Small Business Marketing: An Online Focus
Unlike big business, small business owners cannot just splurge money on brand building and marketing. Most small business marketing strategies need to be result-oriented and cost-effective. Some effective ideas for small business marketing are as follows:
Small Business Marketing Plan
You should first find out your target audience and what’s the best way to go about reaching that audience and only once you have this information devise a marketing strategy. Then it’s a matter of weighing up the various ROI potentials of the different marketing mediums. This of course may mean some trial and error, but sometimes it’s our failures that help us move towards creating business success.
Brand Building and Small Business Marketing
When it comes to small business marketing, brand building probably isn’t at the top of the list of small business objectives. Nonetheless no matter what size business you are running creating awareness of your products and services is always desirable. In terms of bang for your buck online media produces the best results, however this is still a very new area for many business owners.
That said the most cost effective way to build your brand as a small business is to just create happy customers that are willing to spread the word about your business on your behalf. It’s also important to note that with the advent of the internet it’s never been easier for your customers to share their opinion with hundreds if not thousands of web browsers. So doing good business still is the best way to build your brand.
On the topic of the web, by opting for a small business marketing strategy that focuses on online methods of advertising you can generally produce much cheaper leads than other marketing mediums. Building a website related to your product or service and filling it with useful content about them is the first step of getting involved with the online mediums of promoting your business.
Small Business Internet Marketing Ideas
Some common business internet marketing techniques used when it comes to promoting a small business website include:
- Search Engine Optimisation: Also known as SEO, this focuses on increasing the rank of your company’s website on the major search engines which can produce significantly greater amounts of relevant traffic to your site.
- Pay Per Click (PPC): PPC is where business bid on keywords and pay for ads to be placed alongside the organic search results. It provides businesses with the opportunity to gain quick exposure in search engines without waiting months and months for SEO campaigns to take effect. Though this can get quite expensive and it’s important to create highly efficient campaigns that target the right people searching for the right terms.
- Email Marketing: Through email marketing you can keep all your customers aware of your latest services and products. This is one of the cheapest and most effective small business marketing methods given the high propensity for satisfied customers to buy from you again if contacted.
- Social Media: Joining various social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and others is an emerging marketing trend that is suitable for some small businesses. More than just a business marketing idea, making use of social media profiles is often a great way to get customer feedback.
- Affiliate Marketing: If you’re not interested in spending loads of time finding out how to effectively market your products and services on the internet, then you could potentially offer an affiliate program where third parties will market your products and services for you in exchange for a commission.
For small business marketing strategies to be effective prudent planning is critical. This is also applies with online marketing and in many cases it would make for a good investment to at least do some of your business marketing planning with an internet marketing consultant. In Australia, you can find good consultants in all major cities like Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, etc. They will be able to help you build and effective strategy for your small business marketing.
Small Business Website Design
Devising a well-structured plan is the first step in every small business website design process. The best way is to approach a new small business website design is to first decide what are the objectives of your website, what kind of products or services is the site going to provide and what sort of budget you have available. After determining all these factors you will be better positioned to begin your small business website designer search.
There is no shortage of business website designers in Australia. All the major cities of Australia, including Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide etc boast a large number of website design companies. Of course finding a designer is often easier than making sure they are going to produce you a quality website for your small business.
With that in mind here are some tips and things to consider when it comes to small business website design:
Keep It Simple and User Friendly
When it comes to small business website design, simple, clean and focussed designs prove to be most effective as they are more user friendly and create a low friction environments for potential customers. Things to avoid are harsh colours, heavy flash, extremely graphics-intensive designs, overcrowding of elements and trying to sell everything at once.
Website Navigation: Keep it obvious and logical
Website navigation is critical in minimising visitor abandonment and allowing them to get to where they want to be as quickly as possible. It’s important to remember that when it comes to small business website designs, if a visitor cannot navigate a website effectively they’ll become frustrated which is a big problem when they are only a Google search away from becoming your competition’s customer.
With this in mind, the navigation should be simple, clear and obvious so that the visitors can find it easily and probably more important is that the visitors can get to the page they want to be on in the fewest possible clicks without getting lost or frustrated.
