• Imagine YOU live in Anycity, Anystate, USA and notice that your local shopping area is not selling Widgets!

    EVERYBODY NEEDS WIDGETS!!

    so you decide to take the plunge and open up your own local Brick and Mortar ‘We sell the BEST Widgets’ Store. You take another mortgage, borrow from your savings and family and open shop.

    websites the new brick and mortar

    Unfortunately, if you are like the majority of small business owners… you do some business, but slowly (or maybe like a stab to your heart quickly) realize that maybe.. just maybe people don’t need widgets as much as you expected, or neglected to consider that the ‘widget store’ a few miles away is in a preferred location, with twice the amount of stock. Another small business. Another failure. Another statistic.

    Over high up on my pedestal I look down on the mom and pops.. rather pity (in fact fear comes to mind too).. Don’t you know the place to be is ONLINE? Can you empathize with the hard worker who is putting his guts into this business only to cater to the people in his/her immediate vicinity? Its like being a first hand witness to the Rat Race in action.

    BRING IT ONLINE

    The motto could be ‘why aim to serve FEW when you can aim to serve MANY’

    Typically I educate that the cost of failure when venturing online is almost non existent next to offline businesses that fail. Domain names cost $10, hosting is $120/year, free website builders abound. All you have to lose is time.

    make a big splash online

    That’s if you want to make a small splash on the web. I however, plan to drop a cannon.

    As I am currently positioned to dump a sizable amount of money into a website, I am faced with this thought:

    Have I been naive all along?

    Is there really as much difference to someone putting all their eggs into one expensive fancy website and someone opening up a local store?

    Certainly the web has a much much wider market than Anycity, but how hard do you have to work to attract just the RIGHT visitors from the billions of website users, and competing websites. Will my ‘example’ 80,000 web visitors be comparable to the 80,000 pedestrians that walk into your local store? Statistically a greater %age of people who walk in a store will actually make a purchase than actions will result (even it be giving away something free!) from a visitor to a website (I made up this statistic but I am sticking with it). This actually means that you need probably triple to quadruple the quantity of website visitors to reach the same bottom line. This requires proper online promotions and staff to market the proper channels, which means ongoing costs.

    Are websites becoming the new Brick and Mortar?

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