Online business in today's marketplace has many advantages that the small business has never had in the past.
The challenge for the business owner is to take advantage of these advances and use them to grow his business in ways that direct competitors either don't know about or are too lazy to set up.
The advances are only an advantage if they're put to good use. That's why they are so powerful to you - because you know the strategies and can implement them into your business.
It's amazing the number of productive and creative marketing ideas there are available for every small business, that are freely and openly shared and discussed online, but that so many business owners never think to include in their business.
One such strategy is the inclusion of a free, color catalog or product brochure at the web site that highlights the company's offerings.
Here's the real advantage of developing such a marketing piece. It can be put online as a sales aid and filled with lots of good and valuable information besides just product descriptions and pricing.
You might include such "goodies" as a product planning guide, tips for best use, color or size selection charts, how to care for your product, a side-by-side comparison of other competitor's offerings, and hints on maintenance or easy customer tune-ups.
Your company catalog can then be made available as a downloadable color bonus guide that customers will print out at home and keep handy just in case they ever have questions or need help with your products.
Your catalog will be viewed as a valuable information piece that should be kept for future reference.
The best way to produce such a piece is with a desktop combination of word processing software and a graphics editor to handle the images. You will probably want to get or borrow a digital camera to take product photos.
You could pay a publishing service to do all the work for you - to design and create your catalog, but for the typical one-person business that alternative is way too expensive.
When the catalog is ready to publish I would suggest doing so in .pdf format which is universally readable by both PCs and MACs. The .pdf catalog can then be uploaded to the web server and made available for download.
The customer can either keep the catalog on his computer hard drive or print it out (in color or B/W) for easy reference or later viewing.
The expense of delivery is nothing. Think about what it used to cost a small business to have a color catalog created, published and mailed to interested customers. The Internet makes is all possible and at a fraction of the cost of yesterday's business.
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