Content: It’s what visitors value
It is the content of your website that search engines rank and what visitors come to your site for. It divulges more details about your products or services and helps inform them as to whether you are the company they want to give their hard earned money to.
Well written content grabs more visitors attention and encourages them to further explore your site helping to build customer familiarity with your business. Content helps start and build customer relationships, which will help bring in a lot of business, so content integration into your website should be a very important consideration.
At the same time search engines love content, particularly search engine optimised content, making SEO one of the most critical elements of a small business website design. SEO friendly content basically means that content that is easily indexable for the search engines and being viewed by the search engines as being of high potential value to their searchers.
SEO: Design your site for search engines as well as people
SEO or search engine optimisation is argued by many to one of the biggest factors in the success of most business websites. As such, your small business website design should always be considering the SEO implications of design elements. So make sure that your site is not only designed for visitors, but also designed for search engines. It’s important to realise that SEO is a specialisation in itself and often it is prudent to opt for a professional SEO consultant to consult on the SEO of your website design while it’s still in the design phase.
Conversion Optimisation Strategy: Traffic is great; but sales are better
At the end of the day websites should be working assets within a business, not just a billboard to show off some design flare. So it’s important that the business objectives are not lost in a web designer’s vision of creating a visual masterpiece. Remember to integrate prominent calls to action through all of your pages, this includes prominent positioning of business phone numbers, obvious email contact forms, content that is not just designed to rank well search engines but also designed to turn those visitors into leads or sales. Both the design and content of the site should be looking to minimise elements that cause buying friction as well as look to address the concerns of your potential customers.
If you consider and implement these elements into your small business website design you will be taking a number of steps towards improving your online business’s effectiveness.
The Value Of Internet Marketing Consultants
In recent times advertising of products or services through the Internet has become a major focus for small business. However, the success of such campaigns relies on the strategic application of an internet marketing plan. Obviously if a small business lacks the in house experience to spearhead an online marketing campaign then an Internet marketing consultant will greatly aid the success of any online marketing plan.
Responsibility of an Internet Marketing Consultant
An internet marketing consultant improves the likelihood of the successful application of an internet marketing strategy by performing various tasks including;
- Planning a business’s online marketing strategy: Through highlighting the strategic objectives of a business and how best to achieve this objectives via online opportunities. The marketing plan will not only take into consideration business goals, but also budget constraints.
- Market research: One of the many advantages of the internet is the volume of market information that is available which experienced internet marketing consultants can utilise to better set and reach business goals. An internet marketing consultant’s analysis and market research might include keyword research, volume of searches, your website, competitors websites, pay per click value, link building strategies and other opportunities.
- Building a website: It is essential to make a website well optimised for both search engines and user friendly, yet at the same time has the main objective of achieving business goals. An internet marketing consultant can help with finding the right balance.
- Common Internet marketing strategies: The success of Internet marketing strategy is normally focussed on driving more traffic to a website and then optimising the conversion rates of that traffic once it has reached the site. Common methods of driving additional traffic to business website include, search engine optimisation, pay per click advertising, email marketing, viral marketing, social media optimisation, link building and affiliate marketing.
- Competitors’ website analysis: Often the most valuable information an Internet marketing consultant can provide is the analysis of your competitor’s websites. When it comes to internet marketing the name of the game is being better than your competitors. A few positions higher in the search engine rankings and a better conversion rate makes an exponential difference online.
Internet Marketing Consultants – A Must Have for Small Business
Whether it’s about promoting their products or services online, getting traffic to your websites or ranking well on major search engines, an expert internet marketing consultant can make all these things possible and will help differentiate your business from your online competitors and leverage your current business assets.
Australian Internet Marketing Consultants
In Australia, a number of expert Internet marketing consultants and firms are based in the major cities like Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth etc. The rates charge by consultants obviously varies according to their services and expertise. Whilst there are internet marketing consultants that offer cheap rates, when it comes to internet marketing you tend to get more than what you pay for, and remember that in many cases small improvements can yield exponential rewards.
