How can I build a inexpensive internet marketing presence
by admin on May.19, 2010, under Internet Marketing Consulting
Here are my recommendations.
Don’t put the same person that is building the site in charge of the number of hours or the cost per hour to update… only used fixed cost website services. In other words find a company that will quote you a monthly fee regardless of how many changes your make. Changing simple things on your website should time more than 5 minutes.
Be certain of your target audience before you start to build your website – how many prospects can you reach online? With today’s technology, you can find out how many people search for your products and services. Then set a goal to reach X% of that audience, and then measure how well you did each month using free analytic software.
If your site is already built then you can use the existing traffic report to set up a baseline report. This report will enable you to see how many unique visitors your current website is generating and how many take the action your desire. (If you are not getting this information currently from your website company you are missing out on valuable information.
Search engine optimization is the art of building your site so that it is properly indexed by the search engines. Much like the Dewey Decimal System the code in your website requires specificity; What is the title of the page, is the title relative to the content etc. Search engines want to delivers web pages to their clients that match what they search for
Relevancy is the single most important component of each page of your website. If the page is about costing cost then the content should provide the reader with valuable information about controlling cost.
“That’s no my game”
by admin on Oct.31, 2010, under Uncategorized
We need to sit down and come to an understanding.
I spoke with Rich and Hill for an hour on Friday, and learned all the sorted details of another “internet marketing disaster” with Dennis as the primary common denominator.
We do not do business this way, we are professionals that know what we are doing and we feel uncomfortable when we learn from existing website companies how disjointed your online marketing efforts are;
That’s not our game.
We are very competent and fair in how we deal with our “strategic partners” and have an unbelievable retention rates. In fact the only clients we lose are ones that I tell to get lost!
Internet marketing is not some get rich quick scheme.
To do what you, (and every other amateur internet marketing person) wants to do is IMPOSSIBLE.
You cannot build a $1700 a year website and expect it to make you thousands of dollars a week so you can pretend it’s successful and take it public. That is not going to happen with this website in the current state.
This website, is going to give you exactly what you are paying for, the ability for the search engines to index it
It cost you $500 to license the software that we have invested $250,000 in research and development.
That software is the basis of our relationship, without the software there is NO relationship.
To have our crew take your old site and put it on a platform we can work with is covered in the $500;
The one hundred dollars a month is to put whatever it is you want on the ten pages.
This site isn’t going to generate natural traffic unless it’s properly coded with key words and “optimized” and that is what I get paid to do;
And I certainly do not get into “strategic alliances” with people that think spending $1700,is going to sell diapers, or take orders on line.
This site is designed to provide the buyers of your products and services with information that you are competent to take their money online and ship them a product or provide a service.
That requires security certificates, secure transactions, and most importantly QUALIFIED WEBSITE VISITORS THAT CONVERT TO DEALS!
Why would I get involved with a group of guys that “don’t want to pay to do it right, instead just want to give the illusion that they are doing internet marketing and like I said “that’s not my game”
Face to Face Meetings are worthless without an agenda
by admin on Sep.20, 2010, under Uncategorized
Leave a Comment more...UniversityAlliance.com is not a school at all; rather it is a telemarketing company using the University of San Francisco as a telemarketing lead generator!
by admin on Sep.14, 2010, under Internet Business Consultant Charleston, Internet Marketing Consulting
Actually Barbara
I disagree about having someone call me on the phone!
It’s the most intrusive form of marketing possible; and you have positioned your business of offering a Master Certificate in Internet Marketing? Does part of the class include the value of “inbound marketing” principals?
But you send me this insulting email that I didn’t give you the right phone number?
Why do you need my phone number if you are a certified master internet marketing company?
What do you want to talk to me about?
Seriously why would a company that is offering a “masters” in Internet Marketing resort to the most intrusive form or low life marketing in the history of mankind – telemarketing?
Are you telling me the registration process was a fraud, and was really intended as a way to pry my phone number from me?
Is that what this email is telling me.
