Five Ways to Leverage Good Web Design to Create and Maintain Customer Loyalty

Five Ways to Leverage Good Web Design to Maintain Customer Loyalty

Good web design implies more than just having an attractive website.  For that matter, a good pay-per-click campaign may get visitors to your website the first time. But will those visitors have a reason to become loyal to your website and return over and over again?

High-quality, professional web design means having a site that is not only attractive, but also creates and maintains loyal visitors and customers.  Inexperienced web designers frequently overlook this important aspect of good web design in a desperate effort to simply get website traffic.

Here are five ways to leverage good web design to create and maintain a high level of customer loyalty to your website and your business.

1. Good web design should make it easy for your customers to complain.  That’s right! A skilled, marketing-oriented web designer should make it easy for visitors to your website (prospects and current customers) to tell you what they don’t like about your site or your business.  Why?  Because up to 96% of dissatisfied customers will never complain. They will simply not buy from you again.

Fortunately, you can salvage a large percentage of these unhappy, but valuable customers if you make it super-easy for them to voice their complaints.  Your website can be the perfect place to give them this opportunity. If you conscientiously follow-up on each complaint in a professional, timely manner you will bring many of those unhappy customers back into the fold.  Plus, you’ll save your business the high cost of creating new customers to replace them.

Granted, no business owner likes to hear bad news – especially from customers.  Unfortunately, web designers who aren’t keenly focused on “marketing” their client’s business ever mention the importance of capturing customer complaints.  But you’ll find that even the unhappiest of customers will genuinely appreciate a super-easy way to voice their complaint – even more so if you respond to the complaint in a positive way.  It is a proven fact that as many as 95% of dissatisfied customers will actually become more loyal to your business if you make a sincere effort to make them happy again.

2. Good web design should include a way to gather feedback on the website at as many “touch points” as possible.  Did you know that one customer in four becomes dissatisfied with some aspect of a typical website experience or online transaction? But what’s worse is that a single dissatisfied customer tells 10 to 20 others about their experience online.

If the website designer builds in multiple opportunities on your website to collect customer feedback you will likely see the number of return visits soar.  Moreover, teturn visits are a reliable measure of online customer loyalty that eventually translates into more online conversions (sales).

3. Good web design should make it easier to know who your customers are.  This is another area where a lack of marketing focus among many website design companies can cost website owners loads of new business.  A good online marketer knows that there are basically three types of customers: 1) “Satisfied” customers (those who purchase and receive value for a good or service); 2) “Captive” customers (those who purchase a produce or service not available elsewhere); and 3) “Loyal” customers (those who will purchase a product or service over and over with little regard for competing offers).

A professional, marketing-focused web design should always include multiple opportunities to collect information about customers.  This helps the website owner know more about his or her customers and prospects which will ultimately reduce the overall cost of marketing to them over time.

4. Good web design should recognize the value of good information.  Visitors to your website always have a reason for being there – whether they remain there for 5 seconds or half an hour.  Usually what online visitors are looking for is information.  The web designer must always keep this in mind if the goal is to promote customer loyalty. A good website should be designed to deliver high-quality information about a product or service easily and with as few mouse clicks and scrolling as possible.

Finally, genuinely good information on a website loses its value if the web designer fails to properly organize it in a way that is easily consumable by the visitor.  It is true that online visitors do not “websites”, they “scan” them for points that are the most relevant to their needs.  If a relevant point is found only then will the visitor actually “read” the website content as if reading a book.

5. Good web design should translate your company’s overall theme to your website.  All too often web designers fail to set the proper theme for a business online.  This is even more common with smaller businesses that attempt to build their own website without the assistance of a good online marketer.  A theme can be set with a well thought out “credo” that is succinct, clear, and descriptive of the company’s mission.

A theme can also be set with a compelling tag line or slogan.  Can you guess the company that uses the tag line “Absolutely, positively, overnight.”  Probably 95% of adults on the street would recognize this slogan from Federal Express (FedEx).

Whatever a company’s theme, the web designer should make sure that it is carried across to its online marketing strategy (which includes the website, email marketing, social media, etc.).  This is important to avoid any chance that the company’s message will cause confusion among its target market.  Commissioning a website that has no relevance to a company’s overall marketing theme becomes a hindrance rather than a help to reaching the company’s business goals.

Mel Cooper, President, MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc.

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based online marketing agency and website design firm.

