The Blog
Tips and Tricks for Improving Your Small Business Marketing
Tips and Tricks for Improving Your Small Business Marketing
Welcome to the One Stop Site Shop, a unique new company dedicated to helping independent business owners find more customers online. I hope you’ve had the opportunity to take a look around our site, which should give you some idea as to the services we provide. From web design and branding to delivering leads to your inbox and everything in between, we want to be your web marketing department.
But in our first post, I want to discuss why our service took shape the way it did, and how it might help grow your business.
Many of our careers started humbly. In college, web design was not only a way to grow and expand our skill set, but a practical method for padding our beer fund. We connected with our first clients via posts on Craigslist, offering student work at a discounted rate. What we didn’t realize was the sheer demand for these types of services.
We put a focus on helping our clients. For some this meant a standard website, for others, e-commerce. With each success came a desire to do a better job. But a better job often required work beyond basic web design. The success of our clients meant maintenance, promotion, and synchronizing all of their efforts to work together. In short, they needed someone on their team. This became more clear as we ran into some consistent challenges.
The first challenge for independent business owners to acquire a quality web presence was the sheer cost. Fully custom web design was often several thousands of dollars, even when incorporating base templates as a starting point. This was compounded when a client wanted help maintaining the site or increasing their visibility in search engines (SEO). The cost alone kept several would-be clients from getting their project started. So we needed to come up with a way to bring the cost of our service down without sacrificing quality design, mobile-friendliness, and functionality.
The next challenge came after the completion of the site. As a web design firm, we did little to help our clients establish, grow, and connect with their clients or customers. Sadly this tends to be the attitude of most web design firms, hidden behind the false mantra of €œIf you build it, they will come. €
It just doesn’t work like that.
You could have the best site in the world, but without a method for promoting it and encouraging visitors to see your products and services (don’t forget actually convincing them to purchase), the site won’t be successful. So we needed a way to expand and align our interests with our clients, not only helping them to create the site, but to drive it’s ongoing success and visibility.
We used to love self-managed websites. We were staunch believers in clients managing their own websites. After all, the tools and methods for managing a site have dramatically improved over the past 15 years. Clients could quickly upload new information without depending on a web designer to receive, then update, their site.
But after seeing the troubles of self-managed sites, we changed our minds. Clients often didn’t want the hassle of needing to manage one more thing. €œJust take care of it for me, € became a frequently heard term. And if a client were so bold as to try something they didn’t fully understand, they often did damage that necessitated more work (and cost) than just having us make the update in the first place!
So we had an opportunity to create a service, not just a product, that our clients could grow to love and depend upon. The experience needed to be easy and all-inclusive. No more frustration, no more DIY, just a team of experts eager to respond to your needs.
To address these challenges, we created One Stop Site Shop. It is the distillation of everything we have learned about serving our clients and helping them to grow their businesses. It is our vision of what the ultimate in web marketing should look like for independent business owners, and it does so for an awesome price.
Our goal is to help you grow your business, plain and simple. I hope you’ll give us the chance to do just that. Thank you for your interest.