A website is undoubtedly an important tool for any business, big or small. Besides providing information on what a company does and what products or services it offers, a website can help gather information about its visitors so the business could convert them into contacts and possibly into clients later on.

Converting contacts into clients, however, is what most businesses fail to exploit with their presence on the Internet. Many enterprises just put up classic or "static" websites that are simply online brochures that display the company's contact details. If the visitor wants to buy the company's products or service, these static websites give them no choice but to go offline and go to the physical store or office later on to make the purchase.

Today, however, companies can remove this unproductive static from their online shops so they can bring in more clients and, consequently, earn bigger incomes. All they have to do is to add two pieces of support software to their websites: an autoresponder system and an Internet shopping cart.

And local entrepreneurs need not look far to get these items. A Filipino Internet marketing expert, Ian del Carmen, now offers both software solutions through his company Fireball Group of Companies, after successfully selling them to the international market for several years now.

"If you have an offline business and you don't use the available technology to market your business, you're letting the money you could have earned go to waste," del Carmen says. "At this point, the Internet holds a huge percent of the market for any business. So if you have a website and it's not providing additional profits for you, your website isn't really working for your business."

The Fireball Autoresponder and Fireball Cart are part of the company's business automation packages, which are designed to allow entrepreneurs to communicate with their website users and frequent visitors and to make follow-ups with their prospects and proven customers.

"Automation is an important part to any business," del Carmen explains. "The less time you devote to doing small redundant tasks, the more time you will have to devote to primary business activities, such as product development, advertising, customer service, and list building. Specifically, if your prospects are listed on your autoresponder system, they can become your customers in the future. If they already are your customers, and you keep communicating with them, it is more likely that they will become your repeat customers. The beauty of this is, of course, that you benefit a lot from "pocket income" because it increases the value of each customer to your business, especially if he or she becomes a repeat customer."

The Fireball Cart, del Carmen says, is a business centralization and automation system--an online control panel through which an entrepreneur can organize all of his or her customers and affiliate partners in referral marketing. Besides being a virtual cart, the system can also track the firm's online sales, refunds, taxes due, and all of its other financials. "Everything you need to run your [online] business is in there," he says.

Del Carmen explains that these software solutions work best when a business has its own domain name and website, not when an entrepreneur is sharing space on the many social networking sites available online for free.
"It's best to "funnel" traffic from your Multiply, Friendster, Facebook or MySpace sites to your own website, no matter how small it is," he says. "On your own website, you will have full control of your Internet marketing, unlike in those sites where your site can be banned or your free account deactivated."

He says that Fireball Group also offers affordable Web hosting solutions for companies that want to use the Web for its marketing activities. Given the worldwide reach of the Internet, he explains, entrepreneurs are well-advised to begin treating their websites as their biggest store.

"You may have a lot of brick-and-mortar branches, you could be in all the malls, but if you're not tending to your website, you're just wasting a lot of money on what could be considered as your biggest branch with a much bigger market reach," he says.

What is?..

An autoresponder is a program that automatically answers e-mail sent to a website. Often used as an e-mail marketing tool, it is designed to immediately provide information to prospective customers and then make follow-ups with them at preset time intervals. It is usually incorporated into electronic mailing list software to give it the capability to confirm subscriptions, unsubscriptions, and posts as well as to perform other desired tasks.

Shopping cart software is used in electronic commerce to assist people in making purchases online by allowing them to put items they want into a virtual cart. Typically, it calculates the totals for the order, including shipping and handling charges and the associated taxes.

FIREBALL GROUP OF COMPANIES
G/F Feron Building
9590 Kamagong corner Bagtican Streets
San Antonio Village, Makati City
Telephones: (02) 896-0346; (02) 473-8793
E-mail: iandelcarmen@fireballplanet.com
Websites: www.fireballcart.com;
www.fireballautoresponder.com