For more information about Search Engine Marketing please call us at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/
http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com
http://cgmsearchmarketing.com
http://melcooper.com

How Good Web Design Affects Google Adwords Advertising Performance

The Relationship Between Good Web Design and Google Adwords

Mel Cooper - MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc.

Our company often gets calls from prospective clients who tell us they have had very poor experiences with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising programs such as Google Adwords. Those with the most painful experiences don’t even want to talk about the hundreds, even thousands of dollars they’ve poured into Google’s bank account. What these prospective clients don’t know is why their PPC ad campaigns were so costly and ineffective at driving traffic to their websites. In many cases it only takes one visit to a client’s website for us to understand why the business failed to generate a positive return on their PPC advertising investment.

One reason why PPC ad campaigns appear to fail is because many clients (as well as many web designers) do not understand the direct relationship between the effectiveness of Google Adwords and the quality of the web design at the company’s website. Since most all forms of online advertising are focused on driving traffic to a company’s website it is there that revenue-generating actions take place.

The purpose of good web design is to lead visitors to perform desired actions that generate revenue for the client. If the website fails to do this even after the client has paid Google for the traffic then it’s easy to blame Google Adwords for the poor performance. The statistics generated by Adwords for a campaign, however, may tell a different story. More often than not, we are able to pin-point the weak link in the online advertising strategy as being the lack of good web design.

What is Good Web Design
and How Do We Know?

So, what is good web design and how do we know what works best when coupled with Google Adwords? The short answer to this question is experience. If you found this article as a result of a paid search listing then our experience and skill at delivering this information to you using Google Adwords probably speaks for itself. Now, whether you perform an action that ultimately generates revenue for our company is not something we can predict with certainty (no one can!). But if we’ve presented enough compelling information to you that convinces you to call us, fill out one of our web forms, or bookmark our site for a return visit later on then we figure we’re on your “short list”.   There’s a chance you will consider us as your provider of online marketing services to your company.

On the other hand, if we haven’t delivered good, valuable, and compelling information to you in an easy-to-understand way then you probably won’t consider our company any further. If the statistics we collect from Adwords and elsewhere about our site tell us that is happening too often then we carefully test new ways to become more relevant, compelling, and valuable to visitors. Eventually, the conversions start to trend back up, more revenue is generated, and we continue to add more high-quality content to the site. In the meantime, our search ranking continues to rise with the regular addition of newer and better content that is designed to effectively communicate to our visitors.

Good Web Design Should Never
Be on “Auto-Pilot”

Good web design practices must be incorporated into any website to generate conversions from paid traffic. But good web design involves making sure that the site does not appear to be on “auto-pilot” that is, appear as though it is never updated with fresh information. There are two very specific reasons why this is true. First, Google awards a website with a “Quality Score” that influences the actual price you will pay when competing for keywords in Adwords. In short, this Quality Score is a reflection of your site’s relevancy to the keyword(s) you’re bidding on.

A low Quality Score for your website, for example, would likely cause you to pay more for a relevant keyword than you would if your site had a high Quality Score. So, it definitely pays to keep your website design fresh and updated up to maintain a high Quality Score.

The second reason why your website should never be on “auto-pilot” is because paid visitors are turned off by what appears to be outdated information. They are all looking for the most recent information available on a topic and have little patience for “yesterday’s news”.   They will simply click away. Unfortunately, by this time you have already paid for the traffic and have no chance for a conversion.

Summary

There is no substitute for good web design at a company’s website. Good website design compliments PPC advertising campaigns by taking your paid traffic and converting a high enough percentage of those visitors to pay for the campaign. Good web design, however, is not static no “design it and forget it” because online competition for your customers gets more fierce every day. Keeping your site’s design fresh and compelling on an ongoing basis is the price of success in the competitive online marketplace.

_____________________________

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc.  Headquartered in Montgomery, AL, MELCOOPER is an online marketing and website design firm.

For more information about the company’s search marketing and web design services please call 1-877-898-3957 or email Mel Cooper at mel@melcopoer.com.

You are welcomed to visit the company’s websites at:

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

http://web-design-montgomery.com

http://melcooper.com

How Search Engine Marketing Brings New Customers to Your Business

Search Engine Marketing

But first, what is Search Engine Marketing?

Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, is the strategy of making your company’s website highly prominent so that users can more easily find the products or services that your business offers.

Website prominence is reflected in your website’s Search Engine Ranking, or SER. SER, in turn, is determined by several key factors — all of which reflect the degree of relevancy of your website’s content to certain keywords. Your target customers use keywords in online search engines to find products or services they want to acquire from you.

