Web Presence as a Profit Center

Your business has changed over the years, as new opportunities presented themselves, and the lay of the land is altered, ever so gradually.
As businesses evolve, they shed unprofitable bits and chase profitable ones. Then they discover that profit also comes in the refinement of what they do to the simplest, most cost effective means possible. They move towards ease of business, and scale themselves according to multiplicants of the simplest unit of production. The margin in this sort of profit building can afford to be smaller, as there is less risk in doing what you know repetitively than doing what you don't now and again. I call this the Money Machine Principle.
Eventually, a money machine can be mechanised in such a way as to allow it to run constantly with little or no interference.
A well designed web presence, in most industries, can become an integral part of the Money Making Machine principle. The sales process in any business is expensive - your web presence can, over time, become the powerhouse of the sales centre, with less staff and lower overheads than virtually any other means of generating business.
But a web presence, when properly thought out, also contributes in other ways to the bottom line. It can serve as a portal for communication for your workforce, a CRM, an e-tail corridor, a data gathering tool, and a shopfront/front office with the ability to receive payment, run accounts and take orders.
In this blog, I'm going to get into the fundamentals of how to plan, implement and grow a web presence for any small to medium sized business cheaply and effectively, and then to make that web presence pay for itself. I'll be going on to how to create a profit center from a web presence for a number of industry types.

So stay tuned, for more good, practical tips. Until next time.