
- There were nearly 1 billion websites online: 976,383, 510
- 24 hours later, Jan. 12., the number was 976,789,102
- OK math whizzes: that’s 500,000 websites in 24 hours
- **According to InternetStatsLive.com
How Long Will It Take?
If you expect to come up locally and become a player, it may happen after a few months, depending on what your business is and how your pages rank. Is there demand for what you’re selling/doing/producing? What are your competitors doing. How large a presence and for how long have competitors been performing at the top of their game? Is your website excellent in function, speed, user-friendliness, content, photos, videos etc?
Hire Website Firms Carefully
How Much Money Should a Website Earn?
What you really want is business, and you assume a massive stream of traffic achieves that. You shouldn’t be deciding what the website looks like because you’re not your clients. Your logo should be used, but beyond that hire a website firm with design, infrastructure, content, SEO/SEM and online marketing expertise.
In the end, your only concern should be: Will the right people find my website in a Google search?
Sure there’s directories, there’s social media, there’s pay-per-click. But you’re linking all those things to your website, so your website has to be the best part of your online mix. The very best.
Your Website Isn’t the Problem
Your website isn’t the problem. There are many incredibly successful, revenue-driving websites out there. The problem is that you hired an unqualified person to run the Internet and revenue-driving portion of your business. You saw a pretty website that did something cool or original. You get traffic reports, impressions, clicks. No new clients, right?
That’s because you hired a firm that over promised and didn’t deliver. Your pretty website may be a bust. You may have paid $25,000 to someone who took advantage of you. You’ll know if after 6 months you still have no clients.
Your website can and should perform for you after it’s built. It does take time to be cached by Google, especially if it’s a rebuild with more than 200 pages. Or a new website on a new domain, or a new website in a competitive category.
But if you hire carefully and then try to strong arm your website firm and don’t listen to the experts, you’ll lose again. You’re not an expert and you can’t learn SEO, website building and everything else. Website SEO takes many years and it’s fluid and changing. You’re a doctor or a lawyer and should simply hire carefully. You can’t catchup by reading from SEO websites.
If your website fails, you either went cheap, or with someone you thought was qualified, a friend, a random guy online, or a big brand name company. You bought and paid blindly hoping for the best. Then, nothing. No clients: not one.
That doesn’t mean that websites don’t bring clients. It means you chose the wrong company.
If you expect success on the web, you aren’t going to get it cheaply and you’re not going to get it fast if it’s going to be done right. But the rewards and hassle-free approach to website business can propel your brand forward.
With websites, you can expect the unexpected in a good way. You’ll be surprised every time you get a new client because it’s never happened or rarely happened before. When your website is built and managed correctly, you get phone calls.
Another Way to Look At It
When you take your car to get new brakes, you wouldn’t do the brakes yourself or have your nephew who had watched someone else do brakes work on your car. Certainly there are many ways to cut costs, but your Website which should drive business can’t be shortchanged.
It’s helpful if you use a website firm, maybe someone who has been building websites since the web was young…maybe even someone who sees the bigger picture beyond the zeroes and ones. Someone with an expertise that’s proven by clients who say, “yes, whatever he did to my website made me a lot of money.”
The Awkward Silence
Now you’re excited to sit down with your website manager. You go online and see that your website is down. You call your guy because something isn’t right. You’re panicked but you dial his number, take a deep breath and wait while the phone rings. You’re going to ask him to check it out and make some changes. But the phone keeps ringing and ringing.
There’s no answer you get voice mail that says your website manager is on vacation.
Has This Happened to You?
You call up a national computer chain to see how much they’ll charge to look at your site….can they look at your site?
The conversation goes a little like this:
“You have the passwords?” they ask.`
“No,” you say.
“Well you’ll be needing those,” they say. “They’re kinda important. We can’t access your site without them. Who’s your web host?”
“I don’t know,” you say.
“We need that to get into your account. No, we can’t break into your site. You sure you don’t have an e-mail from him with this information?”
“No,” you say. “Nothing.”
“Well you’ll have to wait for him to get back from vacation. Good luck.”
Questions to Ask Your Next Website Company
- Where will you submit my website?
- Do you use webmaster tools, analytics?
- Are you certified in Google AdWords, AdSense, YouTube Academies, Google Analytics?
- Do you program in HTML?
- Can you edit raw HTML?
- What do you know about compressing images?
- What’s your feeling on video posting and formatting?
- What kind of SEO and SEM tactics do you employ?
- Do you use software to generate and post content?
- Do you rely on Google Adwords and Directories for traffic?
- How will you increase my page rank?
- What can you do to increase the likelihood that my site will be found in local searches in other cities?
- Can you send me a list of sites you’ve built?
- How can I get in touch with you after hours in an emergency?
- Where do you host your sites?
- Why do you host them there?
- What’s your plan if there’s a website hack?
- Do you use software to run social media?
Questions? Ask the Website Whisperer
Contact a qualified website firm to solve your website problems. Send the Website Whisperer, a question and it may be selected for posting on The Marketing Square website. The Marketing Square will respond using 12 years of website construction and digital expertise to answer your questions.