Website Prominence
–> is measured by Search Engine Ranking
–> which is determined by a website’s Relevancy
–> to Keywords in the website’s content that describe your products or services.

Generally speaking, a highly prominent website yields high website traffic.

Unfortunately, keyword relevance is a highly competitive commodity when marketing your business online using a website. For that reason your website’s prominence which is reflected in its search ranking is not something that just happens. Achieving and maintaining a high search ranking requires constant focus on:

• Search rankings for competitors and how they achieved them;
• Changes in keyword search patterns used by your target customers;
• The level of website authority relative to the products or services you offer;
• The level of content quality and relevancy at your website; and
• The frequency of adding fresh, high-quality content to your website.

Paid Search Marketing vs. Organic Search Marketing

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Paid search marketing, more commonly referred to as “pay-per-click” or “PPC” advertising, is a strategy whereby you “bid” on one or more keywords relevant to your products or services. A bid that’s high enough will enable you place a small ad featuring a link to your website on the all-important first page of a search. Your PPC ad will appear when someone uses one of the keywords you bid on in a search.

Pay-Per-Click advertising works like this:

1. You open an account with a search engine company with which you want to place your ads. This is like selecting, say, The Wall Street Journal as the media where you want your ad to appear. But that is where the similarity ends.Currently there are three PPC media where you can run PPC ads: Google, Yahoo!, and Bing (Microsoft). Since Google presently owns about 70% of the online search market that’s the one MELCOOPER Consulting focuses on with its clients most frequently.
2. You establish a “budget” for your PPC ad campaign using a major credit card. Your budget places an approximate cap on how much your online advertising will cost you per day.
3. You bid on keywords that prospective customers will likely use to find your business online. This requires thorough keyword researech to avoid bidding on costly, unproductive keywords. The bid price is determined by how competitive the bidding is for a specific keyword in order to assure a first-page ranking in a search result.
4. Next, you write one or more small ads that include a link back to your website. Writing good ads that sell is both a skill and a talent – not everyone can do it well. Assuming your keyword bids were adequate enough these small ads will appear on the first page of a search result when one or more of your keywords are used by a prospect.
5. Finally, you pay the search engine company the bid price of a keyword only when that keyword results in a “click-through” from your PPC to your website. Search engines do not charge you for appearing on the first page of a search result. They only charge you if a prospect “clicks” on your PPC ad and is taken to your website.For example, suppose you bid .75 cents on the keyword “blue widgets”. If someone uses that keyword in a search that results in that person clicking-through to your website you pay the search engine .75 cents for that “click-through”. The trick is to:

• Attract as much high-quality traffic as possible to your website;
• Pay as little as possible for those high-quality click-throughs;
• Avoid wasting money on “click-throughs” that do not bring high-quality prospects to your website.

But please boys and girls, DO NOT try this at home!

Now that I have explained how PPC advertising works it is almost too tempting for many businesses to try PPC advertising on their own.

Note: It is a matter of policy that my company absolutely does NOT recommend that our clients undertake a PPC advertising campaign on their own.

Most small businesses simply don’t have the time or experience needed to effectively leverage this advertising strategy without making very costly mistakes. They risk blowing their entire advertising budget in a only a few days instead of the three-month period they may have planned. Despite claims by Google, Yahoo! and Bing about how “easy” their PPC programs are what they’re really telling you is how “easy” it is for them to drain your advertising budget – really fast.

With that word of caution, PPC advertising can be an extremely cost-effective way of bringing highly-qualified prospects to your website. Most businesses, however, would be well-advised to seek professional help in order to avoid costly mistakes and maximize their return on investment of every dollar spent to pull traffic to their website.

Organic Search Marketing

Organic, or “natural” search marketing is the search ranking a website achieves by the very nature of its relevancy and value relative to specific keywords used in an online search. A high organic search ranking is not one that is “paid for” in the same way that one pays for position in a PPC campaign. A high organic search ranking also does not normally occur soon after a website is published to the Internet. In fact, achieving a high organic search ranking generally requires at least 3 to 6 months of intensive work to “earn” a prominent ranking on the first page of a search result.

While a high organic search ranking takes hard work and a great deal of patience to achieve, there is another advantage to organic search that makes it all worthwhile. That advantage is the fact that “click-throughs” from organic search listings “convert” at a rate approximately 30% more frequently than do paid search listings. In other words, a prospect who clicks-through on an organic search listing is 30% more likely to become a paying customer than if the prospect clicked-through on a paid listing.

