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[ Website or Web Fright: WORD version ] Goal The goal of this handout is to assist you in learning how to make a significant profit from your website and teach you how to use your website to attract customers that may otherwise have gone to your competition. Why am I reading this? Most likely you are reading this because you either have a website that is not as successful as you would like it to be or you are considering purchasing a website for your business. Most likely you are also asking yourself questions such as “Why is my website not having the desired results?”, “How do I get more visitors to my website?”, “How do I convert visitors to my website to people coming to my place of business?”, “How do I avoid getting ripped off when I buy a website”, “How do I tell good website companies from bad ones”, “Do I need a website?” and perhaps that most important question “Will buying a website increase my profits or result in a loss?”. What is this? This information packet will answer most, if not all, of your questions of how, when, where, who and why relating to websites. It can help you avoid serious mistakes and teach you how to make a profit with your website. Who put this together? Steven Nunnally of NotJustWebsites.com (Your favorite website guy).
What you are about to read is “not” mindless speculation. Instead it is based on results garnered through our own websites and those of our clients. We both test and analyze the results of different ideas to see which ones not only help clients make it to the top of the search engines, but also which ones bring in the most "buyers" for the clients. We even analyze how many pages people go to, how many seconds they spend on the site, what percentage of them go to the contact page, about us, etc... The result is that our sites and those of our clients produce a very high return on investment (time, energy and money) compared to most forms of advertising. During the next hour or so we'll teach you how to evaluate not just the success of your website, but also how to evaluate website companies for the likelihood they would help or hurt your business. Cost of advertising The cost of advertising is something that every business must face and deal with. It’s how you deal with these costs (and their potential benefits) that can make or break your business. Making the right choices can result in large numbers of new customers at a low cost. Making the wrong choices can cost you a lot of money without a corresponding increase in new clients.
Below is a sample of the choices of advertising available to businesses with an average cost per year and the cost of these forms of advertising over the typical lifetime (20 years) of a successful business. What may shock you is that over a period of years that websites actually have the lowest total cost of any form of advertising.
Why are websites cheaper than other forms of advertising in the long run? Life expectancy of advertisements Compare this to flyers that have a life expectancy of about 10 seconds when they are received, mailers which are generally thrown in the trash in under a minute. Or how about the $7000 you paid for a quarter page advertisement in the phone book. Have you ever stopped to consider what happens to that advertisement at the end of the year? It’s thrown in the trash. Newspapers are thrown in the trash at the end of the day. TV and radio have a life expectancy of 30 to 60 seconds and then they disappear. In fact, websites are the only form of advertising that you can pay for one time, and then keep using for twenty years with only a minimal annual cost.
Websites are the only form of advertising where your average cost of bringing in a new client actually decreases over time. Other forms of advertising all remain the same or increase in cost per new client. The difference is that websites are a renewable resource that you can use for many years, while other forms of advertising have a very short life expectancy (As shown in the previous chart). For example over 20 years you would need to pay for hundreds of thousands of flyers and mailers, ten thousand newspaper advertisements, thousands of radio and TV advertisements, twenty phone book advertisements, but only one website.
When you started reading this handout you may have been asking yourself “Why do I need a website?” and by now one of the answers is quite obvious. Websites have the longest life cycle of any form of advertising, need only be purchased once and thus have by far the lowest cost per new client. There are other reasons too, such as that your customers can use your website to order contacts, read about additional services you offer, order, etc... But the biggest reason may be, you need a website because your competition has one or will have one soon. What if your competition has a website and you don’t? If you have a well designed and optimized website you can expect (depending on the type of business) hundreds if not thousands of visitors or more per month. These are people who will have the opportunity to read about your services, rather than those of your competition. On the other hand, if you do not have a website and your competition does, then these same people that could have been reading about the services you offer will now be reading about your competitions services. If a thousand people or more a month does not sound like a lot, consider that this works out to more than 12,000 people per year or more than 240,000 people during the normal lifespan of a business. And these are not simply short advertisements like radio or TV that show up on peoples TV screen have little time to give real information for 30 seconds. Instead people can go here any time of the night or day and read more about your company and your product. What if your competitions website outranks yours in the search engines? If your competition outranks you in search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN “and” their website is user friendly and has good information they will most likely not only receive more visitors than you, they will end up with more paying customers in their office than you will. However, as long as you are in the top ten of the search engines and have better materials and information on your website you can expect some visitors and paying clients as a result. Two things are almost equally important here. The first is that your website rank in the top ten. The second is that your information not be a generic advertisement or simply pretty pictures, but that your information be of a better quality than your competitions. If your competition is number one, but their material is boring, generic, unrelated or even from an out of state source then you can still make a significant profit by appearing on the first page of the search engines. Better information goes a long way. What if your website is not in the top ten? No matter how beautiful your website is, no matter how wonderful the information, if your website does not rank in the top ten in the search engines you can expect only a very small amount of traffic from the search engines. Think about it. When was the last time you search for something in Google or Yahoo and went any further down the listings than the first page? One thing to keep in mind is that your website can still be used by clients who visit your office to allow them to gather additional information, fill out forms, etc., and also as a reference for traditional advertising such as newspapers, radio and TV (Read more about us at ...com) The greatest mistake One of the greatest mistakes you can make is assuming that simply because you purchase a website that you will instantly start making money. That is not the case. In fact, most websites lose money. Let me say that again, I am recommending that you build a website and at the same time I am telling you that most websites lose money. Why these statements that sound completely in contrast with each other? The answer is simple, when you build a website it has to compete with every other website in the world for your target phrases (Such as “Cataract surgery in Cape coral”. Since only ten websites can be in the top ten positions, that means if there are one hundred websites competing for the same phrase you are that ninety of them will not rank high enough to be seen (first page). In that case 90 out of these websites may have lost money. Some of them of course will benefit from patients using them for information and as a reference point for targeted advertising such as newspapers, TV and radio. So the actual money losers might be somewhere close to 50% of the sites. The greatest mistake you can ever make is hiring the wrong person to build your website. If you want to win in the search engines you need a professional website optimizer with proven results. Anything else and you risk losing your investment with nothing to show for it. Unless, your intention from the beginning was to build a "business card website" where you have chosen to ignore the search engines and plan on sending people via your business card and other forms of advertising.
