What is a “Small Business” Thinking?
For this discussion let’s define your small business as having some or all of these views:
- You think the business will not grow
- It might grow as much as 5-10% a year
- You will always be there to push it along
- You will never expand your employees, if any
- Your prices will never change
- Your client base will never expand
- You will never advertise, or very little advertising
- You haven’t created a business plan
- You haven’t created a budget plan
Is this type of thinking something that will help or hinder you? What do you really think?
It seems to me that if you use the web and think of the “face” of your business entirely on the web, that there really is no “small thinking”, that the leverage given to you via marketing on the web is the same as a large or very large company.
But even with the type of thinking as noted above, you should not rule out the importance of using the web for your business.
How important is it to to think about your business marketing and web presence in the early stages of your business? Let’s think of an example where it might become apparent.
In other words let’s say you are a plumber, a one man company that is a busy plumber and you like your situation. Perhaps you don’t want or need more success. Eventually however you might outgrow that situation and want to hire and clone yourself so that you need not go out on calls, but will administrate instead. So to grow your company you need more presence, more visibility, because you want more calls to be able to hire.
Even though you had not thought of it before, now the web becomes something you can leverage. What was missing before becomes now a necessity.
What i am saying though is if you had the presence on the web to begin with, it might have helped you for your future business, because establishing your visibility is not a one time shot. Just as it takes time for a retail brick and mortar company to establish itself, it takes time to grow your presence on the web.
How long does it take? Well I think it depends on the type of business, the industry, the market niche you are targeting. Some types of companies are harder to create visibility for, perhaps because of the current domination of brands or just the sheer volume of websites that come up in the search bar.
When that happens you must find creative ways to both create the content for your site to gain traffic and search and credibility, and also to find ways to create authority for your domain through back links. In fact it is important from the very beginning to start thinking about the types of markets that will grant authority for your site, by inducing them to give you a link, either because you are such an authority or perhaps you paid for it, and the symbiotic nature of your company to similar but not competing industries on the web.
