stages of your business, relying on website services like Etsy or Ebay to house your online store this is fine. But eventually, you’re going to outgrow it and need a better home on the web to grow your business.

If you want to capture leads, you’ll need to consider how your website performs through the search engines and use tools like Google Analytics and begin working on keywords and spending time making a site with well-written content.

#2 Build trust through reviews

If you’re a business that relies on project work or provides some services you need to have a website and utilize social media to build trust.

Having a few pages with pictures, descriptions of the services you offer, and some testimonials from customers, you’ve turned your website into a lead generation machine.

You can link reviews for your business from Google, showing how you are a credible business and can back up your promises.

If you’re interested in creating trust to promote sales, you’ll need to spend time creating marketing materials like case studies, testimonials, and/or sharing product reviews.

#3 Less expensive to promote yourself

By far, the best thing the internet has given to small businesses is the chance to promote themselves with little cost.

In the past, you would have to pay fees for local TV and radio ads. Even a newspaper print was costly. Now Facebook will let you do target ads for as little as a hundred dollars.

It is significantly cheaper to drive people to your business through your website and social media then it would be to pay for an expensive ad in the paper.

Investing in advertising is necessary, but it takes a lot of money. Having a website will make promoting your company less expensive. You want customers to visit your site and buy from you, so spending your resources to catch people’s attention through your website is a better way to advertise than thousand dollar ads on the radio or local TV station.

If you want to promote your website, you’ll need to spend time creating some Google Ads or researching how to draw in people through social media.

Bringing it all together

As you can see from above, having a website does not magically create more business. To make a return-on-investment it will take effort.

Just like living a healthy life or making your goals reality, it all takes work. So if you want to take action with any of the ways we talked about you’ll need to take some steps to make them happen.

If you’re interested in implementing any of the strategies we mentioned, subscribe to our email series and see how your website can impact your business.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column]