In Conclusions
Hiring Internet marketing consultant will help you analyse the various aspects of your online business, evaluate your needs and devise an innovative strategic plan that suits your business objectives and budget. This strategic plan will enable you to drive more traffic, for less expenditure and will strengthen your online presence.
The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss – Book Review
The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss is one of my most highly recommended “must read” business/lifestyle books. Whilst it’s extremely applicable for online entrepreneurs it holds great value for anyone who wants to streamline their life to create time for what’s really important.
The book is all about lifestyle design and focuses on how to maximise working/career/business success whilst living the life you dreamed; you know, the one you told yourself was the reason why you got up in the morning, the same one that motivates you to grind through your day at work so you can afford that holiday or early retirement.
I mentioned above, it’s particularly relevant to online entrepreneurs (given that our business can be conducted anywhere in the world) but it hugely valuable for anyone ho what’s to know what’s truly possible when it comes to coordinating an automated business. And before you say, “but I’m currently working a 9 to 5 for someone else” let me assure you this book was written with a broad audience in mind, which includes you.
Core 4HWW Concept
The core concept of his book centers on Tim’s DEAL strategy of define, eliminate, automate and liberate.
- Define – define what exactly you want.
- Eliminate – eliminate distractions, focus on being effective not efficient through the use of 80/20 principles, learn to say no, learn to operate on a low information diet.
- Automate – setup automated systems, outsource what you can’t automate and remove yourself from the production process.
- Liberate – pursue frequent mini retirements rather than end of life retirements, leverage your relative income versus your absolute income.
Tim tackles the traditional myths of how work should be conducted and has opened up the eyes of hundreds of thousands of readers to the possible of lifestyle design.
Overall 4 Hour Work Week Review
As I have already mentioned my recommendation is that this book is a “must read” for everyone and I give it 5/5.
Provide Value Through Cost Effectively Solving People’s Problems
So many people talk about what’s most important when it comes to the success of a business website and internet marketing campaign, but like most things in life it all boils down to one thing.
Providing value for your visitors through cost effectively solving their problems.
People have problems. We all have problems. Every one of us pays good money to solve problems, whether it’s buying groceries to eat or buying a porsche to build esteem, we pay to have our problems solved every day.
Truly successful businesses, products, people, websites, etc all do the same thing – they cost effectively solve people’s problems.
Example of Cost Effective Problem Solving
Google costs nothing but connects people with the information they want in seconds – talk about providing massive value. Amazon is a one stop shop for thousands and thousands of products, which can be delivered at discount prices directly to your door without leaving the comfort of your own computer chair.
Many of you reading this are subscribed to this site because of the valuable content I cost effectively provide you. Of course the information on this blog is free in a monetary sense, but it costs you a couple of moments of your time and attention with each post and that’s worth something to most people. This is the very reason why I’m committed to providing truly valuable information because I know everyone who has subscribed to this blog highly values their time and if I waste it I’ll lose them as a subscriber.
Communicating You Provide Great Value For Money Is Key
It’s always good to reflect on the simple fact that money never leaves the consumers hands unless they perceive they are going to get “value for money”. So before you SEO your site, before your optimise conversion paths, before send your marketing emails, first make sure that you are providing “great value” in the eyes of the consumer by cost effectively solving problems that are important to them.
Knowing this, you need to ask yourself, when a visitors comes to my site can they quickly and accurately conclude that you are going to be able to help solve their problems at a good price? Because if they can’t you just lost yourself a potential sale/lead/subscriber/ad click.
It’s one thing to be able to solve people’s problems, but you win sales by being able to “cost effectively” solve people’s problems. This principle is the life blood of business. People have problems, but in the majority of cases they can solve them themselves, but of course this would be highly inefficient if a business can solve the problem for you more cost effectively.
So remember that the foundation of the success of your business website’s marketing campaign is centred on you being able to communicate to your visitors that you will cost effectively solve their problems.
Why You Should Partner With The New Business Heavyweights
This is post is for all the small to medium business owners who are in the process of dipping their toes into the world of internet marketing.
