Adtastic Hosting

In our previous post we talked about customer A and how they will likely not succeed at their Internet marketing unless they become more like customer B or C. In this post we will talk about customer B.

Customer B recognizes that having a website isn’t about “Build it and they will come.” They understand it will take some effort to build the site towards success. Customer B understands the principle of “At least a little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing.” They don’t have a lot of money but they invest regularly in their site to keep it in motion. They recognize that a successful website is like a river, it must be in constant motion to stay fresh and alive and when it sits still it stagnates.

Customer B has identified the steps necessary for success.

They know they must constantly monitor their traffic to determine if their site pages are reaching their target customer appropriately. This process teaches them better ways to reach their customer and more effective ways to communicate with them. As they learn they adapt and modify their website accordingly.

They’ve learned that in order to be successful they must achieve top representation in the major search engines for the keywords and phrases integral to their success. They understand that to do this requires a process of evolution for their website, that each page must be continuously optimized until it achieves successful representation. If they do not have the time and inclination to learn how to do this themselves they budget and employ a search engine marketing company such as Adtastic Hostings’s company web-sem, that will work with small businesses in an affordable manner and assist them with this process.

Customer B doesn’t have a huge budget but they recognize the importance of ongoing and long-term marketing for their site to be successful. They set asided a small amount of money, usually a few hundred dollars monthly towards the ongoing maintenance and marketing of their website. They find a web company like Adtastic Hosting that offers affordable ongoing professional marketing services and they stick with them. Over time they find that the site grows, traffic increases, sales begin to occur and it all pays off. This is the difference between them and a customer that simply does nothing and wonders why their site is not successful.

In our business we have found that basically we have three types of Internet Marketing customers that come to us. Let’s call them internet marketing customer A, B and C.

Here is an example of internet marketing customer A, based upon our real world customers. (We won’t mention any names or other identifying information as to which specific customers these are, so as to obscure their privacy, however the scenarios we will be outlining are based upon actual customers.)

Customer A decides it is time to get a website to sell their product on the Internet. They’ve been doing pretty good selling it on Ebay but are tired of the rising cost of selling products on Ebay and all of the red tape. They purchase about $7,000 worth of product which is stored in their garage and they invest a couple of thousand dollars in a real nice website from some web design company (not us). Their shopping cart (which was created by this other web design company) doesn’t quite work as well as they would like it to as there are some issues in the checkout process having a few too many steps but they finally get all of that worked out (they think).

This was two months ago. Now, it is two months later and they don’t understand why they don’t have any traffic or are not making any money. They thought they’d be doing as well as they were on Ebay by now. (Meanwhile, they’ve closed their Ebay store and would have to start all over again with a new store if they go back to Ebay.) They went back to Ebay and opened a new store but then got themselves suspended because, oops, they didn’t know they couldn’t put a link to their website in their listing.

So they talk around and after talking with a few people they are of theunderstanding that they need to do some search engine optimization.

That is how they find us. They explain to us where they are now and how they got there (see above) and explain that they need to start making some money over the next couple of months or they are just going to give up. They also don’t want to invest much more because they already have invested all the money in getting the website, plus the $7,000 in stock. They want to know if we can help them.

The answer is, no, we cannot help them. (Unless they are willing to change their way of thinking and make the decision to invest an appropriate amount of dollars into marketing their website properly).

And here are the reasons why. First of all, they have a false sense of how it all should work. Customer A seems to think that if you put a website online and believe you have a great product that is very popular and at a great price people will automatically beat down your door to get it. Customer A is also not willing to invest the minimum amount of time and money it requires for their website to be successful. The average website requires a minimum of 6 months just to get on its feet (even Google “sandboxes” new websites to a certain extent for the first 6 months because they don’t wan tto put a lot of energy into indexing it at the “top” when it might not be around 6 months from now) and one to two years to establish itself. (although we have many professional techniques to minimize this time frame and speed things up considerably for our clients as well as get them to the top of the search engines more quickly than they would on their own).

The average small business related website requires a minimum investment of real dollars as well in order to be successful, at least somewhere in the range of $1,500 on the low end and $25,000 in the middle range and customer A believes they have made all of the necessary investment when they bought their stock and built their website.

Customer A will NOT succeed unless they decide to become like Customer B or Customer C, which we will discuss in subsequent posts. If you have a website and believe you might be like customer A, it might be time to rethink your strategy, get a solid battle plan and become a serious Internet marketer. Otherwise, to be honest, don’t expect to be successful on the Internet marketing your website. We’ve been involved in Internet marketing since the Internet began and we can tell you, it just won’t happen.

Our company has been doing what we do for long enough that we can see the reasons for the small businesses with a successful website and the ones without a successful website. And we are not talking about whether you are “getting rich” or not getting rich from your Internet venture. Basically, we are only talking abut the websites that are making money every month and paying for themselves or the ones that are not making money every month and not paying for themselves.

The first reason is false expectations and the negative thinking that comes from it. We see people that think that once they have a website it should somehow become successful and then when it doesn’t they become disillusioned.

No matter how hard we try to explain to them what needs to be done to become successful they just don’t seem to get it or seem to be willing to “pay” for it. If you don’t invest in success, success will probably never come.

The websites that are successful become that way because they follow the single most important Internet website rule. And that rule might be said to be “what is in constant movement gets stronger”. A stagnant website that is not applying the 4 principles of: ongoing search engine optimization, ongoing search engine marketing, web analytics and constant updating and change tends to falter and fail.

