As women entrepreneurs and small business owners, one of the joys of launching a GREAT looking web or blog site in the Web 2.0 world, is the cost! Gone are the days when you need to spend $3,000 – $5,000 dollars to create a professional looking site. The plethora of attractive templates powered by free software such as Wordpress or Joomla, makes it easy to build an attractive and highly functional site cheap and FAST.
Decision Making is not Always EASY
But for women entrepreneurs’ making these kinds of decisions, is often a more complex process than simply saying “let’s do it”! There is never enough money, so there is concern and anxiety over wanting to invest the money as wisely as possible. And to further complicate matters, we often need to gain the support of a “silent partner” who quite often is a husband or other relative.
The Silent Partner
Case in point. A client recently told her husband that she wanted to buy a template and use Wordpress for her site. She thought he would be especially thrilled at the cost of under $400! Instead his reaction was skeptical. He told her that he thought her website was an important business tool and he had no problem spending $3,000 – $5,000 to get it built. She tried to convey to him all of the benefits that she saw to going this route, but he was dead against the idea. The conversation ended in a stalemate.
The Web 2.0 world has dramatically changed the landscape of how to spend your money to market your business on the web. In the Web 1.0 world, the only way to market your business was to build a custom static brochure website. But the Web 2.0 world has turned all of that logic on its head. With today’s tools and options, there are a number of ways to invest that $3,000 to $5,000 that would reap a much bigger ROI than a custom website.
My client felt the best way to gain her husbands’ support was to show him all of the “high value” ways that she could spend that mula to grow her business. In 10 minutes we developed the following list:
- Pay per Click Advertising
- Advertising on High Traffic Sites that Target Her Market
- Develop an affiliate program and banner ads
- Buy a high quality video camera and editing software
- Have a vendor booth at an important national conference
- Begin the development of the next product in her product line
- Work with companies like Hubspot and LotusJump to drive business with SEO
- Hire a part-time virtual assistant so that she can focus on critical business growth issues
- Hire a copy writer to create her web sales pages
Oprah wasn’t talking about the Web 2.0 world when she said, “Everyone has to learn to think differently, bigger, to be open to possibilities”.
But it sums up the challenge that many of us face when we move our websites and way of thinking from the Web 1.0 world to the Web 2.0 world. As small business owners, the Web 2.0 world offers us possibilities to grow our business’ in ways we could not previously have imagined!
How else would you spend $3-5,000 to grow your business?
