What are you doing to compliment your business income?

Everyone knows times are hard, granted Naples and Fort Myers may not get hit as hard as most places in the U.S. but we’re definitely feeling the pinch. So are your business sales down? Have your leads taken a hit? What are you doing to supplement your losses? Many people are turning to marketing…more specifically internet marketing. What is internet marketing? It could be any number of things, when I think of internet marketing two different terms immediately come to mind. The first is SEO which involves adjusting your websites settings to be more friendly towards the search engines, and other off-site adjustments. PPC is the other term, PPC stands for pay per click and it’s the process of paying a site or search engine such as Google to show your ads atop the search results. The question is, are you doing either of these? If not, why?

Both SEO and PPC can be equally effective. By now you probably understand that the internet can generate real sales and real income and I’m not talking about the infomercials you see late at night that tells you dream stories about making $10,000 a day in your sleep, that’s all lies. However I am talking about making money online, you’re not going to make $10,000 a day while you sleep, just like real life, you will have to work if you want to make money online. The biggest issue is how to get people to your site. You can buy advertisements on other websites and pay each time a visitor clicks your ad or you can let the search engines work for you.

First you have PPC, as I said above this is basically the process of going to one or all of the search engines and paying them money to list your site atop the search results. This is an effective and fast way to start generating traffic to your website. The problem is you have to pay, and you have to pay each and every time a visitor clicks through to your site which can get very expensive, especially if you’re in a niche where the competition is serious. Basically you will bid on each keyword. For example if you want to be #1 for “naples drywall” the competition will probably be fairly low and you’ll end up paying 5-10 cents each time a user clicks your ad. For other terms like “naples plastic surgery” you’re going to pay much more, sometimes up to $5 or more dollars per click depending on your niche. Legal, web, and health niches are usually the most expensive.

For those of you who don’t want to pay each time someone clicks your ad, there is an option called search engine optimization or “SEO”. This will still cost you, nothing is free, but SEO won’t charge you each time a visitor comes to your site. If you get 10,000 visitors a month or 10,000,000 you will still pay the same amount. SEO is the process of getting your site ranked naturally in the search engines. There are a few different factors that determine how your site is ranked for a given search term. Some of these terms you have control over such as on-page text and formatting, others like age of your domain you can’t really control, only time will give you an aged domain. What we do is determine which search terms people are most likely to use when looking for your service or product. A good example of SEO in action is what we are currently doing with napleswebdesign.net. We are currently working to get that domain ranked 1st for the search term “naples web design”. As of right now we are sitting in the #2 spot but the site is only a month old so considering how little time we’ve had to work on it #2 isn’t bad at all. The site is also in a very competent and competitive niche.

I hope this post gives you some ideas for online marketing, if you would like some assistance please visit our contact page and call or stop by our office for a free consultation.