Here are nine ways in which your business can benefit by getting your business on the Internet:

Improve Your Company’s Image

Business websites and social media accounts are very common these days. When a business doesn’t have an online presence, it causes customers to wonder if its owners are even serious about their trade. When you take the time to set up a website and social media account(s) for your business, you show your customer base that you are a committed business owner. If for no other reason, you should develop a website and social media presence for your business just because your customers expect you to have one.

An Online Presence Helps Make Sure That You Are Available All The Time

There are some gas stations, pharmacies, convenience stores, and fast food outlets that stay open 24 hours a day, and every day of the week. For most other businesses, however, being always open is impossible. When you take your business online, you can, at the very least, offer detailed information about your products and services to your customer base, every hour of the day. Many people like researching the products that they will buy from the comfort of their homes. If you have no website, you lose out on these customers. A website would help you generate more leads. If you have e-commerce capability on your website, you can help your leads buy from you anytime, as well.

You Can Offer Your Customers Better Support

When you have no online presence, your customers are less able you contact you with presales questions. You can’t sit by the phones at your company all day, and all night. What you can do is to set up an online presence for your business, and direct users to an informative page, an email form, or a social media account. Often, visitors to your website won’t even need to make contact with you. If you have a FAQs section, product manuals, usage videos, and other information on your website, you will be able to answer your visitors’ questions even before they ask them.

Getting Started Is Easy

While it’s possible to spend tens of thousands of dollars on building a top-notch commercial website, there are options out there for less. LaunchNeo offers a simple monthly package called a LaunchPlan that provides everything that you need for a custom WordPress website.

The Internet Is Business-Friendly

When you get on the Internet, every potential customer out there is just a click away. You can use your website and social media presence to educate visitors on your products or services, convert them into customers, and help them use their purchases. Getting on the Internet makes your business more customer-friendly.

The Internet Allows You To Do Business From Anywhere

In many cases, if you have an online presence, you can run your business remotely. You don’t need to be in a specific town to run it. You can move to any city that you like, and continue running your business online.

Cut Costs 

Moving even parts of your daily operations online can help you lower costs. A single online video that explains your product’s features may be able to allow you to cut down on customer support staff. Once you begin making much of your sales online, you will be able to cut down on sales staff, as well.

Target New Geographical Areas

When you restrict yourself to your brick-and-mortar location, your business is limited by the number of individuals who live close by. Getting your business online, however, opens you to a much wider geographical area. You may be able to use delivery services to deliver your product to a larger customer base.

The Internet Allows You To Be More Responsive

When your business goes online, you get to respond to your clients and potential customers far more readily than you would if you weren’t online. You can respond to questions through email and offer basic information to customers through articles and videos on your website.

Whether you physically provide a service to a certain geographical location, or sell products that can be shipped, taking your brick-and-mortar business online can be a powerful way to increase your revenue and find more customers.

The post 9 Reasons Why You Should Take Your Business Online appeared first on LaunchNeo.

While it has its detractors, WordPress is the base of 34% of all websites on the internet. That number includes websites that have no outside CMS or have a custom-coded CMS. (W3Techs) 

With one-third of all websites running on this one content management system, it’s no wonder that it has a lot of assets to recommend it as your CMS.

1 – It’s open-source.

You don’t have to pay anyone to use WordPress as your CMS. You can download an installation file for it and then upload it to your host. In fact, most hosts make it even easier: all you have to do is push a button to install the WordPress CMS on your site. 

There is a paid version of WordPress that includes hosting, etc., but you don’t have to pay to use WordPress on your website.

2 – Lots of plugins/extensions

Because WordPress is open-source, there are thousands of plugins that you can add to your site to make it better. They range from anti-spam plugins to design tools that help you build a website. 

Essentially, these are pieces of code or functionalities that someone wrote that make your site work better for you. Most of them are free, although some have a small fee to get all the bells and whistles. In essence, these will save a developer time having to reinvent the wheel; someone else has already done it and they make it available to everyone.

