“Rebuilding Small Towns on the Web” is the Linkytown business vision. Like our customers, Linkytown’s founders come from small towns from around the USA. And, like you, a few years ago we got into small town business. Unlike you, a little “nerdiness” had made us Internet users. Imagine our shock when we found that just because we were Internet “friendly”, we weren’t getting results from the website we established.
We considered this a big deal because we knew a lot of facts that you probably either already know or suspect:
- Consumers, organizations, and businesses ever more frequently use the Internet to find solutions, make purchase, and educate themselves. As small town business owners, we feel we should be part of this.
- More and more often consumers, organizations, and businesses won’t call until they’ve seen some information about a business on the Internet. We are sure we can’t afford to be left out.
- Print advertising is losing its effectiveness. A few weeks ago we even saw a report that the print newspaper won’t exist in 10 years.
- Our target customers increasingly pay less attention to mailers even as it grows more expensive to use. Plus, the new 41 cent postage rate is killing us and we expect you don’t enjoy it either.
Unfortunately, even knowing all this information, Linkytown’s discovered what you already understand. The Internet has left small towns, small town groups, small town businesses, and small town needs behind.
Now for us, our business happened to be in a town where times were tough. Much of the town population was away fighting the War on Terror. Customers were few and far between. At first, we were too busy putting out brush fires in the business and didn’t want to take the time to consider what the Internet might do for us—a lot like most of you. However, revenue pressures cause drastic actions. Soon we focused on the Internet as the best place to find the customers we needed. The results have been tremendous. We have more customers. We sell more products. And, our customers like us better than they did before.
Our experience uncovered a lot of important facts that when changed to action quickly improved our ability to reach customer. We discovered things like:
- The search engines (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) can't tell you are around the corner from your customer. Google doesn't destinguist between local business and someone selling the same product or service halfway aroud the world;
- The national advertisers could bury us nationally, but locally we had a lot more punch with customers than they did. The key was making the second point (local importance) more important than the first;
- We could advertise using the same tricks national companies use on the web and win customers too;
- Google, the largest search engine, allows you to post your address on their Google Maps tool and people will see where your business is visually on the map;
- There is a specific way to write a web page that improves how the Search Engines find and rank you; and
- The number of folks who look at your page changes your rank and that there are ways to use this to your advantage even for small businesses, and the number of businesses, organizations, groups connecting to you and vice versa are important to Internet search engines.
Finally, Linkytown realizes that as a small business owner you aren’t interested in becoming and Internet expert. Because of this, we provide some basic services to keep having a site simple including:
- First, our service is cheap. In fact if you only want a very basic text page you may only need our free service. If you need more than this, the cost of your web site is still inexpensive—our entry service is only $20 per month plus a one time $35 setup and includes 5 pages. Most web pages on the Internet are only 5 pages. If you need more, we offer more, but the cost remains modest.
- Second, you don’t need a web designer. Our websites allow you to self create your pages using simple word processing and administrative skills you probably already have in your office. Yes, your site can look like this example with no outside "nerd" in the process.
And, if you aren’t comfortable writing or setting up the page yourself we offer:
- A template of what to write in each of the main pages we suggest;
- A list of commonly used additional pages often included on websites. Descriptions and templates for these are coming soon;
- To build your initial site for you for $150. All you have to do is tell us about the business information you want by filling in each page of the page template; and
- If you aren’t confident in your in-house skills, we offer a $150 training package that includes 3x 1 hour onsite training visits or training via webinar when a trainer isn’t nearby to teach you how to operate, build, and maintain your website. Additionally, you receive two hours of training call support.
- Third, we build in much of the search engine optimization large national sites use automatically into each and every website automatically and even use part of your monthly fee to market all the businesses on our site. You don’t need to learn “diddly” about Internet marketing.
Linkytown is here to close the local gap and create local online presence for your small town business, organization, or group. Most importantly, we are making the experience easy and rewarding.