With the advent of the internet a new class of business entrepreneur has emerged, the resourceful, independent, flexible, strategically scalable internet marketers. Many of these new internet entrepreneur are now not only staking a claim in digital industries, but are increasing moving into the traditional business realms of local business products and services. I’m hearing more and more stories of local businesses moving online to chase their customers only to realise that a new exotic competitor has already staked a claim. The internet entrepreneur.
Who Are These New Internet Entrepreneurs
Many of these new internet entrepreneurs that are moving into localised business are affiliate marketers, seasoned SEO experts, domainers and bloggers who are looking to leverage their talents and skills in the less competitive yet highly lucrative waters of localised business as a result of the increasing competition in their former markets.
These internet marketers have their new breed of marketing skills, knowledge and know how coupled with their often large and leverageable portfolios of developed sites, refined strategies and premium domains. They are the cutthroat competitors that have risen to the top in the most competitive market in the world – the web. With few barriers to entry many have already made their first moves and hold key positions within local markets leaving traditional business owners scrambling for market share.
Whilst these new competitors won’t offer great products or services they understand the web better than traditional business owners which will ultimately force many incumbent business owners to negotiate buyouts of these new internet entrepreneurs to climb back into the new economy, but this won’t come cheap.
Don’t Bite The Hand That Leads
I , as have some of my associates, have already had a few run ins with misinformed business owners and their threats of “stay out of my industry” remarks as they cling to their former business models, but unknowingly to many of these businesses owners, it’s them walking onto the turf of the new business heavyweights. However these new internet entrepreneurs are not the enemy, they are just the leaders of the pack, and in many cases could be supremely valuable allies in the migration into the online world of business.
It’s important to note that many of these internet entrepreneur are simply flowing the money trail and don’t harbour intentions of participate in local business long term. As such businesses should be looking to work with rather than compete with these internet entrepreneurs. They have a lot to teach traditional businesses owners about the new world of the web, but their time valuable and the best of them are not available for hire so you need to work with them or be ready to pay a large price for their slice of the pie.
If You Can’t Beat Em; Join Em
All over the internet, marketers are talking of the money that can be made working in partnership with local business. Local businesses would be wise to seek these opportunities and find neutral ground, because as mentioned earlier many of the best in this industry are not available for hire. However, the internet entrepreneurs achilles heel to their dream of making millions, is their lack of ability to deliver tangible products, which for most business is their biggest strength. Out of which perfect partnerships are born.
Last year my father finally decide to call me in to have a chat about his own business website design. Initially I was only consulting on the matter of selecting the best web design company to redesign his site. However over a few conversation on what was really possible in regards to his online marketing campaign a collaborative partnership was formed.
The Potential Of Partnership
Now without sounding too full of myself, I was able to single handily take his online source of leads from 3% of his business per month to 43% within a few short months, investing no more than a couple of hours a week. This makes a massive difference to a company whose yearly revenues were already in excess of 10 million a year. Of course my father paid quite handsomely for the performance, but like most things in life you get what you pay for.
Now there are many who would argue that businesses can compete with these internet entrepreneurs by hiring their own SEO firms or inhouse online marketers, but once again you get what you pay for, and in my opinion the biggest argument against hiring an SEO or web marketing firm is if they were so good at it why aren’t they doing it for themselves. Many of these firm apply a systemized optimisation process which will yield “some” results depending on the competitiveness of the industry, but at the end of the day the difference between ranking 1st and 10th is 1400% so companies that promise you they’ll get you on the first page aren’t even worth the phone call. You need someone whose got some skin in the game and is looking to rank nothing short of “as high as profitably possible”.
So the moral of the story is going forward many small to medium businesses looking to capture there own bit of the online pie may need to be looking for collaborative partnerships with the new business heavyweights (the internet entrepreneur) rather than merely hiring low end SEO services.
Why Your Conversion Optimisation Is More Important Than SEO
ShoeMoney
I get emails every day from people who rank in the search engines for their keywords but are not getting any leads from it. When I send them a list of like 20 things to do to improve their conversion they tell me “but could this affect my keyword ranking?”.Annoying…
Continuing on from the previous post – Is Your SEO Focus Destroying Your Sales Conversions? – too many online marketing campaigns are focused on SEO as their internet marketing solution rather than just a small part of the equation.
