Search Engine Optimization Consultants - Are They Really Worth It?
Posted on June 4, 2008
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment
In my opinion, SEO consultants are worth more money that actually paying a company to optimize your website for you. I believe this for two reasons, I will explain each of them below.
First, it is much less expensive! I have spoken to hundreds of SEO’s and SEO companies across the nation. On average, when hiring a consultant to come in and teach your company how to optimize your website, you are paying on average from $75 -200 per hour. An average SEO consultant is working with you for 5-8 hours total. The most it is going to cost you is $1,600! That is nothing.
If you are hiring a SEO company to do all the work for you, you can plan on paying around $2,500 - $3,000 per month!!! Yeah, per month! Times that by 12 months in a year and you get the picture. No matter what, to optimize your website it is going to cost you some money, but the return on that investment will far outweigh the initial cost of implementing it.
Second, when hiring a consultant, you actually are taught and gain knowledge. You can then go and do it yourself or hire someone to do it at a fraction of the cost! Search engine optimization is a valuable tool that can be used to generate huge online profits. If you are able to keep it in-house, you can save yourself thousands of dollars each year. Not only that, I have seen this dozens of times, when a company hires an SEO to optimize their website, they 100% of the time pull the contract after a period of time and hire the same company to consult them on the technique. This is great if you are the SEO company!
So, my answer is yes, they are worth the money! Anyone who takes the time and invests the money to learn search engine optimization ends up dominating their competition in the long run. You should really give it a shot, you will be happy with the results.
If you would like to learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization, please subscribe to my full RSS feed!
Branding Yourself Or Your Company
Posted on June 2, 2008
Filed Under Internet Marketing | 1 Comment
I first want to apologize for not blogging recently, we have just been swamped over the last two weeks with new clients and new consulting opportunities. At Web Vizion, we are always evolving and trying new things, especially when it comes to our own projects. We have a certain budget set aside to roll into research and development of new web properties. We have been working on an amazing platform for college students to connect with other students from their school and sell books to them. It is an exciting project for all of us in the company!
When starting a new project, building a strong brand is something that is essential if you want to succeed and stay in business longer than a year. Branding yourself or your company takes time and a lot of money, but if successfully done, it will provide results beyond belief. Some of you may be wondering, what is branding? Branding is making your or your company’s name a known player in a certain industry. A household name, per say. Companies who are masters of branding are Nintendo, Sony, T-Mobile, Jeep, Nike, etc. Because they have strong brands, they don’t have to work as hard to market to the end user.
So, how do you begin branding your company? Well, you can start by getting your product or service in front of faces and in thousands of homes. Marketing on the internet has made your job ten times easier since millions of people access the internet every day. Promotions are a sure way to get people to at least try your product or service and hopefully hook them as a customer. There are dozens of sure shot ways to build a brand and gain a customer, you just need to find the ones that work best for you and give you the highest return on your investment.
Building a brand name can be tough, time consuming, and very expensive. However, it is essential that you begin now! Don’t wait around and miss your chances of becoming the next big thing because you fail to brand your product or service. Invest in it today, and reap the benefits years down the road for as long as you can.
If you would like to learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization, please subscribe to my full RSS feed!
Running An Email Marketing Campaign
Posted on May 19, 2008
Filed Under Email Marketing, Internet Marketing | Leave a Comment
To be completely honest with each of you, I HATE email marketing! Unless, I build my OWN email marketing lists! Email marketing is the fastest way to throw your internet marketing dollars away unless you have personally built your list and have a relationship with your readers. In that case, it will be one of the fastest ways to increase your company revenues and keep revenues high over the coming years.
There are three focal points you need to be aware of when running an email marketing campaign. I will discuss each of them in greater detail below.
Build A Quality, Responsive List
First and foremost, if you want to have success with email marketing, you need to build your own list. I’m going to be blunt, purchasing or renting an email list is a waste of money and the email addresses will be crappy! If you own a website, you need to have a lead capture form on your site collecting first and last names and an email address.
To attract these individuals and make sure that they are quality, you need to offer them something of value. When talking to other internet marketers that I know, they try to offer some free PDF report, or something like that. I just offer a load of quality information for free. That usually seems to do the job, but whatever you choose, make sure that it is of value to the end user. If you offer good advice that is valuable, your list will not only be quality, but they will be responsive to your messages! These two factors make email marketing a powerful tool and money generating machine!
Email Your List With High Quality Information Often
This is huge and very straight forward! NO BODY LIKES A SPAMMER! Yes, you will be spamming them (technically), but it will be with information that is pertaining to a certain subject that they wish to learn about. Once they give you authorization to email them, they will only put up with your emails if they are filled with good content that helps them. If not, be prepared to be marked as spam and possibly be blacklisted!
Test, Test, Test Your Email Creative
This is huge as well and the key to a successful email campaign. First thing you should know about email marketing is, you need to send all emails as the HTML version. I send emails to my lists that are only text, but set them up as an HTML email. This allows for tracking the opening of each email and which links are clicked. These two things are important to know if you plan on testing your email creative.
In testing, have at least three to four options when testing. Test each version of the email creative for at least one week to your entire list. As you compare results, you can clearly see which versions are converting the best for you. Once you have the pegged, you can make the change and make big money!
