Small Business Talk

I just wanted to pass on this source for guides about ebusiness, and using the Internet as part of your e-business strategy. The site appears to be partly funded by the Province of Saskatchewan and presents 30+ guides on all aspects of ebusiness from building a website to dealing with fraud in ecommerce.

There’s too much stuff to summarize, but if you are interested, click here.

Small businesses tend to build websites without really following a set of sensible “thought-exercises” that will ensure sucess, which is one reason why most small business websites fail miserably.

One neglected aspect is the Unique Value Proposition that your website will or does offer visitors. This should be established early on, before any website coding is done, and it unique value proposition should reflect a need on the part of your market or potential visitor pool.

For example, this site is based on several different UVP’s, one of which is based on the potential visitor’s problem of finding good reputable, no bull, semi non commercial information about small business that isn’t, in effect spam, and is also available at no charge. Hence we are building two human reviewed directories so visitors don’t have to wade through machine generated junk from search engines.

So, first things first, which is that when planning for your small business website, always start with how you will fulfil some visitor need in your target market. Of course, there’s much more, and we’ll cover more topics soon.

Before Al Gore allegedly invented the Internet, Bacal & Associates existed as a somewhat technologically enabled regular offline business. And as the Internet and the Web became more and more prevalent, we used more and more of its features to grow our small business and generate new revenue streams.

So, we’ve been without the big “I”, and we’ve been with the “big I”. And I’ll be the first to tell you that the Internet is an absolutely incredible boon to small business, but it’s also a potential morass of wasted effort and disappointment for small business.

In this category (Small Business and The Internet), I’ll be sharing what I’ve learned over the many years that we’ve been using the Internet to drive our business. And I”ll share both the good and the bad, and even some of the uglies.