Striving for perfection is a nice goal, but sometimes waiting for perfection can hold you back.

The beauty of marketing on the Internet is that, in most cases, you can test, change, modify and update your campaigns once they go live. Having everything completely perfect prior to getting out there and being seen is no longer a necessity. It is more important to take action and become visible, even if it’s not perfect, than sit around and wait.

Recently, I’ve noticed this trend of waiting for perfection with some small business owners. The problem with this strategy is:

• The longer you wait, the more chance you give your competition to be found before you, potentially stealing the thunder from something you thought was unique;
• The Web changes too quickly to worry about finding small imperfections that can be fixed quickly once they are discovered;
• Marketing takes time to work and waiting just lengthens the time before you will see results.

Understand that I’m not saying not to strive for excellence in your business. However, there is a difference between striving for excellence as a goal and waiting for everything to be perfect before you take action. I totally agree that you should:

• Review your Web site and blog for spelling, grammar and other flaws that hurt the image of your business;
• Test your forms, landing pages and interactive components to make sure they work the way you want them to;
• Ensure that your brand is consistent and well designed;
• Target the right market, use the right keywords and communicate the right messages in your pay-per-click advertising.

But trying to get everything “right” (whatever that is), whether it’s your Web site, social media profiles, email campaigns or your pay-per-click advertising, is costing you clients, visibility and money.

Waiting to begin marketing on the Internet so everything is perfect is futile. Get it to a point where no one but you knows it’s not “done” and go live. The longer you wait for perfection, the more the world is passing you by!

Are you waiting for perfection before you begin a marketing campaign?

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Don’t Wait for Perfection is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Small businesses need a Web presence. It’s the central hub of your social media strategy – the place where you send everyone to find out more about what you do or provide.

The challenge for many small businesses is to obtain a high quality, professional Web presence that is affordable and easy to keep fresh with new content. On top of that, business owners are hearing that if they blog, tell stories and keep people aprised of what they are up to, they will help increase their chance of being found through search engines.

So how do you maximize your Web presence without breaking your marketing budget?

For most small businesses, building your Web site in WordPress will help you achieve what you are looking for. You can get a quality web site that is easy to update and maintain, support all the multimedia features you want to keep it interesting, while having the ability to add a blog if you are ready to take that step.

I’m still finding small business owners are confused as to what they truly need when it comes to the Web. What is necessary is a place you can call your home base. This home base is where you should be directing everyone through your calls to action in your marketing campaigns. This one place should tell your prospect why they want to do business with you. And, this one place should have everything you need to keep your visitors engaged. You should strive to combine your Web site and blog into one Web property that does it all for you. If you have two separate sites – one for your static Web site and one for your blog – you risk splitting your traffic between the two and you may just find yourself

If you are starting to develop a social media strategy, be sure this Web presence is solid so that when you point people to it from your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter or Google profile, you will be proud.

Why WordPress?

I have finally moved all of my client’s Web sites to WordPress and have trained them on how to update their content. This has liberated many of them, helping them keep their Web site up to date with news, events and content that attracts their ideal clients. In my opinion, the following are the key benefits for building your Web presence in WordPress:

• It is easy for anyone to add, change and update content – This is a real benefit to businesses that sell services. Sharing your expertise through articles, a blog or other types of content keeps your Web site interesting and up-to-date and helps you demonstrate how you help your customers.
• The developer community has built an enormous number of quality plugins – This enables you to include complex features, such as embedding video, audio, image galleries, flash, and secure email forms without having to know how to write code. This reduces development time, thereby reducing the overall cost of building the site. In my experience, if I search for “wordpress plugin xyz feature”, I usually come up with a plugin that does what I want.
• The business can grow their Web presence as needed – Start with a web site using only the page template and add a blog when you are ready for that option. Businesses don’t feel like they have to know everything about how their site will look to get something done. They can add new areas of pages (if the theme is set up to accommodate), change content and add the blog without a major redesign.
• The site takes less time to set up – The structure of the site can be set up in a much shorter timeframe than developing a web site using html. If the business owner has the time or another resource, they can enter the content themselves, reducing the overall cost of the site to create.
• WordPress templates extend the design capability – You don’t have to have just one page template for the whole site. You can create different templates and apply them to pages to create a customized look for various sections.
• WordPress sites are search engine friendly – You still have to ensure other SEO (search engine optimization) techniques are used, but the structure of the site (page names/categories/tags) are all used to help the search engines index the site better. Two plugins that help with this is All in One SEO Pack and Google Sitemap Generator which creates an XML sitemap supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.
• Your site can be mobile ready with a simple plugin – By installing the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin, you can support mobile devices such as iPhone, Blackberry Storm and other powerful smart phones without a lot of additional development. Mobile support has become a must for all web sites now given the number of people who access the Internet from their mobile device.

The following sites are all created with WordPress. These examples illustrate the creative sites you can achieve using this platform. In addition, even though these sites are a tad complex, they all support mobile devices.

So the bottom line is this: small business owners – take the plunge and get your web site built on WordPress. Many Web developers can do this for you. Find someone who understands the online marketing world and can help you set up a Web presence that helps you grow your business.

For a really comprehensive discussion about building a WordPress Web site, read the blog post Guide to Your First WordPress Web Site by Jerry at Web Hosting: Secret Revealed.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

WordPress, Not Just for Blogs is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

I recently had the pleasure of wrestling a new client’s domain name and web site from their current developer. It is not a pleasant experience but when you ask the developer to make changes and nine weeks later they haven’t even returned a phone call, something has to be done.

But even more disconcerting is when I find out that the domain name is registered under the web developer’s name.

Your domain name is a business asset. To have anyone else hold that name in their possession is a disaster waiting to happen. But many business owners don’t realize the value of those domain names. Keep in mind that if I wanted to buy your business sometime in the future, one of the assets I want is your domain name.

Another thing that concerned me about this situation is that when I initiated the transfer of the domain name to a registrar in the business owner’s name, the web developer told the owner that doing that would mean he would relinquish control of the domain to the registrar. Mis-information like this really annoys me. Are they uninformed or just lying?

Please remember that when you want a web presence, work with someone who understands marketing and business to help you through the process. I’ve sent this message out before and I’m repeating it again because of the importance of being in control of your marketing tools. Today, with marketing depending so heavily on the web, you cannot take chances on someone else being in control of your domain name.

©2012 Masterful Marketing. All Rights Reserved.

Domain Names = Business Asset is an original post from Debra Murphy, Small Business Marketing Coach: Masterful Marketing - Marketing in the New Media World. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Debra on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.