If there is one thing that I can tell you about email marketing and hope you take from this post, it is, help others and be yourself while doing it. If you act like a human being, talk like a human being in your communications to your list, always provide meaningful content in your emails, and always sign each email with your name and contact info, the members of your list will feel like they have a real friend in you. They will trust you and usually pull the trigger whenever you pitch a product or offer at them.
It is a beautiful and rewarding method of internet marketing… if done correctly!
If you would like to learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization, please subscribe to my full RSS feed!
Building A Business From Scratch
Posted on May 14, 2008
Filed Under Internet Marketing | 2 Comments
I thought today that I might talk about how I started Encore Solutions from just about nothing into a company that helps people market their services online. As we are approaching our one year anniversary as a company, I was thinking about everything that we have gone through to become a successful company. Last July, I was pretty depressed and hated my current job. I wanted more than anything to be my own boss and help other people build their online presence through internet marketing.
I phoned my younger brother one day and threw down a business plan over the phone. He had no experience with internet marketing, but wanted to be a part of something fun and new. It was exactly then that I realized that I was going to be a business owner. As I thought more about what I was going to be embarking on, I was quite scared. I had no idea how a little guy was going to come into the industry and make it. I also wondered how I was going to finance such an operation. At the time, I was doing internet marketing for a market research (paid survey) company here in Orem. I had been taking paid surveys on the internet for the last few years from three companies and making about $200 a month doing it. I decided that I was going to sign up for three more companies and take my earning from the six companies and roll it into our business.
When starting, I had about $600 from paid surveys that I had earned throughout June and July and we spent about $300 more that we put on a low interest rate credit card. This paid for us to register our company with the state of Utah ($52), open a savings and checking account at the local credit union ($25), buy a book of company checks ($20), purchase a year of web hosting for three websites from a company called Host Monster ($116), purchase a killer website template to build our company website ($50), purchase Adobe Dreamweaver and Fireworks to help build our websites ($300), purchase an Article Marketer account to help promote our business ($200), and a few other necessary expenses needed for us to go into business.
Two weeks later, we had landed our first client and business exploded from there. Today, we have helped many different types of companies develop their business on the internet. Internet marketing is a powerful tool that can lead to greater sales and increased revenues. To be successful at anything today, whether it is starting a business or marketing your business online, you need a plan, persistence, patience, and dedication. Without these, you are destined to fail and lose a lot of money.
It has been a fun trip over the last year, especially with the launch of Web Vizion. I hope that this post has helped you realize what potential you have to make good things happen. It doesn’t take a lot of money, just hard work!
If you would like to learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization, please subscribe to my full RSS feed!
Building An Email Marketing List
Posted on May 9, 2008
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing | 1 Comment
I was talking to an individual last night who has been trying to break into the internet marketing industry for the last few months. Discouraged, he talked about how hard it was for him to make money online. He has poured a lot of money and even more time into his venture than most normal people do and still has no results to show for his labors. He asked me how I make money doing what I do. It is simple, I have high quality email lists that I blast to on a regular basis.
Yes, my websites do quite well for me each day, but the real money in internet marketing is through capturing your visitors first and last name and their email address. Once you convince them that it is ok to give up this information, you have permission to email them as frequently as you would like. In doing so, you would ultimately send them offers that they can sign up for make you a commission each time it happens.
So the million dollar question remains, how do you build a quality email list. First, you have to have the proper software to populate a capture form on your website or blog. I use an email marketing software called Send Studio. Send Studio is a solid email marketing platform that can be used on as many websites as you would like. The reason I chose to go with Send Studio is because of the one time fee of $279. No monthly fees like other sites like AWeber or GetResponse. Each of these services cost around $20 a month, I think. They are great services, I just want to pay once and have a solid system.
Second, you have to get visitors to your site, or your capture form location. How do you do this? One, you can market your website online through various methods. You can do a ton of SEO to get your site ranked and get organic visitors. Or third, you can purchase or rent an email list to blast to yourself. Once you have access to a list of individuals who may or may not be interested in your list, you can blast them an email asking them to either visit your site, or opt into your list.
Third, you need to offer them something of value. If you don’t, good luck getting them to accept your offer to opt in. You can offer free advice about a particular subject related to your site. A PDF report about a particular subject to your site. Anything that might catch their interest and cause them to opt in will work.
Sweet, we have now established how to begin building your list. So, once you have people opting in, what do you do? You need to have a series of auto responders set up to go out to your list. These auto responders can not be sales pitch after sales pitch or you will lose the responsiveness of the email list that you have built. You need to genuinely want to show these people that you want to help them. Teach them all about the subject they want to learn. As you do, you can offer them products or services that will help them. These can be free or cost money. Offer them stuff that you, yourself have tried. This usually will get them to buy, if you have taken the time and put forth the effort to build a relationship with them. When they buy, you will receive an affiliate commission.
Over the coming months and years, you can continue to sell them over and over again providing you with a continual stream of income. Email marketing coupled with affiliate marketing is by far the most powerful form of internet marketing that there is. By leveraging its power, you too can become a master internet marketer and take your company or website to the next level.
If you would like to learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization, please subscribe to my full RSS feed!
keep looking »
