Think you’ll have to pay your programmer a pretty penny to redesign your Web pages? Not true. Simply search the term “free chat room software” and you’ll be able to pick and choose from dozens of options. Every business owner with a bootstrapped budget should check out their free options first to make sure they don’t toast their budget on something that doesn’t work or something they find out they simply don’t need.

• Random SEO Note: I accidentally wrote “free” with a capital “F” and this reminded me of an important SEO tip that might be often overlooked. Search engines actually distinguish between capitalized and lower-case words. While one doesn’t necessarily carry more clout over the other, it may help boost your pages if you include both capitalized and lower-cased keywords in your meta tag information for proper nouns, acronyms, etc.

Today’s chat rooms are even easier to integrate, featuring user-friendly software that is embedded directly into your website. If you have access to your website code, then you can plug this in yourself. If not, it shouldn’t take your programmer long at all to do this, so make sure they’re not overcharging you for this simple task.

Let Them Have Their Chat

All proud business owners will surely be eager to jump right into these chat sessions on their website. But the main goal of your chat room should be prospect-to-prospect or prospect-to-customer. If you’re looking for the opportunity to direct topics of conversation and really get involved with discussions then we suggest you also set up a separate forum as an added resource for your website.

Remember, today’s Internet users are a bunch of doubting Thomases, and rightly so with all the scams going on. If you jump into the chat pool it’ll be like those parents who think they’re cool, milling around the pool party until they’ve thoroughly embarrassed their children and all their friends are too scared to talk about the things they normally do without a parental presence.

Importance of Moderation

Although you’ll want to promote freedom of speech in your chat rooms you will still want to be sure you’re moderating comments. First, check your settings to see if you can automatically flag or block messages with vulgarity (some allow you to manually type in words you want blocked).

Second, you’ll want to see that people aren’t outright knocking your business. However, make your chat room too squeaky clean and some chat room visitors are sure to feel that the whole thing is a setup; a false environment to dupe people into buying. Instead, concentrate on removing the truly malicious and leaving in reasonable suggestions for improvement.

Accomplish these things and you’ll provide the perfect virtual environment for your prospects to talk themselves into writing you a check.