Why You Should NotChoose One Type of Search Marketing Over the Other

We used to tell our clients that they should start out using a paid search (PPC) campaign while waiting for their website’s organic search ranking to reach the first page of a search result for our keywords. At that point they could end their PPC campaigns and concentrate on keeping their organic rankings. But now that the competition for “first-page” ranking is so intense we advise our clients to not choose one type of search over the other. The reason for this should be clear to any competent online marketer.

A search result page only has so many available positions for an ad to appear. On Google’s search result page, for example, there are:

• Up to 10 possible organic search positions;
• Up to 3 paid search positions just above the organic listings;
• Up to 10 more paid search positions on the right side of the results page.

In short, there are only a maximum of 23 possible positions in which your paid or organic listing can appear. Needless to say there is a LOT of competition for a limited amount of advertising real estate on Google’s first-page.

Because of the limited real estate on Google’s first page we encourage our clients to “crowd out” as much of the competition as possible. They do this by investing in both paid and organic search listings on the same first-page of a search result so that their website listing appears in both places on the page. This strategy has a powerful psychological effect on prospective customers by giving them the impression that your website is highly authoritative and relevant. This only increases the likelihood that they will visit your website and ultimately become a paying customer.

Think of the brand “Coke” and all the places you are exposed to that brand name. This kind of advertising leaves less room for competing brands such as “Pepsi” or “7-Up” to make an impression on customers.

Conclusion

Search Engine Marketing can bring new customers to your business by making your website as prominent as possible at the very moment that prospects are actively searching for the products or services your business offers. It is no secret that most forms of traditional advertising (print, broadcast, outdoor, and direct mail) account for a shrinking share of a typical company’s overall advertising budget. Conversely, expenditures on Search Engine Marketing account for an increasing share of the advertising budget pie for one obvious reason: The Internet is where most consumers are now going to make purchasing decisions.

* * * * * * * * * *

Mel Cooper

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based online marketing agency and website design firm.

For more information about Search Engine Marketing please call us at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

http://cgmsearchmarketing.com

http://melcooper.com/searchenginemarketing/index.html

Yellow Pages vs. Paid Search Advertising

Dump the Yellow Pages!

Why Yellow Page Advertising is No Longer a Safe Bet for Advertising

1. Fewer people are using the Yellow Pages to find a providers of products or services. Yellow Page advertising has gone from one of the best advertising mediums for businesses to one of the worst in only the last ten to fifteen years.   Why?  Well, ask yourself, when did you last use the Yellow Pages to find a service or product provider?
2. There are too many phone book choices. There are so many phone books offering “Yellow Page” advertising you don’t know which book is best. Fact is, most consumers keep only one book and send the others to the trash can.  Still others keep the old book and throw out the new ones.
3. Yellow Page advertising Return On Investment (ROI) is difficult to track. Justifying your Yellow Page advertising is not easy unless you have a consistent, systematic way of collecting information from prospective clients and customers about how they found you.   More often than not, you don’t have the time to put pencil to paper to track and calculate the return on investment from your Yellow Page advertising.   Many businesses continue their Yellow Page advertising year after year out of fear or frustration.
4. Yellow Page advertising rates increase every year for the exact same ads. There’s nothing fair about this kind of advertising. First of all, anything printed and delivered on paper is bound to get more expensive.  Second, phone book publishers have to make up for the legions of former advertisers who have already jumped ship by charging you even more.  And third, God help you if you reduce your commitment to Yellow Page advertising (no matter how long you’ve been an advertiser). You’ll be rewarded by having your new ad(s) appear at the END of the smallest ads.

Here’s Why You Should Replace Your Yellow Page Advertising With Online Paid Search

• Online paid search advertising is one big reason why Yellow Page advertising is no longer cost-effective. More commonly referred to as “pay-per-click” or “PPC” advertising, paid search advertising involves paying Google, Yahoo!, or MSN for the privilege of promoting your firm’s website on the all-important first page of a search result.
• PPC advertising can deliver highly-qualified, prospective clients right to your door. Pay-per-Click advertising can produce new business for a fraction of the cost of Yellow Page advertising. I often describe PPC advertising this way:  It’s like having a billboard at a high-traffic intersection and only paying a few dollars or cents for each prospect who contacts your law office as a direct result of seeing that ad. PPC advertising works because it drives qualified traffic to your website or landing page at very low cost compared to virtually any other form of advertising. How cool is that?
  
