website marketing

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.

Jerry Roelofs of Roelofs Remodeling, a member of my BNI group, hired Design Tech Consulting to design a new website for his remodeling firm. They did a great job on the design. My firm, WordsmithBob.com, was brought in to write the copy for the Roelofs Remodeling website and to do the search engine optimization.

Jerry’s new website went live a month ago. Jerry says he has been contacted seven times from the website in the last month. Four people downloaded his new free do-it-yourself ebook on creating a remodeling plan and three of them contacted him directly for a quote on a remodeling job.

I’m reading Seth Godin’s book All Marketers Are Liars. It’s the first book of his I’ve ever read. Now I see I may have to read more.

The guy isn’t telling me anything I don’t already know. That story-telling will sell a product or service far better than facts; something I have a very hard time explaining to my clients. Too often, they want their website filled with facts and data and a shopping list of all the things they do and sell.

I received an email today from a client who was very excited about a new customer. My client has a glue and adhesive marketing business in the Twin Cities. He contracted with DLCA Internet Marketing to study his current website and his online competitors and create a powerful new search engine optimized website for his firm. DLCA contracted with me to write the copy for the new site.

What got this client so excited was an order he received from Mexico. But it wasn’t the fact that the order was from Mexico that got him excited. It was the reason they ordered from him.

Unless you have a whole lotta money…

And even then, it’s an iffy proposition at best. There’s a lot of bad information and charlatanism on the Internet. Get rich quick schemes abound. And the only people who get rich from those guys are the sham artists pushing the “How To Do It” ebooks, videos and seminars.

Of course, if their methods were really successful, they’d be doing it rather than selling it. They’d be hobnobbing with people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Richard Branson rather than, surprisingly, each other. Ever notice the same names keep showing up on each other’s websites endorsing each other?

I have friends who own an online dining guide. They’re always bragging that they’re the 800 pound gorilla in their city. The numbers speak for themselves. They get 300,000 unique visitors a month. In fact, if you Google a restaurant in our city, their listing in the dining guide will pop before the restaurant’s website. And yet, my friends are only making about 60 grand a year from it.

Now you might say that’s not chump change for an online business. But at least half of that comes from his search engine optimization, web design and hosting business. So that leaves us with about 30 grand for the actual dining guide.