Why are you the “best source” for information? Are you more knowledgeable than all the other experts online? Or are you just a good closer that needs to have an “up”
Look Barbara, I pulled your website for the sole purpose of seeing how you were marketing – and it’s really is a slap in the face to a professional marketing person that is looking for a way to market that is the exact opposite of what you are offering. . . telemarketing?
If what the dudes on the tape are saying is true then let’s see how long it takes this message to get to the decision makers!
I can’t wait to put this on my Facebook, Twitter, and Blog under the headline
UniversityAlliance.com is not a school at all; rather it is a telemarketing company using the University of San Francisco as a telemarketing lead generator!
For Traditional Publishers who have turned to online advertising as a cost effective system or cash flow is vital.
by admin on Sep.07, 2010, under Uncategorized
What traditional publishers have learned is that they can increase their return on investment and provide relevant up to date content, but it’s generating the cash flow that is the stumbling block.
I can usually tell when a traditional publisher still has a sales force, that they are holding on to old school publishing. . . commission sales person selling “emotion”.
In the internet world, sales rep are old news, and really worthless. Phone Closers on the other hand are gold.
When traditional publishers learn the value of online content they will see a continuing return and everyone benefits.
WIFM (What’s in it for me) was a phrase that was coined for the internet. Because you can track your internet website traffic from your smart phone, commissioned sales are monitored using state of the art analytics.
Unfortunately, especially for old school publishers, there is too much dependence on the technology. Most people do not understand the technology and as one client told me; “your ideas are great but what if the internet goes down” and my response was simply “then your website is the least of your worries”.
Internet marketing can be intimidating—how can a traditional publisher keep up with what’s new in distribution channels, and methods to deliver his publication. What is the difference between an “app” and a “smart phone friendly websites” or for that matter, what’s the difference between a “browser friendly website” and a “smart phone website”? Answer; about $2,000
Google, for one has new technology that is designed to make display advertising work better. They have put in place a e-commerce system that is seamless and easy to follow…once you learn the system. (That’s what I do).
As an internet business consultant I believe that traditional publishers need to quit thinking about growing sales the old fashion way and they should be looking at the traffic their content generates for their advertisers or what I call “strategic partners” websites.
Websites are about quality traffic, if I own a “care giving” business in Atlanta Georgia, I want my business to be associated with THE authority on “care giving” in Atlanta. So whether I’m a publisher of “care giving advice” or looking for “care giving advice” the one common denominate is I’m looking for something “remarkable”
There are three guaranteed ways to get quality website traffic in addition to remarkable content on your website;
• Buy it
• Coop
• Earn it
Buy it
If you are going to buy traffic, you need to understand “quality score” basically quality score is how well your pages matches what the person searched for. So in the example I gave above about “care giving in Atlanta”, it’s stands to reason that a small publisher in Atlanta with a focus on care giving advice, has a better chance of getting listed in Google for “care giver Atlanta” then he does “care giver”.
That’s just my opinion; but after 30 years in the marketing business I like my chances of providing more relevant information about the state of the care giving business in Atlanta than I do “globally”! And, it’s less expensive to be a local expert than a national expert or global expert.
And yes, before your think to yourself “why can’t I do both” . . . you can, but I like a modular approach to marketing, because it’s a simply process.
Coop
The way you set up your website has a major impact on how quickly and easily you can be found for specific key words.
About Us
Contact Us
FAQ
Background
That is old school navigation. If I’m in the care giving business I want “information about Care Givers” – not information about “who the company is that built the website” ; when I’m ready to do business I’ll make sure I find out “all about you”.
Using specifically targeted key words, you have multiple options, such as geography, days of the weeks, time of day; life style etc, this “inventory” of niche markets allows you to have more precise control over your website content, and frankly over you entire business. And it allows you to attract a diverse coop group.
For example if I’m in the care giving business in Atlanta it might make sense to coop with a “durable medical equipment” supplier? That key word phrase has nothing to do with “care giving” or does it?
Earn it!