Diminishing Returns of SEO Optimisation
Whilst the click through rate difference between 1st and 10th can be as much as 1500% there comes a point where SEO won’t yield the return on investment that optimising a site design for conversions or integrating optimised landing pages into PPC campaign will. Often refining the average site design to convert better can produce just as significant a ROI, if not even more so, than SERP ranking improvements in addition to giving you a longer term strategic advantage over unoptimised competitors in paid traffic mediums.
Over Reliance On Google
Also far too often people forget that Google is a law unto itself, it’s not obligated to rank your site for anything, and if all your eggs are in the SEO basket be prepared for some tears and a business model break down. If your online success is over 70% dependant on Google that’s a single point of failure if I have ever seen one. Now I’m not saying Google and SEO shouldn’t make up a very important chunk of your online marketing campaign, but it’s not the be all end all that many SEO companies sell. Rather it should be seen as the very healthy bonus to an online marketing campaign.
Poor Conversion Optimisation Helps Your Competitors
Aside from over reliance on SEO and Google, the reality is with your competition just a click away users don’t waste time trying to work your site out or spend too long trying to find the products and services they are looking for. They literally conclude in a couple of short seconds whether you have what they want. Failing this test they will be browsing your competitor’s site seconds later.
So not only are you missing conversion opportunities you’re giving your competitors a bite at the cherry, not to mention that in our fast paced world empirically it’s been shown that customers first point of contact is many times more likely to make the sale than following points of contact. So making it simple to get find the information they need then proceed down a sales funnel and/or get in contact with you is vitally important.
You need to remember that in the world of business, sales are more important than potential prospects. So keep your website focused on best serving your customer, rather than focusing on primarily serving Google.
Plan For The Future Of SEO
The web is the most competitive place for businesses to compete and having a site unoptimised for conversion will hurt you more in the long run than having a site that is unoptimised for search engines. With Google’s algorithm constantly evolving many top search engine marketing experts are speculating that websites that engage their users as well as continue to build an aging link profile are gaining a first mover advantage if/when Google decides to build user based data into their their ranking algorithm.
Internet Marketing Darwinism – Survival Of The Fittest
With SEO many feel search engine traffic is free therefore conversation optimisation of it isn’t essential, but the reality is every visitors that leaves without buying, subscribing or clicking an ad is a missed opportunity that you may not get again, or worse is gone to the competition. If your competitors utilise their opportunities better than you, it doesn’t matter if you out rank them today because Darwinism is alive on the web and the fit, strong and flexible organisations and individuals using best practices will eat into your market share and increase user retentions which will indirectly lead to eating into your rankings well over the longer run.
Sell Because People Want To Buy
Many site owners fear being overly focused on conversion optimisation or being “too aggressive” in selling themselves, but at the end of the day the strong will rise to the top and weak will be filtered out of the web like any other competitive system.
Plus when was the last time you visited a random site and went “man I’d love to be friends with the owner of this site?” That’s right, never. Your visitors don’t want to be your friends, they want you to help solve their problems.
And when was the last time you said “wow this site provides great value, but I hate the fact that the owner had the nerve to place ads on his site.” Once again, rarely.
So remember that people have come to your site to solve a problem, make that as easy as possible for them, and if you can cost effectively solve that for them, you’ve created a win win situation which is the principle under which business is done. Don’t be afraid of selling to people who want to do business with you and don’t get caught up on SEO – it’s not the primary part of your business.
Your Actions Convert Better Than Your Wisdom
My apologies for the crappy title, it was meant to be a play on words of the old saying “actions speak louder than words” but upon reflection I don’t think it worked well.
Anyway… the point of this post is that, like many, you probably already know a phenomenal amount of practical and useful information when it comes to internet marketing and all its disciplines. Yet despite this great wealth of knowledge the success, as you envision it, has yet to eventuate. If this is the case with you, the chances are the biggest hurdle you have yet to jump is simply applying what you already know; and then applying it again on a bigger scale.
