Using your website for your business

BUSINESS BITS
Jimbo Owen B. Gulle

An important tool for any business, a website can help you convert viewers into clients.

A website is undoubtedly an important tool for any business, big or small. Besides providing information on what a company does and what products or services it offers, a website can help gather information about its visitors so the business could convert them into contacts and possibly into clients later on.

Converting contacts into clients, however, is what most businesses fail to exploit with their presence on the Internet. Many enterprises just put up classic or "static" websites that are simply online brochures that display the company's contact details. If the visitor wants to buy the company's products or service, these static websites give them no choice but to go offline and go to the physical store or office later on to make the purchase.

Today, however, companies can remove this unproductive static from their online shops so they can bring in more clients and, consequently, earn bigger incomes. All they have to do is to add two pieces of support software to their websites: an autoresponder system and an Internet shopping cart.

And local entrepreneurs need not look far to get these items. A Filipino Internet marketing expert, Ian del Carmen, now offers both software solutions through his company Fireball Group of Companies, after successfully selling them to the international market for several years now.

"If you have an offline business and you don't use the available technology to market your business, you're letting the money you could have earned go to waste," del Carmen says. "At this point, the Internet holds a huge percent of the market for any business. So if you have a website and it's not providing additional profits for you, your website isn't really working for your business."

The Fireball Autoresponder and Fireball Cart are part of the company's business automation packages, which are designed to allow entrepreneurs to communicate with their website users and frequent visitors and to make follow-ups with their prospects and proven customers.

"Automation is an important part of any business," del Carmen explains. "The less time you devote to doing small redundant tasks, the more time you will have to devote to primary business activities, such as product development, advertising, customer service, and list building.

Specifically, if your prospects are listed on your autoresponder system, they can become your customers in the future. If they already are your customers, and you keep communicating with them, it is more likely that they will become your repeat customers. The beauty of this is, of course, that you benefit a lot from 'pocket income' because it increases the value of each customer to your business, especially if he or she becomes a repeat customer.