I’ll be taking part in the FSB Business Advice Evening at the Barnstaple Hotel, Barnstaple from 6.00pm to 8.30pm on Tuesday 16 February 2010, giving a joint presentation with Kevin Woodward of K&V Associates and Multiheat Energy Systems on twitter and social media.

There’ll be lots of government agencies and business advisers present to offer free advice to all business.

We’ll be tweeting from the event and hope to see you there or else say hello to you on twitter and follow #fsbnd

Follow Kevin at @llamakevin

Follow Multiheat Energy Systems at @infraredheating

Follow Zarywacz at @z2zine

Follow me at @robertz

So you have a web site and a blog, but why? What do they do for you?

Most businesses have a web site as a brochure to showcase their products, as a shop to sell their products or as the actual product itself (eg entertainment or other content).

Apart from personal web sites which could have any purpose, most business web sites are created to sell products or services. They can do this using hard sell or very softly, building relationships, which the blog approach is well suited to help.

The test of whether a business web site is successful is not how much traffic it attracts, how many page views or even how long a visitor spends on the site, but whether it leads a target group of potential customers to take a specific step to buy. This could be sending an email or making a phone call. These are the actions we aim to achieve, as we are selling services which we tailor to each specific client’s needs.

In the past weeks we have received such contact from potential clients precisely matching our target profile, which has led to meetings, quotations and ultimately, we hope, actual business.

What sells us to these clients? The words on our web sites. They persuade the client that we are credible and lead to that all important contact so that they approach us rather than thousands of other suppliers also promoting themselves online.

Taking the process forward, meeting, negotiating and quoting depend on our inter-personal skills, but without that initial contact we wouldn’t have these leads.

Preparing your web site so that it not only persuades potential customers to contact you, but ensures they are the customers you want to attract (and not time-wasters) is critical to selling products and services successfully online.

But you have to know what you are setting out to achieve before you start.

Robert and Simon Zarywacz have relaunched no less than seven of their promotional web sites during the May-July period. As well restyling the main z2z web site (z2z.com), the Zarywacz business blog and five “resources” sites have been redesigned and updated.

The five resource sites cover copywriting (copywritingresources.co.uk), proofreading (proofreadingresources.co.uk), public relations (prresources.co.uk), writing (writingresources.co.uk) and document production (editorialresources.co.uk), and provide practical advice as well as details of the professional services provided by Zarywacz.

“The resources web sites all share the same overall design, and this is intentional,” says partner Simon Zarywacz, “Although each site focuses on a single aspect of our corporate communications services, the shared styling ensures the five sites also work together as a whole. As always, our web sites are search engine optimised, which leads to more enquiries.”

z2zine is the new Zarywacz business blog, which is updated regularly, with comments on a wide range of writing, PR and corporate commmunication topics.

“The internet is a key promotional vehicle for us, so we’ve invested the time to improve our online presence,” adds partner Robert Zarywacz, “And what we’re doing for ourselves is precisely what we recommend to every other business. In these uncertain times, it’s wise to control expenditure, but at the same time businesses have to continue marketing and selling if they are to survive, let alone thrive.”