• PPC allows you to pay for advertising that can be easily tracked for effectiveness. You no longer have to pay for advertising “impressions” (exposures to an ad) up front or get locked into year-long commitments with no way of knowing whether those impressions will result in new business.  You only pay a few dollars or cents for each prospective client that your PPC advertising brings to your online front door (your website).  Plus, you get new clients at precisely the moment those people need specific products or  services.
• PPC advertising can be changed “on-the-fly”. Unlike Yellow Page advertising, if a mistake is made in a PPC ad it can be fixed in a matter of minutes.  If a specific PPC ad is not producing results it can be replaced altogether.  In fact, we constantly change PPC ads as part of our testing methodology to find out how we can squeeze the most traffic out of our highest-performing online advertising.

Here’s How to Get Started With PPC Advertising

1. You need a solid, well-designed website. PPC advertising gets your prospective clients to your “online front door”, but your website must be compelling enough to finish the job of “converting” the prospect into a revenue-generating client.  The ideal “conversion” would be for the website visitor to pick up the phone and call the attorney’s office for an appointment.  Or, a conversion might be for the visitor to complete an online web form describing the legal service they need.  Regardless of how much (or how little) you may have invested in your law company’s website you would be well advised to get an expert opinion about its effectiveness in a search marketing strategy.   Hire a professional online search marketer to give you an appraisal of your site backed up with a written analysis and suggestions for improvement (if any).
2. You WILL need professional help setting up your PPC advertising campaigns. Here again, go with a good online marketer who has experience with PPC advertising who can help you get your campaigns started.  Anyone who says setting up a paid search campaign is easy probably hasn’t executed one before.  PPC advertising is actually a very complicated strategy that can cause an amateur to blow through an entire ad budget REALLY FAST with no conversions to show for it.  Always remember that Google and Yahoo! try to make their PPC programs sound so easy even a caveman can do it because it’s in their best interest to take as much of your money as possible – and as quickly as possible.
3. Focus your search strategy on “keywords” that prospective clients are actually using. A good PPC consultant will research and help you select the right keywords that are relevant to your specific law practice.  Finding the right keywords is actually an art unto itself – and is often misunderstood by businesses.  The keywords that you might think a client would use to find his practice online may not be the keywords that prospective clients are using online.  Good keyword research uncovers the keywords that are actually being used in order to maximize the effectiveness of the search advertising.
4. Finding the right keywords is only part of a successful search marketing strategy. A successful search marketing strategy requires good keyword research.  But keywords must be combined with attention-getting PPC ads and highly-relevant, compelling content at your website for any search strategy to produce a good ROI.  Your PPC consultant can help you develop one or more PPC “campaigns” that include all three elements to achieve the high-ranking search results you want to achieve.

What You Can Expect From an Effective PPC Campaign

• Your PPC strategy should get your advertising on the first page of a search. Once you and your PPC consultant have decided on the list of relevant keywords to focus on, you’ve bid on those keywords appropriately, written the text ads for each PPC campaign, and optimized your website or landing pages for those keywords it’s then time to run the ads.  This is probably the only easy part of the whole process since it requires a simple mouse click.  If you have bid correctly on your keywords your PPC ads will appear on the first page of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) within a few minutes.  It’s that fast!
• Your PPC consultant must monitor the performance of your PPC campaign(s). Among other things the consultant looks at CTR (Click-Through-Rate, or the number of times a user “clicks-through” to your firm’s website) relative to the number of times the ad is actually displayed on a search page (the number of “impressions”). Click-throughs are how prospective clients are driven to your firm’s website.
• The goal of PPC is to get users to click-through from you PPC ads to your firm’s website. Your website is where conversions will take place. However, a high CTR can potentially be be a bad thing (i.e. expensive!) if your consultant does not know how to interpret the statistics generated by the campaigns.  All the more reason why you should let a pro help you get started.

Conclusion

Search marketing is quickly becoming a very popular way for businesses to market their practices in a highly cost-effective manner – especially compared to Yellow Page advertising.  Now is the time to start moving your Yellow Page ad dollars over to search marketing and become much more competitive in the legal services marketplace.

Mel Cooper

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based online marketing agency and website design firm.

For more information about Search Engine Marketing please call us at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/

http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com

http://cgmsearchmarketing.com

http://melcooper.com

The “Online Marketing Facts of Life”, or How to Avoid Wasting Your Money on a Website

Don't waste money on your website!