Research, find and write remarkable content, and get people to follow it.
Once you get “remarkable content” you need to compete with yourself to find out which pages had the “most” remarkable content, the least remarkable content etc, and measure which pages have the most readers, and therefore the most potential for profit!
What I try to make my clients understand is this
Making life more efficient on the internet is something I can help you do, but what I can’t do is make a client’s website deliver remarkable content.
I can show you technology that will reduce your administrative cost.
I can help you develop budgets that set a percentage of sales for each internet marketing target audience (18-24 years olds are FREE), and measure your cost per visitor, cost per subscriber, and average income from advertisers, and subscribers, using sophisticated browser based software.
In today’s online publishing world, publishers profit gauges that empower ownes with historical data, up to date (accurate) reports and net profit gauges, are what internet marketing is all about.
But you need to know how to fly the plane, land the plane, and navigate efficiently to your destination if you are going to be a successful online pubishers.
My clients pay me to help them make informed decisions about how people search, target market segmentation, geo-targeting campaigns, internet advertising allocation and online add pricing.
I believe this helps my client extract the maximum value from their internet marketing efforts (expense) and enables them to discover new untapped markets, and increase their Return On Investment, tenfold over traditional publishing.
Transparent Relations
In my 18 years in the internet marketing business, I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly and I can tell you there is more ugly out there then you can imagine.
Ugly in terms or “miss information delivered by unscrupulous vendors”; let me be clear, anyone with a internet connection can build a website for free.
It is what is on the website that makes money.
It is my belief that the best ways to make money online is to take the technicians out of the equation. They are expensive, they do not have an entrepreneur mindset, and they are secretive in providing solutions, but they are a necessity.
That is why I partnered with a software engineer. And a computer program engineer, and together we launched an easy to use back end software program that allows a business owners total control over their website, simply by sending an email.
Can we give you a system and teach you how to use the admin, absolutely.
But in 20 years of business consulting services I’ve never met one business owner who cared how the plane worked, he just wanted to know that if he gets in it, the plane will it get him to where he or she wants to go!
I train the pilots!
Happy Labor Day to All
Generating Qualified Internet Leads – That’s what I do?
by admin on Jul.23, 2010, under Internet Business Consultant Charleston, Internet Marketing Consulting, Small Business Interent Consulting, google analytics
This lead is a significant milestone in our internet market plan. In fact, as a former business consultant I used to term this “the golden lead”
The car business is about “deals”, and deals come from quality leads, that’s what I promise my strategic partners. It’s obvious we can get people to fill in a White Ford Web Form - that is my yardstick; that is how I am judged by my clients – “how many quality leads did you get me today?
It’s important because it is the basis of what Bob and Miles hired me to do – “get qualified leads”
This is what I call a highly qualified lead.
Now we need to know the value of these leads; so for example if this person does in fact buy a car – we need to keep our internet marketing cost in mind (when we add pay per click the quality of the leads will multiply by tens of leads per week
Website Monthly Cost = $600 – hosting, technical support, and maintenance.
Internet Marketing Director = $600 – RETURN ON INVESTMENT STRATEGIES
Pay Per Click Cost = TBD (once we eliminate the AutoTracker, we have $3200 a month to either put on the bottom-line or take 1/3 of it put it into pay per click, and assign each vehicle a specific dollar amount.
Remember when I asked you for the inventory of used cars; and I sent you the key words and the cost; that kia sportage had over 8 key word phrases, and literally thousands of people looking for it!
My primary role is to do that for every car in our inventory. That is what I’ve been striving for all these months
Because now Miles and Robert will be able to divide these three numbers by the net profit from each qualified internet lead that was deliver.
To a real internet marketing director, it’s all about the quality of the lead, now bogus tire kicker leads, I’m talking about people that want to buy something!
To people like Bob and Miles, the quality of the lead is directly related to whether the “lead” turns into a deal. And when it does they now have a hard number (the profit from the deal) to determine the value of each lead.