All Success Involves Taking Action
Taking action is at least 50% of the battle. Yet somewhere along the line we seem to justify to ourselves that lack of action isn’t the real problem; the real problem has to be that we haven’t found the one critical element that will supercharge our online fortunes.
Truth be told, even if you were in the top 1% of any field of expertise, “knowing” what to do still only makes up a tiny fraction of any “success story”, and at the end of the day…
The cost of opportunities lost through inaction outweigh the cost of mistakes made through imperfect action ten fold.
Learn To Let Go Of Learning
Many people actively use the internet to expand their knowledge to improve their lives. Yet the real irony with being engaged in learning online is if you’re one of those people that loves to read, learn and understand, this passion quickly becomes debilitating in the presence of unlimited information.
If you search for the term SEO, according to Google there are already 189,000,000 related articles. That’s at least 50,000 new SEO related articles being added to the internet everyday. Attempting to stay up to date would leave no time for anything else, and unfortunately you don’t produce results when your learn; you produce results when you apply what you learn.
Now I’m not advocating that learning isn’t important, I believe it’s vital. What I’m suggesting is that you should always be spending more time taking actions than learning. Plus some of the best learning you’ll ever do will come about through taking action – aka experience.
Learn to Learn Efficiently
To learn efficiently you need to limit your information flow, or as Time Ferris coins it, opting for selective ignorance. What’s this mean? It means limit the amount of new information that gets to you, blog, emails, TV, newspapers (ignore it all) and choose to digest this information at an allotted time that is convenient and caters for effective learning.
Selective ignorance will not only save you huge amounts of time to which you can dedicate to productive activities, but it will also highlight just how much trivial junk steals your attention every day (you’ll never go back TV once have control over your attention).
My Method
I do all my reading in 4 hours on the weekend (normally Saturday morning). I normally have 100 – 200 new items in my feed reader which I view in list format to limit distraction. I just open the items that look promising, normally around 30 – 40. Then I just spend the next couple of hours reading whilst taking notes and adding things to my to do list or set the wheels in motion if I find something worth acting on.
With this method I don’t waste time reading during the week, which always turns out to be hours each day. This allows me to get on with what’s important during the week and I’m still about to keep up with the important industry and real world news.
Focus Only On What Is Relevant
Let’s face it how often do you need to be updated on what’s happening in the Middle East? When was the last time you took any action on the information you read about the war? So what sense does it make to waste valuable time absorbing redundant information?
The way to change the world is not by wasting your time being informed about something you can do nothing about. Focus on what you can change today. Then when you have the power to make a difference you can pursue your altruistic goals. I think Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are great examples of a couple of guys that focused on what they were great at then when they had the means and motivation to really make a difference they made a difference in a big way.
Learn to Take Action
Not wasting your time is the first step, next is taking action implementing what you have learned. After all, wisdom without action is wasted.
The most important thing acting on wisdom is once you have learned something valuable and actionable; take action immediately. It doesn’t matter whether the action is big or small, it just has to get you committed.
The hardest part of doing anything is taking the first step. The first step doesn’t have to be big. It can be a two line email to a web designer requesting a quote, buying a domain name, setting up a new hosting account, buying the book – but whatever you do, do it immediately so your committed.
I hate even suggesting this, but in the event your one of those people that struggles to take action, at the bare minimum you need to physically write you ideas/tasks down straight away and keep that to do list in a prominent location. It’s so important not to just make a mental note, or bookmark a page to come back to it, the action needs to commit you, because without the commitment it’s too easy to cop out.
So get it out of your head and onto your relatively short to do list. I write a brand new to do list everyday, I keep it nice and short only a couple of items, never more than 5 or 6, with the most important task always being first.
If you are going to remember anything from this post, remember these two points:
The cost of opportunities lost through inaction outweigh the cost of mistakes made through imperfect action ten fold and that wisdom without action is wasted.
Is Your SEO Focus Destroying Your Sales Conversions?
ShoeMoney
I get emails every day from people who rank in the search engines for their keywords but are not getting any leads from it. When I send them a list of like 20 things to do to improve their conversion they tell me “but could this affect my keyword ranking?”.Annoying…
ShoeMoney’s above comment reminded me a little of my own online story which engaged me to review the topic which I have split over two posts, this being the first, the second being Why Your Conversion Optimisation Is More Important Than Your SEO.