The Cost of a Website Is NOT the Total Cost of Online Marketing

Our company often gets calls that go something like this:

• Caller: “Hello, I’d like to know what you charge to do a website…”
  
• Us: “What is your budget for a new website?”
  
• Caller: “Well, we really don’t have a budget yet.  What do you charge for a ‘simple’ website?”
  
• Us: “I’m sorry, but we need to know more about your business before we can talk about price.  How much does your company normally spend on advertising annually and who is your target market? (If the caller has a new business we ask how much they are planning to spend for advertising during the first year.)
• Caller: “Well, we spend (or are planning to spend) about $__________ a month for (Yellow Page advertising, radio, TV, print ads, etc.).

It’s at this point that we explain to the caller what we refer to as the “Online Marketing Facts of Life”.  This is basically a collection of facts that accurately reflect the current compeititve marketplace that the Internet has now become.  If a business owner thoroughly understands these facts it could potentially save his or her company a lot of time, money, aggravation, and disappointment.

Here are the “Facts” that every business should understand before investing in a website:

The “Online Marketing Facts of Life”

Fact #1: Your business’ website is not a Yellow Page advertisement.  Unlike a Yellow Page ad your website exists within a virtual sea of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of similar businesses — all of which are competing for your customers.  And unlike a Yellow Page ad your website is dynamic (that is, it should change often).

Fact #2: Whether your website get’s noticed in this sea of competitors is determined by one thing:  keyword prominence.  If your customers search online using a keyword that is both popular and relevant to the products and/or services that you offer — and your search ranking for that keyword puts your business on the first page of a search result — then your chances of selling to those customers is high.  Conversely, if your website does not appear on the first page of a search result for a popular and relevant keyword then your chances for success are much, much lower.

Fact #3: Getting your website on the first page of a search result for a popular, relevant keyword doesn’t just happen.  It requires hard work -  work that many of your competitors are more than willing to do to drive you out of business.  Most companies retain a talented search engine marketer who knows how to optimize your website to achieve the keyword prominence that your business needs to be successful online.

Fact #4: Search engine marketing is like any other form of advertising.  Stop it and business eventually dries up.

Fact #5: Hide your head in the sand while “waiting for this whole Internet craze to blow over” will only get you one thing:  “Out of business (eventually)!  A LOT of money is being made by online businesses as well as traditional brick-and-mortar stores that are leveraging the most powerful marketing medium business has ever seen.  Ignore the rewards of online marketing at your own risk!

Why You May Want to Wait Before Buying a Website

Now, back to our caller who wants to know “how much do you charge for a ‘simple’ website”.  By the time we’re finished with the call we have either:

1. Persuaded the caller to hold on to their money until they’re ready to invest in online marketing (of which a website is a part), or
2. We proceed with more questions about the caller’s business in an effort to further qualify the prospect and come up with the best, and most cost-effective strategy for marketing their business online.

More often than not we wind up persuading such callers to hold on to their money if they are not willing to invest at least $2500.00 during the first year to reach their customers online — and that’s a bare-bones minimum investment.  Admittedly, this is a hard thing for us to do, but we simply prefer not to take a client’s money if we know there is little chance that the site will earn a decent return on investment for them — or for us.

Now, it is never our intent to skirt the issue of the cost of our web design services when people ask.  The truth is, when we speak to a prospect for the very first time we really don’t know what a website will cost because every site we design and build is different.  But as I’ve said we gently discourage a lot of prospects from buying a website until they understand the true cost of staying competitive with online marketing.  Many call us back with this renewed understanding and are willing to invest in an online marketing solution that will give them the best possible chances for success.

Summary

There is a virtual graveyard on the Internet where poorly-funded and poorly-designed websites go to die a slow death.  They are all alone and no one visits them.  Many of these websites are owned by businesses that were sold on the promise of online success for the “low, low price of only $199.00″ — or some other equally unreasonable claim.  Online success at a bargain basement price may have been possible ten years ago, but it definitely is not the case today.  The competition is greater, the rewards are MUCH higher, and the technology behind a successful online marketing strategy is vastly more sophisticated.

Mel Cooper

This article was authored by Mel Cooper, founder of CGM SearchMarketing and President of MELCOOPER Consulting, Inc. , an online marketing agency and website design firm.  These companies serve Montgomery, Alabama; Birmingham, Alabama; and the Florida panhandle.

For more information about our Web Design and Search Engine Marketing services please call us toll-free at (877) 898-3957 or visit the our websites at:

http://web-design-montgomery.com/
http://melcooper.com/
http://web-design-birmingham-alabama.com