The Internet offers unlimited potential for KTEs. Undoubtedly, the greatest single improvement to the fortunes of the Kitchen Table Entrepreneur has been the arrival of the Internet. Where else can you launch a worldwide business for less than the price of a month’s advertising in your favourite hobby magazine? But despite the opportunities, the Internet is awash with global business failures.

There are any number of reasons for this, but lurking somewhere will either be one or a combination of these factors: So what can you do to ensure that your website does what you want it to? To answer this question you need to ask yourself What’s your objective in having a website? Before you go any further with your business website you need to be clear about your objectives.

Don’t work under the misapprehension that simply because you have a website, visitors will come flocking to your site. The reality is that bringing customers to your website can be a full-time task. Once you get them there your website has to be absolutely right or they’ll click their way out to your competitors.

Make no mistake about it – the Internet is cut-throat and there is no place for half-measures, poorly-designed web pages or sites that don’t take credit cards.There are three areas that you need to look at:

Creating A Website For Your Business

As I said earlier, before you go any further and even attempt to build your own site or commission someone to do it for you make sure that you have clearly identified your objective in having your own website. This is absolutely crucial to your future success.

For example, my businesses include a gardening business, cycle shop, boat hire, and home study course business. The objectives for each of my sites differs considerably.

My primary objective in having a site for the gardening business is to promote my main gardening business, which is maintenance and landscaping work.

So my site includes:

• details of the services we offer;
• reasons why someone should choose my business over my competition;
• testimonials from delighted customers who have used our service;
• gardener’s diary;
• contact information;
• details of any special offers we’re running;
• pictures of work that we have completed.

The site’s primary objective is to get people to contact us as opposed to selling them anything. Therefore the success of the site can be gauged in how many enquiries we get through it. The process of turning those inquiries into actual orders is done offline when I go and visit prospective clients.

There are two objectives to the cycle hire and sales business website:

• to interest people in coming to our seaside location and hiring a bike;
• to sell cycles and accessories in our shop.

The objectives differ entirely from that of our gardening business, because not only do we want our website to be a marketing tool for our business, we also want to sell our products online.

The success of this site can be measured in how many new customers it brings to our cycle shop and hire kiosk, and how many bikes and accessories we actually sell.

Our primary objective with the home study courses site is to sell a range of innovative and inspirational gardening home study courses. The success of this site is ultimately gauged by the number of courses we actually sell. Selling on a site requires you first to get customers to your site, and then once there interest them enough in your course to make them enrol on one.