Marketing Your Business - How to Start a Home-based Computer Repair Business - page 135

payments. This piece requires a secure ordering page and a connection to a bank. Or you
may use more traditional billing techniques either online or through the mail.
n A fulfillment facility to ship packages to customers
n A way to accept returns
n A way to handle warranty claims if necessary
n A way to provide customer service (often through e-mail, online forms, online
knowledge bases, FAQs, etc.)
Visiting your website only to follow links that land on an “under construction” page will
lead your customers away from your store and into the hands of the competition. Whether
you build your webpage yourself or contract it to a website consultant, you must insist that
your site be ready for opening day. Don't trust yourself to “get back to it” or feel that “it
doesn't matter.” Since your website must be complete and ready for business, it should be
your primary focus as your first marketing tool and your best salesperson. Just think about
it . . . a good website will take orders for you twenty-four hours per day. It does not need
to be built as a nationwide service site and if you only want to service customers in your
hometown, you're still going to want to have a site on the web.
Lesson 1: Make Your Website Visible to the Public
When thinking in terms of my business and how I want my customers to find me, I use
the Internet from my customers' point of view. I will go to a search engine and type in
a phrase (otherwise known as a keyword) and scour the results. Give this a try for your-
self. Since you're moving into the computer repair business, try searching for the keyword
“computer repair.” You're going to find hundreds of businesses from all over the country
that work very hard to get their search results on this front page. This is known as SEO
(search engine optimization, see page 166) and is something you're going to want to know
a little bit about. The key is to fine-tune your search query and to remember to think like
your customer. Maybe your new business is in Boulder, Colorado. When you perform your
search on the Internet, use the keyword “Boulder Computer Repair” to see a narrower list
of results and your true local competitors. Then type in “Boulder Computer Service” and
see yet another list of websites. Finally try something obscure and relevant to your busi-
ness. Maybe you're planning on servicing Dell computers. Now search for “Boulder Dell
Inspiron Screen Repair” and you will most likely find an even different set of websites,
some of which might not even be relevant to that keyword right on the front page. Now
that's the kind of keyword you want to focus on in your SEO efforts—because the more
services you can have land on the first page of your search engine, the more people are go-