For those of you who have sales representatives in the field, there are probably a list of common standards that you require your representatives to meet.

• Look Professional – How can you expect someone to sell your product if they don’t look the part?
• Speak Professionally – Use proper grammar and if writing proposals/contracts, be able to communicate effectively through your writing.
• Act Professionally – As a direct representative of your company, the sales rep should act in such a way as not to make you look bad.
• Be punctual – Be there when a client expects you to be there.
• Be Knowledgeable – If a clients asks you a question, be prepared with a response.

So, now you are probably asking yourself, “How does this apply to my website?”. As your 24 hour sales representative, your website is in constant communication with potential customers. The great thing about this sales rep is that you have total control over how it looks, speaks, acts, its knowledge, and also its “punctuality”. Let’s go into a little more detail:

• Look Professional – I constantly run into businesses that “have a website”, but it looks as if it were just thrown together. Ask yourself what you would do if you found out that your sales rep was not abiding by the company dress code. You would probably either reprimand or fire them. Why should your website be treated any differently? The fact is, when dealing with web-centric clients (which most are), they are looking at professional websites on a daily basis and in turn, can tell when a lack of effort has been put into the site that they are viewing. Don’t let the way your website looks cause you to lose potential clients!
• Speak Professionally – Although most visitors to your site are not reading every single word of your content, you can bet that they are reading the details of the services being searched for. If when reading they see bad copy, i.e. poor spelling, punctuation, they are more likely to search elsewhere for the product or service that they require.
• Act Professionally – Believe it or not, there are probably many of your websites that are not acting very professionally; this can be a result of poorly written scripts that either cause browser errors or bad performance in regards to load time. Probably found more often is the infamous "broken link", where a potential client clicks on a site link only to find a blank page or even worse, a 404 Page Not Found error. This not only looks unprofessional, but is very aggravating and a quick turn off to your clients.
• Be Punctual – Yes, your website has the ability to be punctual in the sense that it should be there, ready to browse whenever a client wants to pay a visit. If a potential customer finds you on Google only to click on your link and find that your site is down, they will simply move on to the next search result.
• Be Knowledgeable – Content Is King! This applies in a couple of ways:
  1. The more relevant, keyword-rich content that you have, the more the search engines will like you!
  2. If you are able to provide the answers that your clients are looking for, they are more likely to retain your services.

Here are a couple more questions that you should ask yourself:

1. "Where is the first place I go when looking for a business or researching a product/service?"
2. "When is the last time that I picked up the Yellow Pages?"

I can probably take a good guess on the way that most of you answered:

1. The Internet
2. I don’t know

It is now a fact of life that as a business, you must have a professional website in order to deploy an effective marketing strategy. Just remember that your website introduces your business to the world and you only get one chance to make a first impression, so take great care when hiring a company to develop your website.

We at Fat Lynx Media are excited to announce our membership with Retail Alliance.

Founded in 1903, this organization has worked relentlessly to “promote the healthy growth of businesses and trade”, not only by providing support to its member businesses, but also by holding its members to certain ethical standards which in turn, help the consumer. Also, remember your Tax-Free shopping weekends? That’s right; you can thank Retail Alliance for that as well.

To show our appreciation to Retail Alliance and the businesses that work hard to make it a better organization, we are offering a 10% discount on all web development packages! This discount will apply to all fellow members of this organization.