Making the Internet make your business successful

Tonia Speir and Crystal Street helped give a small group of Marion County business owners hope that the Internet can offer them new sales and more money.

Speir, president of C.A.S.E. Solutions, a full-service advertising and marketing firm in Myrtle Beach, and photo journalist Street, provided information and answered questions about how the Internet can make local businesses successful.The two-hour E-Commerce workshop, sponsored by the Mullins Chamber of Commerce, the Marion Chamber of Commerce, the Clemson Extension and the Marion County Economic Development Commission, was the final one in a series of three aimed at helping buiness owners of small enterprises.

The workshop covered online "social media," from blogging and twittering to having pages on facebook and building and managing the business' Web site. Speir used an information discussion and question and answer session to make the workshop relevent to the attendee's needs. From using a Web site as a way to showcase products to using the site as a stanalone business that sells products online, the two explained software pakages that create Web sites and said each site and use of the Web should be tailored to the business.

You are not your customer, Speir said. The better Web sites, she added, keep their steps as quick and simple as possible, "The site must be easy to navigate." Business owners at the meeting offer products from works of art, to floor coverings, fromfurniture to construction services, and more.

It's possible, Speir added, that a business should want to use the Web site to create interest in a business, service or product, but not "give everything" online. Street told the entrepreneurs that when shooting pictures to use on their Web sites, "daylight is the best light." She offered other settings and tools and told of ways to diffuse light to give a "no shadow" effect where light is evenly distributed.
You don't want a lot of distraction in your pictures or on your sites, Street said.

Speir added, "Be careful whatyou pair with your products."

"As the Internet grows and develops and as a business grows," Speir said, you have to decide if you want to reinvest in a new site or put bandaids on the old one. It's important, she said, to make good decisions that can be built on along and along.

It's possible, Street and Speir said, that "open source" programs available for free online, which are downloadable, are sufficient for a business or organization's site. "Figure out what you want to do and start somewhere and then move on," Speir said.

Besides paying to be there, the best way to be at the top of a Google search, she said, is to carefully craft content so it its searchable. "There's a whole lot of learning what not to do," she joked when showing why some Web sites are not as good as they could be.

In the world of Internet, Speir said, you want to be "viral." You want to be talked about and passed on from one consumer or customer to another.

Street said one of the effective tools when using social media as a way to get the word out about yourself or your product is to "burn" what you doing, especially when blogging or twittering, from one site to another. She recommends feedburner.com She and Speir also recommended googleanalytics as a way to track the Web business on the particular site.

Beth Stedman, with Clemson University, said she hopes to offer a social media workshop, with Speir's and Street's help. To learn more about C.A.S.E and what they offer, all Speir at or visit www.CASE.com .