Depending on what you do – a web presence could be extremely important, or it could be somewhat of an add-on. If I’m honest with myself, I understand that some businesses acquire customers very easily because of the inherit demand – and some businesses could do all the promotion in the world and never get one customers.
Somewhere in the middle – are the people like you and I who have to promote our goods and services to get them out in front of the right people who may or may not know that they need what we have before they see it.
For these people – a website is likely a very good option to share what they do, or share their product, explain it – give them the rundown of how it will help them, or solve a problem they have. Back in the day, this might’ve been left to a brochure – a synopsis of your value proposition complete with images, bulleted lists of key benefits all presented in as professional way as possible.
Now ‘brochure’ style websites are easy enough to create on the surface – through a Wix, Squarespace, or even a WordPress theme and some elbow grease, but what if you want to add a feature that doesn’t come standard with the template you’re using – or if you want to stand out from the crowd of other small businesses and entrpreneurs.
A template has limitations for both standing out from the crowd (cause inevitably other people can make a cheap website like that too,) or if you want something they don’t have a built in function for in a way that blends seemlessly with the site you’ll want a developer to help. If you built it cheaply in the beginning, those things cost more to fix down the line, because they’re often poorly coded and require time-consuming overhauls.
Can you make money though?
You can indeed – if you know there’s enough demand to fuel leads in through the website, and if you’re willing to either expend time or energy to market the site. Unless you have the exact perfect niche with crazy demand, and low competition – ‘if you build it, they will come’ is just the plot of an old movie, not our modern reality on the web.
So having a decent niche, and ongoing promotion of a website will be crucial. Whether that be paid ads through search engines like Google, Paid social ads, creating amazing content that serves your core demographic, educates and then provides a way for them to buy or contact, or a combination of all of these – you’ll likely need this promotion strategy to make money from a website.