What is the net and why is it important to your business?

Sitting on the train musing over the days events I began thinking about how to best explain the web to businesses that are scared of it or don't understand it. The fact is that getting online isn't so scary or different from doing offline business or marketing.

The web is just one big library, but this library holds every type of document you can imagine, from shopping catalogues to travel brochures and business cards. This library is the most used and most influential library ever known to man. At this very moment in time there are tens of thousands of people within a bus ride from here looking at something on the internet. The techy people like to make things confusing. Online they don't call things catalogues or brochures they call them websites, and because they're not on paper you can do extra things with them. You can put your e-mail on there so people can contact you, you can put up job quotes or pricing guides. People can browse your goods and you can sell them as if it were a catalogue shop. Builders or Landscapers can show photos of their best jobs, Theater Groups can show clips of performances and pubs can keep locals updated on upcoming events. There isn't a company that would find no benefit in having there presence felt in the vast library of the net.

Now as I'm sure we've all experienced at times, even in a small library it can sometimes be hard to find what you want. You've either got to ask the librarian or go and look on the library computer or index. As you well know just going in and placing a copy of a book on a library shelf won't make people notice it, now imagine just dropping a book into a library with billions of books. You've got to properly catalogue and described your site so that the librarian (Google) can add it to the library catalogue and people can find it. That's the basics of SEO or Search Engine Optimization, to make sure your website comes up when people search for anything relevant to your business. Of course a little more marketing never hurts (unless it's intrusive and offensive) and that's where things like Google ad-words come in, by bidding on key search terms that are relevant to your business you can appear in sponsored adverts that are placed in searches or on websites, the best bit? You only pay when people have noticed your advert and click to visit your site, you don't get that with advertising in the local paper or the yellow pages!