You shouldn’t let Coca Cola, HP, and CNN make you feel like your website ought to play like a Superbowl ad.

Small Businesses Have Specific Needs
Superbowl Ads Can’t Meet

Superbowl ads are all about appealing to a mass market. Your small business, on the other hand, survives by the grace of your clientele.

But now, with the Internet, any small business can have access to the same billions of people that Coca Cola does, the same mass market. This is as much a curse as a blessing. Because the mass-market, Superbowl-ad mindset can destroy a small business.

In this free on-line report, you’ll discover:

• The one and only purpose of your small business website.
• What is the most important element of your website, and how it can make or break the deal without you even knowing about it.
• The great hidden inefficiency of traditional website design, and how Web 2.0 software makes it moot.
• One of the most powerful—and dangerous—traffic sources on the Internet, and what you need to do to safely take advantage of it.
• The 4 most important web statistics you need to understand, and why.
• How age-old secrets of advertising that we lost in the television age are now turning the web into a gold-mine for thousands of small businesses.
• And more…

Superbowl ads cost hundreds of millions of dollars, are seen by millions of people, and half the time, you can’t even tell what they’re advertising. And half the time you can tell, they don’t make you want to buy. Big companies dump untold millions of dollars into such ads every year, just to get their name and logo in front of as many people as they can. And for them, it might even be worth it.

But a small business needs a different approach, Because a small business succeeds one customer at a time. Serving each customer. Impressing each customer. Getting repeat business. Spreading the word. One person at a time. A Superbowl-ad mindset is just a waste of money for a small business. Because it doesn’t matter how many people have heard your name or seen your logo, if no one knows what you actually do. To a small business, one actual customer is worth more than all of the fancy movie tricks and special effects in Hollywood.

Your small-business ads need to do things that an award-winning Superbowl ad never will. And your small business’s website needs to do things that Coca Cola’s website never will. Because small businesses are niche businesses, not mass-market businesses. That’s why an effective small-business website does 2 things:

• It converts visitors into customers; and
• It converts customers into visitors.

Keep these in mind as we go over the following 4-part website strategy:

1. The Copy - This is the text, images, and other media on your site. It is not the graphic design. Rather, it’s the part that actually communicates your sales message to people who visit your site. In this chapter, I’ll reveal why the copy is the most important part of your website, the purpose of your web copy (and it’s not “to communicate”), which is the most important page of your website (and it’s not the front page), and how you can get good copy.
2. The Website - This is the technical and artistic component. It’s how you actually publish your copy on the Internet. This is what most people usually think of when they say “web design.” But it’s really only one part of an effective web-design strategy. I’ll explain the basics of how web technology works, why most web designers are doing it wrong, what to look for in a web hosting service, how graphic design fits in, and 3 technologies you can use to build the website that’s right for you.
3. Web Traffic - Even the best website does you no good if no one ever sees it. Traffic is the people who visit your website. There are many ways to draw visitors to your website. I’ll explore the 3 web traffic strategies, the strengths of each, and how to use all 3 to draw people to your website and keep them coming back again and again.
4. Website Metrics - Once you have people reading your website’s copy, you need to measure whether it actually works. This is the part that ties everything else together. This chapter will reveal which web statistics you actually need, why you need them, how to make sense of them, and what tools you need to measure them.

This is an approach that small businesses have worked time and again, sometimes going on to dominate their niche. And I’ve used it myself successfully, both in for-profit markets and for charities.

Using a mass-market, Superbowl-ad approach is the biggest mistake small businesses make when they put up their first website. I’ve seen it happen with both men and women, with the young and old, and in completely different markets. I’ve seen it happen not only to brick-and-mortar businesses, but to online businesses, too. Consider this alternative, because you want your website investment to pay off.