Once upon a time I too was guilty of being too focused on the traffic side of the revenue equation and the penny didn’t really drop for me until 2006 when I found the real secret lay in striking a balance between SEO and increasing ePV (earnings per visitor).
The “It’s So Simple It’s Stupid” Online Revenue Model
Producing online revenues in it’s simplest form is just a function of “visitors x ePV”. It seems so simple, yet the vast majority of people running websites online neglect one or the other.
Most businesses websites have a good product focus that’s complemented by good copy and prominent calls to action as a result of their experience with traditional marketing formats like print media, but still lack the know how to drive visitors to their site nor are they aware that they should be employing an internet marketing agency to help drive visitors to their site. Most have just bought into the “build it and they will come model” purported by their web designers who claim to offer well SEOed site design with Google doing the rest.
On the other side of the coin you have many passionate bloggers and hobby site owners who find their sites have outgrow their own ability to maintain on a part time basis as popularity follows their passion to produce quality content, products or services. In most cases if these hobby sites and blogs were better monetised it would justify a greater commitment from the webmaster, ultimately producing a better user experience for the visitors and everyone would win.
Finding the Balance Between SEO and Conversion Optimisation
When it comes to finding the balance between SEO and conversion optimisation eyeballs are more important than earnings in the beginning. However with the diminishing marginal returns of SEO coupled with the rising opportunity cost of neglecting on page conversion optimisation there comes a tipping point where a greater ROI can be achieved through focusing on extracting greater value from each visitors.
This turning point is different for different sites and different business models. For your typical blogger blogging about their passion monetizing their site primarily with Google AdSense the turning point comes around the 500 visitor/day mark when a serious analysis of revenue optimisation should be undertaken.
For a local business website the turning point occurs at much lower levels of traffic due to the higher margins of selling a tangible product or service. For many business websites a serious conversion optimisation review should be done when receiving in excess of 50 visitors/days. Additional consideration should also be given to businesses competing in auction based advertising markets, like Google AdWords, as they can better compete over the long run if their website produce higher rates of conversion than their competitors justifying a higher profitable max bid.
Evolution Of The New Internet Marketing Firm
There seems to be a large gap in the market within Australia (my local market) for firms that produce quality, usable web designs, that are well optimised for search engines yet still have a focus on conversion. Moving forward it is difficult to not see major SEO, PPC, web design, copy writing firm converging into one stop shops of online business presence given their mutualism.
It would seem that at this stage most small businesses continue to primarily gauge the success of their business website almost holistically on traffic and as such almost exclusively pursue methods of increasing search rankings. This is perfectly highlighted by the fact that there are over a 1,200,000 results when searching for “search engine optimisation” in Australia, but less than 15,000 results for either “conversion optimisation” or “landing page optimisation”. In the not too distant future the smart small business operators will not be solely looking for SEO services alone rather a more comprehensive internet marketing service.
The moral of the story is to know what you’re in the game of optimisation for; sales not traffic – Why Your Conversion Optimisation Is More Important Than Your SEO.
8 Business Success Factors
I have watched this videos so many times now I felt I should share it. At 3:46 minutes long this is by far the best bang for buck video on business success and success in general that I have ever watched. I highly recommend bookmarking this post and coming back to watch this video at least annually.
The Big 8 Business Success Factors
- Passion
- Work
- Good
- Focus
- Push
- Serve
- Ideas
- Persist
So many people who have dreamed of starting or expanding their online business have asked me what it takes to produce real success online. Well I’d like to let this video do the talking on my behalf.
At the end of the day most people are chasing the “secret” or the “magic formula” for online success, but having been in this business for years now, I can say that there is no “silver bullet” that will change your online fortunes, but in almost every one of the business success stories you can read all around the internet these 8 factors play a prominent role.
Plus the best marketing techniques in the world won’t build your business if you don’t also embody a lot of these factors when it comes to your work and business projects. So take 3 minutes now and watch the video and leave your comments below letting me know what you think.