online 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.

How many of you read the article in the August issue of Wired Magazine on Julia Allison and online promotion? I found it intriguing.

While I have no interest in promoting myself online to become a celebrity (no money in it that I can see), I saw a great deal of potential in her methods for promoting your business.

Especially if you ARE the business such as a personal or business coach, a lawyer, a consultant, doctor, or CEO of a small ad agency. You need to get in front of people, You need to cultivate a certain amount of celebrity.

Yesterday, I was a guest on WCCO Radio and I was stressing that almost any business could be adapted to the Internet. The example I gave was a residential window washing business.

You might wonder how a window washing business could be adapted to the web. Here’s how he did it.

The guy had a residential window washing business. He contacted a web designer and had a web site designed where people could sign up for window washing service in his city. Next they designed a calendar with week days between Monday and Friday and times  between 9am and 5pm where people could sign up for window washing service.

I’ve read some articles recently that claim that free downloads don’t work anymore to get email addresses from visitors. I’ve just seen proof positive that those people are wrong.

Again, I reference Roelofs Remodeling because it is such a fresh example. As part of his online marketing campaign, I created a series of ebooks for Roelofs. He gave me the planning questionnaire he usually goes over with potential customers to help them narrow down what they really want for their remodel.

Using it as a model, I contracted Lisa Drew of Lyrical Biz to create a series of impressive looking ebooks that people could download by simply giving their name and email address.

I don’t know how many times I have come to a website and they have some little box halfway down the page that says “Subscribe to our newsletter” and a “click here” button. Give me one good reason why I would subscribe to that newsletter. Actually, I’ll give you several great reasons why no one will:

• They didn’t even consider it important enough to give it a name. How lame or unimportant must that newsletter be?
• And is there anything there telling me why I should subscribe to that newsletter?
• Any hint of the powerful or useful information I’ll be regaled with should I subscribe?