10 Reasons Why Every Small Business Needs a CMS-Based ...

I recently met with a peer group of CEOs who asked me about how they can ensure that their website is competitive with bigger companies. They were concerned that they couldn?t afford to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars competing in this economy. Not to worry, the days when quality websites were the domain of large corporations with deep pockets are over. Today your small business has the potential to compete with the biggest companies on the internet for highly coveted search traffic. Search, queries entered into search engines like Google, tries to give searchers the best website that matches their need. So if you have a website that other businesses link to and has the information that the user is looking for you can come up ahead of the national companies. I know, this is a fairly simple concept but in practice it is harder than it seems.

With recent changes to the way Google and other search engines do things the playing field is even more level. ?On a basic level there are new things that matter when you get ranked in search. First, your website must contain the text people are searching for. Second, your website must be linked to from other places on the web. Third, your website must be regularly updated. Last, your website must be usable. That?s right, Google now knows whether people actually use your website and read more than one page, so those other sites stuffed full of content that used to come up are now gone because nobody ever goes deeper than the landing page. To be honest, there are hundreds of factors to ranking in search but these important ones relate directly to what I?m trying to tell you: get your website on a Content Management System immediately.

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A good executive coach can tell you that half the battle is knowing the right tools to get the job done. My favorite tool today is a CMS. A CMS, or Content Management System, is a tool for generating websites and website pages via a back end interface. In plain English, it?s an online website generator. For small business (and large ones too) this is a MUST have.
Here are 10 reasons why:

1. You can control your destiny. A good CMS does one thing very well, it makes it so that you can control the content on your website without having to know code. This simplification is critical because it removes the barriers that kept business owners from being able to regularly improve their website to meet their audiences? needs.
2. The best content management systems are FREE! Well, at least the tool is free. It will definitely take a few dollars for design and setup but trust me you can get a top notch website for under $1000US.
3. A few hours of training is all you need to be able to edit, add and remove web pages on your site. Including creating blog entries so that your site is one of those all-important regularly updated ones.
4. Setup in minutes. I kid you not, on my website hosting service there is something called a one-click-install of WordPress. I create a new website, click a button and five minutes later an up to date installation of WordPress is running on that site.
5. Most CMS tools like WordPress have something called ?plug-ins.? These add-ons to the tool allow you to easily display social links, bring in twitter feeds, and thousands of other things without knowing any code. The best part is most of these are free as well.
6. CMS developers regularly update their software. This means that while your competitors are stuck with old web technology and static pages you can have the latest and greatest with very little effort.
7. Support is a breeze. Because content management systems are so popular your small business is a Google search away from finding a solution to your problem. And if you can?t find it, there are thousands of low cost experts who can help (especially with the more popular tools). ?
8. Even the free CMS systems like WordPress are scalable for when your company hits it big. There are some major brands like Executive Street, CNN, Ford, and others using WordPress, a free CMS, to run part of their websites.
9. You can get high end when you need to. At my current company, Vistage a CEO Peer Group organization, we have a few sites that run on WordPress. The cost to implement these sites ranges from 100% expense free (time was put in of course) to over $20K. The reason for the variance is customization; the further you go from the reservation the more it?s going to cost. But for a small business I?ve developed fairly custom WordPress sties for less than $1k.
10. Options. I?ve spoken a lot about one particular CMS but there are literally hundreds. The top ones include; WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and more. But there are also some that are focused on particular niches, CMS systems for car dealers, CMS systems for eCommerce, etc.

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?About the Author: Andy Ramirez is the Director of Interactive Marketing for Vistage International,an executive coaching organization that helps CEO members build better companies through unique business coaching opportunities. With a background as an IT Manager and Systems Engineer as well as Online Marketing for small and large businesses Andy is a unique combination of both techie and marketer. With this skill he specializes in helping Vistage find new ways to grow their membership through the online channel working with a team of experts in; SEO, SEM, Automated Marketing, Display Advertising and more.

Source: http://thecustomercollective.com/dfasso/74239/10-reasons-why-every-small-business-needs-cms-based-website

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