Your website is crucial. I think everyone and specially every company should have a website or a blog.

When you run a business you need a way to get leads someway. Now with social media, blogging, SEO and email marketing(none are affiliate links) you can collect leads for your business.

But your website is where it all counts. Using all these online tools you can direct more people to your website. And that’s what your goal should be, because your site is where a consumer can turn into a customer.

It’s obvious that just having a website going to bring you tons of leads. There’s more to it.

But the point I’m trying to make in this post is that having a presence online is important, here’s why:

• Scalability: Having a website can double the number of consumers your company can influence.

For example: Say you have a shoe store. How many people can you help at a time? Maybe a couple right? But if you have a website, you can serve as many as you can.

Then if they want to pay for the product they don’t have to wait in line to pay for it. If the company has Facebook connected to it, they can see if any of their friends have purchased anything from the company, and if they have they can ask them any questions. Do you believe in social media now?

• People expect you to: In these times not having a website is like the biggest mistake. When you’re researching a product you want to buy what’s the first thing you usually do today? I’m going to guess, you “Google it”.

Before we’d ask a friend or anyone we knew, but now with search engines, Facebook, Twitter we can pretty much the world. Right now small businesses are just beginning to embrace Facebook and Twitter, but don’t be surprised when it turns into a must.

• It just converts!: This is what it’s all about. When you have a website, you obviously want to educate, engage, and entertain in some cases your visitors, but it really is more about conversion than anything when you have a business.

You might ask, well if I have a Facebook page do I really need a website? Yes, yes you do! Your website is your home, you own it and you can do whatever you please with it. If you want to design your website a certain way you can.

There are some non-believers still out there, but soon they’ll realize how important it is to use these new tools to have a more efficient business. The clock is ticking, and soon it might be to late for them, because by then those who’ve taken advantage of the web have won over their possible customers.

How important is your website to your business? If you don’t have a website or blog, I’m curious to know why not. Leave a comment.

photo credit eldh

I recently downloaded a great report about twitter and how to get more retweets, which I highly recommend. The reason I liked it so much was because Dan actually went and did the research and figured out the science of getting more retweet.

Like a lot of us marketers online, I’m sure you too wouldn’t mind getting more retweets than you get right now. I admit it I would. The reason why is quite simple. We all want more traffic to our blog, subscribers, and to all the cool thing you have to share with other people.

The biggest reason for business owners to want more retweets is more leads and customers. If you’re a blogger or you have business online and you’re on twitter, but you’re not getting the traffic that you want, keep on reading.

5 Ways to Get More Retweets

• Have a link in the tweet. Dan explains in the report that retweets compared to random tweets contain 3 times more links. A tweet showing a link has a better chance of being retweeted than if it doesn’t.
• Keep the tweets short. By leaving free space it allows people to add something, a message or something he might want to say to his followers, explaining why he liked it, which might persuade others to feel the same and retweet it.
• Please ReTweet. It’s proven that your tweet will get 50% more time retweeted if it contains a “please retweet” or “please rt” than if it doesn’t. Who would of thought asking would get you what you want. More retweets.
• Make sure it is interesting and relevant to your followers.
• Don’t talked to much about yourself. If you just chat and tweet about going to the bathroom or something mundane, you’re not going to get retweeted.

Finally don’t forget to be social, actively engage your followers, build meaningful relationships and your retweets will jump through the roof for sure.

Oh and don’t forget to Retweet this post. Share some ways that help you get more retweets.