How can a small local business get found online cheaply without a website?

You’re an acupuncturist, a pet shop, or a small church or mosque? You know who you are.

The internet gave a helping hand to many organizations. To the local business, it was most of the time another bill to pay and another puzzle to solve. More often it was threat than help. Even Yellow Pages advertising is too expensive and takes too much time. Should you skip the web, or learn to build sites?

You are not a designer nor a programmer. You are just a small business that is trying to sell something, or somebody that is trying to help people or animals, or possibly a small religious place. You are not a web person. You know it. You will not learn to write HTML or pick fonts. Look at your local basement waterproofing company. The site has not changed in years. In fact, they don’t even know why it is there. But the local customers need to find you. Do you learn to be an expert, or miss out?

There is a way to help each of these type of people and businesses. There is a way to get them online, and to have them benefit from the web. There is a way to get the phone to ring, and to turn a searcher into a prospect. There is a way to let them have a site, a good site, and yet not become a web expert. For a bit of time, one or two hours a month, and for about $60/year, you could have a site that covered just about everything needed.

That Blog Is Your New Website

Choose a clean, professional layout. Then write the first post. Type the company name, the address, what you sell, the hours, and the phone number. Click on the link that says, ”Feature this post”. Make that post stay on top. That blog is your new website. Later, you can post news, that you are closed for vacation, or that you have a new product line in.

For a beginner, it is that simple: for about $5 a month, you get a web server, a professional look, and you can write directly without designers and domain names and confusion. You do not have to learn anything you are not interested in.

Squidoo Page

This blog is fine, but how about a Squidoo page (also called a “lens”)? Hours of operation, a Google map, a list of books on your specialty, a guest book where customers can leave testimonials. Add the RSS of your blog to the lens, and any new posts will show up there for you. If this is too technical, then ask somebody on the block who understands computers. You only have to do it once.

Next step is to print a piece of cardboard about a foot by two feet, and to write your name and phone. Then photograph your place, your employees, happy customers, and always have somebody hold the sign in the picture. From time to time, whenever there are new pictures, upload them to Flickr, pull the whole set into your Squidoo lens, put the best ones on the blog too.

Now let’s get some of those customers talking. Ask them to make Squidoo pages about you. Ones that blog can mention you. The happiest customers can pose with the sign, or write a testimonial.

A Few Hours and a Few Dollars

The cost of all this is a couple of hours. The cost is a few dollars. Some reading may be involved. No HTML, no fonts, no sitemaps to mess with. You can keep running your dry cleaning, you can keep writing sermons, you can be a non-expert.

No one is marking you on your website. No customer walks away thinking, “I will never buy anything off a site like this - my cat could have designed it”. Nothing expensive, nothing endless, nothing to do with tweaking or optimizing.

The payoff. A month later, when people search locally for “migraine acupuncture des moines” or “pet store 10706” you should come up. Five or ten new people a week could double your customer base in a year. All for about $60 a year.