TV can’t do that
Radio can’t do that
Newspapers can’t do that
AutoTrader can’t do that
Patrick Bruce can’t do that
People often confuse my work with technical information, it’s not; my business is about NET Profit, if I can show you how to increase your net profits I have a client forever, I make money for my clients so they can keep paying me!
As a business analyst I have one simple rule – what does it cost you to get a qualified lead, and whatever it is I can reduce that cost by 80% using the internet (and I want some of it).
And I do not worry if this deal doesn’t pan out; we still have valuable information. For example we at least know that one lead cost us about $10,000 in internet marketing cost, if we get lucky and make that on our first deal we breakeven immediately.
If not and the lead fizzles out, we know that the quality of the lead needs to be improved because we can’t spend $10 grand to get one lead, I’ve had that cost down to as low as $1.99 for my law firm client. He based every marketing decision from that point forward on cost per quality lead acquisition, and the most qualified leads are the ones that buy!
And, this is actually the second lead so under the scenario above, our cost per “quality lead” is $5,000 per lead! To put that in prospective, the RV dealer gets 2-3 of these a day! (his cost per quality lead is $20.00). In the internet world, the quality of the lead is directly related to the knowledge of the guy that is publishing the information on the website.
The CyberCom’s job is to make sure I have the tools to teach you how to do that. That software you use to program the website is just as valuable as the financial software they used to run the business, with one small difference, it’s a world wide reach, powered by a person that has sold cars!
How can it not be successful?
My point is this, this is what I am all about from this point forward; if we don’t get this deal but make this person a Friend on Facebook that is a database of #1 person as our Friend, and you can see those Friends and who they are
I’ve got a meeting at 11:00 and but call me later today to discuss using facebook
Search Engine Friendly Websites
by admin on Jun.21, 2010, under Uncategorized
Over the past two weeks I’ve had at least one person a day ask me why they are not getting listed on the Search Engines.
Literally one person a day, has specifically called, sent me an email or stopped by my house and said “what is wrong with my website”
Of the last 14 people that I have talked to, 9 had built their website themselves, and 6 had a “friend” build it for them.
But my favorite was from a writer from a client that had left to start his own business. This guy was one of the best writers I’ve ever known in my life, ( and I’ve been around some talented writers in my day).
When I was consulting with his boss I was always saying that “you need to optimize your copy. . .” and (being from the old school), he was constantly telling me that “good copy stands on its own“, and we had this friendly debate all the time.
As I told him, (and many others_; when you search Google (or any search engine for that matter) you are not searching the live internet, in reality you are searching the search engines database, and if your information is not listed in the search engine index there are one of two reasons; your site is not visible to the search engines or your site is not indexed properly.
When someone does a “search” the search engines rely on their database “index” to find relevant content. They find relevant content using software programs called “spiders”. The “spiders” start by collecting a few web pages, and then they follow the links on those pages and collect the pages they point to and follow links on those pages and so on.
As you can imagine the software collects data that creates a database with millions of websites, with billions of pages stored on millions of computers.
So let’s say you are looking for Pat Bruce, you go to Google and type in pat bruce and hit enter, and now you have told Google to find every page with those two words “pat and bruce” on them and finds hundreds of thousands of pages with “pat” and “bruce” on them.
How does Google decide which pages you really want? They do it by asking questions (over 200) such as:
• How many times does this page contain your key words?
• Do the words appear in the title?
• Do they appear in the URL?
• Does the page include synonyms?
• Is the page from a quality website, or a low quality website?
Nobody really knows all the “questions” Google asks but there are a few things that are obvious; such as make your site easy to read without confusing them.
Putting all kind of different photos, and confusing motion on the site tends to force people away from your site; make it simple and easy to use.
How the most important part of a website is to understand the old adage from many years ago “garbage in, garbage out”.
The search engines are sophisticated databases; nothing more, nothing less. These databases require that the data stored in their systems come to them in a very specific way.
When you build a Word Press Blog, or a GoDaddy Free website, they are set up so it’s easy for you to make the site graphically pleasing; unfortunately the on page stuff is only part of the process.
