Small Biz And The Net

[Jason Molinet]

Whenever I meet a small business owner, more often than not they are resistent to the Internet. It's a dirty word; a foreign world. There's no way any of their potential customers troll around the net looking for them. That's where many proprietors are making a serious mistake.

It's no longer enough to hang out a shingle and place an ad in the phone book. If that's all you do, you are living in a bygone era. And your business might follow.

Search is what has turned Google into a powerhouse and why Microsoft is scrambling for a piece of the action. Anyone under the age of 30 goes to the net first to look up products and services. Any local merchant with a stand-alone web site has an instant edge.

In other words, a web presence is essential.It's like trying to run a cleaners without hangers or a deli minus a cash register. Consider it infrastructure. And believe it or not, a personalized web site doesn't need to be a costly investment. If your web site brings in just one new regular customer that just might offset the cost. And in the bottom-line world of small business, that's a rationalization owners need to be willing to make.