1.  Don't Be A Beautiful Wallflower Website

A wallflower website is all form and no function and doesn’t serve a purpose.

Creating a beautiful and non-functional website is a common mistake that small business owners make when hiring an inexperienced designer who has no marketing expertise, or when signing up for a 'free' website.

If you have no mission statement, specific goals or follow-up workflows associated with your content, there is no marketing action!

2.  Make More Than An Online Brochure

In today's web ecosystem, you need to compel visitors to return. The best online marketing strategy these days is to pull your customers, not push your materials.

To compete, your site needs to be filled with interaction.  It needs to be educational, with new content added frequently.

3.  Don't Pay The Kid On Your Block To Put Up Your Website

This is the flip side of the Beautiful Wallflower Website. This site looks homemade; it’s inconsistently designed, amateur and gives visitors a bad first impression.

A messy, poorly designed site leaves a trail of broken links, grammatical errors and embarrassing typos.

Don’t represent your small business as a shoddy, unprofessional company.  Would you want to do business with this person?

4.  Be Organized

In general, you have .5 second (yes, that's one-half of a second) to engage your visitor's interest.  If your site is not cleanly and efficiently organized to guide your visitor or potential customer to what they need right now, they're outta there.  We've all done it.

5.  Don't Be Annoying

Avoid over-using animation, annoying music.  Maybe avoid any music that repeats each time you load a high-use page, or that just keeps on playing.  And playing.  Remember: the music I like might not be the music you like.  And you might be my next customer.

Avoid aggressive pop-ups. Remove anything that causes irritation and does not lead to an action step, or that gets in the way of an action step.

6.  SEO Is Still Important

If your website isn’t search engine friendly, then you’re losing money every second.  And SEO is really easy to employ.  Of course, it's easier if your site has been designed and set up properly to begin with, but no matter how it has been designed, you can likely take some very effective, very easy steps and put best practice in place for yourself. SEO is not rocket science, it's just good practice.  Really.

Learn about titles, meta-tags, keywords, back-links, on and off-page optimization.  It's easier than it seems, and your understanding will pay big dividends.

7.  Convert! Convert! Convert!

Your site will move to the head of the class if you educate, inspire and motivate your visitors.

Convert your visitors to interested sales leads so you have a chance to convert your leads to customers.

If your website isn’t making money for you, then it’s probably not working.