Working the Streets

For the Past few weeks I have been visiting a number of businesses from Atlanta back to my office here in Provo. Through my travels I have discovered a few things about the functions of what I do and how they play a part in the online world. I don't claim by any means that I know all about online marketing. But really who can? I do consider myself a professional in what I do and have a great knowledge of putting the correct budget with the correct marketing in any business. Most companies that I visited seem to have a confusion on what the difference is between what is done online and how is places an effect to their bottom line. Unfortunately I can't tell you how much money your company will get from online marketing. This is impossible to calculate. I like to compare the online world of business to the stock market in most cases. It is constantly changing. That doesn't mean that it is a risk. There is a risk involved with discovering the pattern. You have to put something out to get something back. When a company decides to put themselves out on Google AdWords or takes the plunge of doing SEO (search engine optimization) they take the risk of how the market looks at them. What they assume they will get the highest return for may not be what they have properly designed their site for. I had a business that sold design furniture and did custom interior design. What they really wanted to do was sell their furniture. But when you went to the site you saw one picture of a couch and then a large paragraph of all the things they carried. This doesn't work! You can't expect that your descriptive paragraph is going to drive people into your store to look at it. If they are looking on the Internet then that is what they are doing looking. If they can't see then they can't be sold. The owner for this store looked at me when I told him this and he says, "Well, isn't that what I'm paying you for?" NO, you are paying me for the traffic or the people looking for your business. I'm not the creator of how you sell. My job is to point those people who want furniture toward your site. After this encounter and many others I realized that small business owners get a website and get traffic, but don't get proper information on how that traffic needs to interact with the website. Most large marketing firms do this for their clients. But as more and more small businesses enter into this vast market they don't know how to make it work. So, I decided that I could offer my knowledge of experience in sales and online marketing to these few that need help in getting a website that "sells" to the traffic visiting their online business.