If you want your sandwich business to survive, it’s probably a bad idea to close for lunch. Lunchtime is when you are likely to sell the most sandwiches, so you need to be there and ready, for when the hungry masses arrive.
Before you laugh at a sandwich shop closing for lunch
Consider this: What happens to 99% of business websites, as soon as they get hit with a lot of traffic?
Answer: The site becomes either too slow for people to use or the site collapses under all the traffic!
At the point where their content marketing or advertising is pulling in the most potential customers, many small business owners are pretty much closed for business! They often invest huge amounts of time and money, trying to drive potential customers to their websites, without making sure the doors are open when people arrive.
Closed to traffic
I was prompted to write this post after trying to access a site, which some a social media big shot had tweeted. He has over 200,000 followers and by the time I clicked the link, the site was already inaccessible to me and probably hundreds of others. I know this will have lost that site a lot of visitors, because when he tweeted about the launch of my creative thinking site, there were hundreds of people simultaneously on the site, for hours. That site, like this, is on dedicated hosting and was able to remain speedy and reliable throughout. For those interested, my hosting is provided (and sponsored) by Webfusion, though I was a very happy paying customer of theirs, long before they sponsored the blog.
Here’s why this matters
Through a lot of effective marketing and some solid launch content, I managed to attract tens of thousands of visitors on the first week of my creative thinking site. That traffic earned me my first few hundred subscribers, social media shares and back-links. This got the site established fast. None of that could have happened, if the server the site was on had gone down or been too slow to use, once the initial few hundred people arrived on that first day! The momentum would never have been created.
I would have been like a sandwich shop, closed for lunch.
Considering the cost
Don’t leave yourself in a position, where your site can’t cope with a retweet from a social networking star or a rush of traffic from a viral blog post. As with my example a moment ago, those kinds of targeted traffic spikes are often the launchpad to a quantum increase in your sales, readership numbers, subscribers and customer inquiries.
If you are serious about your marketing and business development, build the foundation of your online presence on the strongest, most reliable hosting you can afford. Cheap hosting can be extremely costly in missed opportunities.