3 – It’s not new.

WP has been around for about a decade now. That means that the kinks are worked out and there’s a large, professional organization there making sure that everything works well. 

When a new CMS is issued, it will often have lots of glitches and problems. They will cause your site to crash and create a lot of headaches. Those problems are in the past for WP, so you can expect smooth running (most of the time – everything has its issues).

4 – Many, many big companies use WordPress.

The list of companies that use WP as their CMS is like a who’s who of the world’s largest, most notable companies and even government agencies:

• BBC America
• The New Yorker
• Variety
• Sony Music
• MTV News
• Mercedes-Benz
• Katy Perry
• The New York Times
• The Village Voice
• New York Post
• The White House
• The Obama Foundation
• …and many more!

There are tens of thousands of major brands that use WordPress to build their websites. That means that you can count on it being around for a long time and to be constantly improving.

5 – Lots and lots of themes

A WordPress theme is a template that you build your WP website from. There are thousands of them to be had. Every day, someone issues a new theme.

WP started as a blogging platform. It has expanded into a complete content management system. In order to get a website to look the way you want, you need to add certain elements. A theme is a pre-designed template that you can use as a starting point. From there, you can add more elements to the site to meet your needs.

6 – WP makes SEO easy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is at the heart of success on the internet. WordPress and the developers who’ve contributed to it over the years know this and have designed it to be SEO-friendly right out of the gate. In fact, because so many important websites and so much of the internet runs on WordPress, it’s only logical that Google and other search engines look to WP to know what to add to their algorithm. 

SEO is simply a part of the WP core, making it a powerful platform for getting your message out to search engines and the world.

7 – Developers and designers are everywhere.

Because WP is so popular, there are literally millions of designers and developers. You can find them on every continent and working in every language. There are very few web design and development companies that don’t offer WordPress. In fact, WP is the core of many desengers worlds, without them ever learning any other system.

8 – WP grows with you.

Because the platform is so flexible, it grows with your needs. One page or one thousand, a blog or an ecommerce site, multiple themes across multiple pages, all of it can be done in WP. Because the platform is 100% scalable, it will grow as your needs grow.

Often, you can transfer from one theme to another with ease. The content will stay in place and simply move around in the themes. That makes growing and changing your site easy.

9 – It’s multilingual.

Because WP is so popular, it’s everywhere. Baked right into the system is the ability to be multilingual. You can easily duplicate a website and change the language. This allows you to localize your websites to your audience if you have customers or staff in multiple countries. 

10 – It’s really easy to use.

Most of the time, you don’t need to know any coding at all. You don’t have to understand HTML or CSS to build a website. There are programs that allow you to drag and drop elements, change parts of the site, and make it what you want. The themes are very often nearly complete in and of themselves. For example, a lawyer theme only needs you to change the words to match your law firm to make it yours. Changing out photos, adding signup forms and more is all very simple.

11 – It’s compatible with everything.

Not matter what CRM or email program you’re using, it will work with WP. The reason is simple: it’s the most popular so everyone makes their systems work with WP.

One example is your email service provider, like MailChimp or Mailerlite. All you have to do is look for the WordPress tutorials and they show you exactly how to add their system to your website.

12 – Mobile is built-in.

Being “mobile-friendly” was a catchphrase a couple of years ago as everyone tried to adapt their websites to all the mobile devices in the world. WP has mobile readiness built in. While almost everyone else has gotten there, there are still some platforms that you have intentionally convert your site to mobile ready. WordPress does it automatically.

Get Started With WordPress!

There are even more reasons to use WordPress as your CMS, but these are the ones that matter most. Use WordPress for your website and it will make your life easier. Need a custom WordPress website designer? At LaunchNeo we offer an all-in-one solution that includes web design, hosting, domain, SEO, and more – all for one monthly price.

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