business website marketing

Recently, a new professional services client told me that “no one looks for financial advisors online.” The following email was my reply to his comment.

Just a quick note in reference to Earle’s assertion that “no one looks for a financial advisor online.”

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project:

• 81% look for information about a product or service before buying it.
• 73% get travel info online.
• 51% take a virtual tour of a location online.

And according to BIGResearch:

Online marketing is going to cost you time or money. Never believe anyone who tells you about free online marketing.

I talk to small business owners all the time who ask me if there are some kinds of free online marketing ploys they can use. And I always respond, “It’s going to cost you time or money. What’s your time worth?”

You have to ask yourself if your time is better spent doing the “free” online marketing strategies which require skills and knowledge you don’t have, or sticking to what you do best and paying on online marketing expert like me to do the work for you.

Internet marketing “gurus” are like ants on a sugar cube.There are hundreds of them swarming all over the Internet. And the vast majority of them are full of crap.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that there are some people out there who really know their stuff. But how do you tell whether you’re going to get a first class, up to date education in Internet Marketing or sold a bunch of old tired “tricks” that haven’t worked for years or are rehashes of off-line marketing ideas?

Here’s my bullshit detector:

Who are their testimonials from?

Headlines are the key to everything. Try an experiment. The next time you’re in the checkout line at your grocery store, notice if you scan the magazines conveniently placed right there by the checkout line.

You probably scan all of them. In fact, you probably read the headlines and mini-headlines before you bother to look at the name of the magazine.

Some of the headlines make you laugh, some get you curious, and some might even make you pick up the magazine and thumb through it or toss it onto the moving belt along with the veges and ice cream.

Getting more content on your web site is a great way to get more traffic to your web site. The search engines love it and it gives people a reason to visit again and again. You can also use the content or articles to steer people to some of your products or services.

The tough question is always, how do you get content if you aren’t a writer?

Well, I just got an interesting “request for quote” from my web site yesterday. an attorney contacted me wanting to know if I would be willing to swap writing articles for his web site in exchange for him creating a will for me.

The Wall Street Journal article on the front page of the Monday 8-11 Small Business section titled, “How To Create A Small Business Web Site For Nothing (Or Almost Nothing)” has some mistakes and missing information that could cost small business owners dearly in the future.

In other words, if a small business owner follows it verbatim, they are going to need to spend an inordinate amount of money later to fix the problems.