A Plain English Guide to Internet Marketing 

Why Website Marketing is Important Today!

The Challenge

I’m going to repeat myself here.  Your biggest challenge as a business owner is attracting new customers or clients.  

Now I’m going to amend that.  Your second biggest challenge is hanging on to the customers or clients you all ready have.  .  

When I was coaching loan officers, my company found that without some form of post closing follow up, 6 months later the average customer couldn’t remember the name of the Loan Officer  who had helped them complete one of the biggest financial transactions of their lives. 

How are you making sure a client you worked so hard to get will come back again and again?

Traditional Sources


If you are not currently on the internet with some form of website marketing, what are your current options?  First there is Print, which includes advertising in newspapers, magazines, direct mail, yellow pages, etc.  Then there is radio and/or TV.  How about Billboards or Signs on your building. 

How much money are you currently spending to do this?  Please get a piece of paper and write down how much you spent on marketing last year.  We will come back to this later. 

My point is, if you are going to tell your story, you need a way to get the message out.  And, if you are going to pay good money to do it, don’t you want the biggest audience you can get?

How Big is the Internet?

World wide the number is huge and not relevant to our discussion.  According Internet World Stats,  the estimated population of the United States at the end of  2014 is 318,892,103.   The Estimated number of internet users as of March 31, 2014 is 277,436,130.

That is a staggering 87% of the  US population estimated to be on the internet. 

Why Numbers Matter

Numbers, particularly marketing numbers, matter a lot.  I know, you sell widgets, and the only number you really care about is net profit after taxes at the end of the year.  

There are other numbers that matter too.  Let me explain.  

How big is your audience?  This is a number you should know.  If you advertise in the newspaper, then it’s the daily circulation times the number of times you run the ad.  If it’s a sign, it’s the average daily traffic count of the road it’s on. If it’s a radio ad… well, you know.  Write down that number. 

What is your response rate?  How many actual customers are you getting from your sources?  Actual customers divided by total audience = response rate.  I’ll be surprised if it’s much greater than 1 to 5%.

Now take the actual number of new customers you got and divide by the amount you spent.  This is your cost to acquire a new customer.  This also called “Marketing Investment”.   

Here is where it gets interesting.

You can buy a domain name for about $9.  These have to be renewed periodically, so let’s assume the $9 is an annual cost. 

You need a web hosting site for your domain.  The cost ranges from free to around $400 per year.  Let’s use $400. 

This means that for about $409 per year, you can publish your story to an audience of over 277 MILLION people.  That’s about as close to free as you can get.  If you were to convert ONE THOUSANDTH OF ONE PERCENT of that audience into customers, that’s 2700 new customers at a cost of 15.1 CENTS per customer. 

In addition, with website marketing,  you now have an easy way to stay in touch with your existing customers and clients making sure they come back again and again and…

That’s why you need a website. 

But Wait...There's More


Yes, there is more.  Numbers like those above aren’t enough.  There is a lot more information required if your small business internet marketing campaign is going to be successful. 

In order to attract an audience to your website, you need to know more stuff. 

So click on the page  Finding Internet Marketing Leads  and let’s explore finding out who we want to talk to.  

Then go to What are Keywords to find out how to attract customers to your page.

You can also return to the Home Page by clicking here

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