Here are 8 ideas to help your website produce inquiries and sales.

1- Your website is your worldwide profile, the only impression you may ever get to make. If you are not proud of it, fix it.

2- Your website should differentiate your business and reveal your capabilities in language customers understand. Develop your selling points with specialists like engineers and salesmen. Then refine them into short, business-like sentences that are easy to read. Include email links so that people can reach you easily.

3- Your website should project the personality of your business. If you manufacture things you shouldn’t look like an ad agency.

4- Surf the Internet to see what your competition is doing. Respond accordingly.

5- Your corporate video should be on your website. Then a phone call or email conversation can launch your video in your customer’s office, immediately. “Are you in front of your computer? Go to www.mycompany.com and click on the video link. Now you can see what we do.”

6- All your brochures can be posted on your website as PDF files. No postage, instant availability, printable, 24-7. Portable Document Files. Use what you’ve already paid for.

7- If a customer sends you an email through a link on your site they should receive an auto-response from you as well as a personal response within 24 hours. “Your email has been received, thank you. We will respond personally within 24 hours.”

8- Talk to your customers in the best language you can afford. Good writing is mandatory. Don’t expect a technician to create powerful sentences. Most likely, “It ain’t gonna happen.”