Whereas, the websites that apply those 4 principles WILL be successful. Sure, it may take some time but in the long run it pays off in the form of profitability.

If you are doing it to “get rich” good luck. But if you are doing it to enhance your income, pay for itself, make something extra and you are following the 4 principles, you will succeed for certain. And perhaps even get rich. Patience is the key and constant movement the deciding factor.

The largest corporations follow those principles and they do it in largesse. Maybe we don’t have the millions of dollars they do to invest but we can still have a piece of the pie. Did you know that the hourly rate for a professional web analytics and website marketing analyst to a large corporation is anywhere from $275 to $1000 per hour?

Our top specialists are CIW Certified Web Professionals which according to a recent CIW income study can command on average $120 per hour. But they are also certified search engine marketing specialists which get on average $240 per hour. Not to mention that we are web analytics specialists as well which average somewhere around $320 (or more) per hour. Which, together is an average of about $226 per hour we could command in our industry and we would get it too if we marketed ourselves directly to major corporations. In fact, it would likely be reasonably easy for us to make that type of income since we would be pricing ourselves much lower than our competition and considering that our own websites are at the top of all of the major search engines for very significant industry competitive keywords and phrases it is very obvious we know how to do what we say and we do it every day. Many of our so-called competitors charge ten times what we do and get it every day yet are not even ranked nearly as well as we are in the search engines which is where it counts. They simply get where they are because of pure aggressive marketing and advertising which we do not do.

But our philosophy is different. We got into this business to help small businesses compete with large corporations on the Internet. That’s our “niche” I suppose you could say. Did you know our average hourly rate is $59 per hour? It might seem expensive but that doesn’t go to pay one person our “hourly” involves research assistants, technical staff and much more. In fact we have on average 3 man hours for every hour we bill. We keep our overhead low, own our office property and do everything we can to keep that hourly rate as low as possible so that the small business can afford us. Yet many of them still don’t get the value of being able to hire someone that is “worth” $300 an hour for a cost of less than 20% of their actual worth. And then they don’t understand why their website just isn’t going anywhere. We even put together a program for $149 a month, less than the cost of a monthly newspaper advertisement that applies the 4 principles on a monthly basis and guarantees after a specific amount of time that they will be at the top of the search engines and have a dramatic increase of relevant traffic to their site which is the most important step to a websites success. Many are not willing to invest in the program yet still expect or hope their website will pay off, somehow.

If you don’t apply the 4 principles day in and day out, it never will. We have a saying around here, “Do the right thing enough times you WILL get the right results.”

There are all types of schemes and arguments for link building and page rank. I am not going to get into them here but will impart a little bit of our professional philosophy regarding the two.

Link building (aka backlinks) is when you get other websites to link to yours. Page rank is a number from 0 to 10 Google attaches to every page on the Internet that it indexes. Page rank is like a vote for your site. It is extremely difficult to rank much higher than about 7 unless you are a huge corporation then you should rank that higher or higher. (Although I run across many that aren’t doing there job well because they don’t).

If you are a small business having a page rank of 4, 5, 6 or 7 is excellent. Basically, the higher the page rank the more authority Google is saying your page has according to them and the better chance of you ranking more highly. Page ranking is mathematically configured for your page based upon, amongst other factors, how many sites link to your page. So, theoretically, the more sites you can get to link to the page, the higher your page rank will be. And if some or many of those sites have a higher page rank than your page, the greater chance your page rank will move up accordingly.

However, we have shown and argued time and again that page rank is not really all that important. This is because we have frequently taken a page with a 0 page rank to the top of Google right over the top of high page rank pages. This proves that page rank is not all that important, all the time.

What is most important is relevant content. Content is king when it comes to getting to the top of search engines. Knowing how to write and optimize content that gets to the top of search engines is critical. And this is where a search engine professional comes in because a true professional knows how to achieve this.

Don’t get me wrong, having good quality backlinks is important too and a site should devote some of its efforts and time in slowly building up the backlinks. And it is important that they have a good mix of relevant content known as “anchor text”. The information in the link leading to the page should have a few of the relevant keywords or a phrase related to what the page is about and this should be mixed up a little bit so not every backlink says the same thing.

If you do employ a backlink campaign be certain you use a true professional and be careful as too much could actually harm your site more than help it.

Figured it was about time for Adtastic Hosting to have its own blog. I’ve
had a couple of blogs over the years but tend to stay so busy never really
seemed to have the time to keep them updated. They are still floating around
on the Internet here and there and the few posts on them are pretty
informative I think because my primary interest in having a blog is really
to try and help teach people about how to be successful on the Internet and
explain all the technicalities of that. So I think that must have some value
somewhere.
But, as mentioned I usually stay so busy around here its hard to give it
much attention. And hard to trust that process with anyone else, after all
the chief cook and bottle washer should have that task and that would be me.
So, why will this blog be any different. Well, for one, it has its own home
under a root top level domain. And that is pretty important I think, gives
it more of a reason to want to stay alive and maybe me more of a reason to
support it.
But the biggest reason this blog might tend to develop is I have it set up
to automatically post my writings directly from sending an email right to
it. Considering I spend so much time in the email anyways I figured that
might help me to keep it updated more easily. Such a nifty feature being
able to just write a quick email, jot down your thoughts or musings or
ponderings of the moment and 15 minutes later it’s posted to your blog.
So hopefully, this time around we might actually fill this blog house up
with something someone somewhere might be interested in.