Our Blog

As part of my website redo, I have taken my own advice and asked some clients to provide testimonials. As with other forms of marketing, testimonials help your visitors see more about you from a client perspective. Your clients can (and will) say things about you that you could never say about yourself. It has been said many times that word of mouth marketing is the most powerful form. Testimonials is one way to leverage that on your web site. But don't stop there--use them wherever you can.

I also have to say that it has been gratifying to receive these testimonials. They are from clients that I have forged working relationships with over time. While I knew that they valued what I was doing for them, having them articulate it for others shows me how much they value it. To everyone that sent in a testimonial I give my very sincere and heartfelt thanks!

We held our monthly webinar last week on web analytics. It just amazes me the range of information available from Internet marketing. It is one of the key differences from traditional marketing.

Take the example of one of my clients (www.Austin-All-Maids.com). I built their web site last year. Of course I installed Google Analytics throughout the site. From that I can tell them many things about the traffic on their site. We know how many visitors, how many repeat visitors and how many new visitors. We can tell what pages they came to originally (landing pages) and what pages they visited during their stay. We can tell which pages the most people 'bounced' off of and did not look at other pages. We can tell where the visitor came from geographically and where they came from referral-wise (not to mention the search terms they used to find the site.)

While that's all very helpful if analyzed properly and reacted to, there's even more. Through tracking phone numbers, we can tell how many people called because the found the website. We can tell how many called from the search engine advertising. We can even tell how many people called them from their Craig's List ad's.

Better yet, we can tell which search terms on which search engines resulted in phone calls, emails or form submissions. That let's us shift money around to take advantage of the best yielding advertising.

Finally, we automatically send a follow-up email to every price estimate requested. That email contains a coupon to encourage them to try the service out. We can tell how many people open those emails to gauge the success of that campaign.

All in all, we have a wealth of information about our Internet marketing program that allows us to intelligently improve it on an ongoing basis. Not to mention that the client feels good about the money they're spending because they can tie it to specific results. Don't you wish you could do that with all of the marketing dollars you spend?

There is a common saying about how the children of the cobbler don't have shoes. We all can get caught up in the day to day operation of our businesses and taking care of our customers to the point that we neglect to take care of ourselves and our own business. You would expect an Internet Marketing Consultant to have great website and these days a blog. Well, I've decided to take my own advice and redo my website and start this blog.

It's been my pleasure to work through new websites with many businesses and see how thinking about their website makes them think about their business and in particular their marketing and their core value proposition. That has certainly been true for me as I reworked this website. The value of this exercise has caused me to sharpen my messaging not just for the website, but also in my other marketing efforts.

Even this first blog entry has me thinking of all the things I want to talk about and at the same time thinking about how to stay focused and provide value. The beauty of a blog is that it develops over time--I don't have to get it all out right now! It's an ongoing discussion. I look forward to having that discussion with you!