If your source code is not “tight” it takes the search engine longer to find your site (if ever) so instead of worrying about the “look and feel” of your website, you need to focus on the source code, and you can do that “for free”.
Source code is a software and if you want your site to be found by the “spiders” then you need to bite the bullet and pay someone to build a search engine friendly source code.
I have done the research and the ONLY Company I use is www.thecybercom.com they have a modest set up fee, and their monthly hosting is fixed. The turn your site around in a few days and make changes in 24 hours. . . and the search engines can read it!
How do I determine if my website is profitable
by admin on May.19, 2010, under Internet Business Consultant Charleston, Small Business Interent Consulting
Pre-Determined Net Profits
One thing that I have always known is that for a business to be successful they must show a healthy net bottom line profits. I’ll invest $42 dollars all day long if I know it’s going to generate $1500, wouldn’t you?
Rule number one in building a profit is to control spending. Notice I mentioned about my website cost me $150 a month. The reality is that is my “out of pocket cost”, I probably invest 3-4 hours a week on my website.
I look at my analytics, I look at my inbound leads, I read and re-read my content. I used to equate building a website with raising bonsai trees (my hobby ) and people hated it. How did I know that I saw that people never stayed on that page very long, and the majority of people that got to that page left. . . I change it to this page.
If you want to make money and use your website to help, you must be willing to take control of your online actions and invest time!
Internet marketing success comes from taking the initiative put down on paper what it is you do and know. Then put that information on a website that the searching engines can find, and being persistent in making sure that when people find your site they find what they are searching for.
It’s not what we I can do for you or a website company can do for you it’s more about what you want to do consistently. If you want to put up a website, leave it out there, and “hope” that people can find it. Then you will not be successful online, if you want to convey to people that you can help them answer the questions they searched for – the sky is the limit!
You must decide.
A new / reengineered website is an action you can take today to make your business better, it does not cost a lot of money, but it does take a time commitment and what is most important is what you know that other people NEED to know you know!
What do I need to do to have a good website
by admin on May.19, 2010, under Internet Business Consultant Charleston, Internet Marketing Consulting, Small Business Interent Consulting
People always ask me “what do I have to do” and I tell them all the same thing “what do you know that will be valuable to other people?”
In my case it’s “I know how to dumb down the internet”
It is pretty simple; when people search on line they are looking for someone that knows more about the subject they are searching for then they do.
Therefore, it stands to reason that building a website is not about knowing what to do; it is in knowing what you know! I know marketing research, business analysis and profit engineering. I also know a lot about building profitable websites, not about building websites but rather building profitable websites.
But the most important thing I know is that my clients have not been involved in the internet since it’s inception. How do I know that? Because I have done research that says that 49% of all small businesses DO NOT HAVE A WEBSITE!
The only reason people would not have a website is because they do not understand the value or how to measure return on investment. I show them how!
In fact, I know nothing about the technical aspects of building a website, I just know that website design companies have been taken advantage of people that do not understand the technology for the past 20 years. My goal is to educate them about the value and to simplify the process.
Website Return On Investment Analysis
by admin on May.19, 2010, under Small Business Interent Consulting
Return on Investment
Your website will bring you a higher return on investment than any other management or marketing tool that you have at your disposal. My website cost me $150 per month (not including my time) so each of those 35 customers over the past year have cost me about $42 dollars and I target between $1500 – $2000 per customer!
Gone are the days when you had to pay thousands of dollars to have an effective web presence, in fact you can have a website today for about the same money it cost you for a cell phone!
True Value
The real true value to your website is directly related to how committed you are to take action to make your business better. I have told clients for years the real success of any business (online or not) is measured by the amount of time you take to actually make something happen.
If you make one new thing “happen” everyday in your business you will be successful and I strongly recommend that same for a website.
The mere fact that you are on my website means that you have taken action towards learning about building a new website (or fixing the one you have). But unless you actually ACT there is no decision