There are essentially two kinds of websites. One is used like a business card. A business cart website is designed so “you” can send people to it so they can gather additional information about your business. This type of website is not optimized or optimized poorly and gathers few, if any visitors from the search engines. Instead, you give out this website address, like a business card, to existing clients and through traditional forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, radio and click thru advertising. Optimized websites have all the same functions as a business card website except that their primary function is to bring in visitors from the search engines. Although business card websites and optimized websites “appear” the same to humans optimized websites may take as much as three times as much work to create. The difference will not be visible to humans looking at the website, but it will be highly visible to search engines. Or you can think of it like this. Any amateur can use a website in a box program to create a beautiful business card site, but only the experts can build a well optimized sites. For some companies optimized websites are not necessary because people do not search for the words related to that businesses website. For instance companies selling some new gadget whose name and purpose is not well know. These items need to be promoted via other types of advertising and the business only needs a business card website where they may display their product and take orders. For a doctor on the other hand an optimized website is the best choice because there large numbers of people searching the Internet for information on local doctors. Your Website There are several things you need to avoid getting ripped off. Otherwise you can lose all or part of your investment and get little or nothing in return. What is domain registration? Domain registration is the process of purchasing a website address, such as SillyThingsPeopleDo.com. The process is more like renting that ownership because you do not own the domain as much as you lease it by the year. Domain Registration - Do you own your website? Never allow the person who will be building your website to purchase the domain name (website address) for you (Example www.myeyeguy.com). Instead purchase the domain name yourself. Why? There have been many instances where a website designer has used ownership of the domain name to rip off their own client. Basically it works like this. The website designer offers to purchase the domain name for the client. The client agrees. The website designer spends about $7 a year to have the website registered. If at some future time you (the client) decide to change website design companies the original website designer (if they are dishonest) may inform you that they own the website domain, not you. By purchasing the domain name yourself, you can avoid the possibility of this happening to you. Registering your domain I recommend purchasing your domain for ten years in advance because the search engines use the information on how far you have prepaid the registration to help determine if your website is owned by amateurs who could disappear at any moment or a professional company that will be here for many years. The easiest to use domain registration website I have found costs just $7 a year and is called Name.com
If you already own a website and do not know if the website was registered in your name or your webmasters you can find this out by clicking the “Who Is” button and typing your websites address at the main registry website for the entire Internet at Internic.com What is hosting? Hosting the process of saving your website to someone else’s website (known as the host server) where other people can go to view it. The computer where your website is stored is called the host server. Hosting – Do you have access to your own website? It is very important that you have access to the hosting of your website. For instance if your website company does a poor job you may want to hire a new website company. However, if you do not have the user name and passwords for the host server account for your website you may be at the mercy of your old website company. Occasionally situations like this have arisen where the old website company holds the website hostage, demanding substantial amounts of money for you to be able to access your own website. I highly recommend that you host your website in your name, not your webmasters, and that you have the passwords. A little extra work today could save you thousands down the road. Hosting Fees There is another reason for hosting your website yourself rather than letting your webmaster do it for you. Hosting is a way many website companies increase their profits - at your expense. Some companies charge as little as $19.95 a month while others charge up to $1,000 per month. The average is about $50 a month. What these companies do not want you to know is that you can buy your own hosting account for as little as $9.95 a month. Keep in mind that when you look at monthly fees this price difference may appear small, but when you multiply that monthly difference by 12 (months you may be shocked at how much of a cost difference there is. Where the real shocker comes in is when you consider how many years your company may use this website. For instance even a $25.00 a month difference in monthly fees works out to $6,000 (the cost of having a good website built in the first place) over the lifetime of the average business. Save money. Buy your own hosting. Buy your own website hosting With the help of my current webmaster I have searched the Internet for the best deal on website hosting. The best I was able to find has everything your business website could reasonably need, plus 24/7 tech support and is available for $9.95 a month from Webmasters.com.
Have you ever gone to a website and gotten a message that the website could not be found and to check back later. The vast majority of the time this problem is caused because the computer where that website is being hosted is experiencing problems. Additionally you may have gone to websites that load very quickly one day and load very slowly another (known as slow response time). This again is most likely that websites host computer having problems. These problems can be related to power outages, hardware issues, software conflicts, other users on that server sending out huge amounts of spam or even something as simple as heavy traffic on that server. If you have experienced these problems you most likely left that website and went in search of a different website. Now think how that applies to your website. If your server has problems or runs slowly your visitors may be deciding to leave your website (profit lost) and search elsewhere (even though technically there is nothing wrong with your website). Additionally, the search engines automatically lower the rankings of websites that have server problems on a regular basis. There is a program that will test your website for downtime and response time 24 hours a day for a month. For details please visit Pingdom.com Unique IP Address There have been some recent changes on the Internet and one of them is that the search engines have become more and more diligent in trying to find websites that try to cheat in the rankings by building websites with similar content to try and compete with related phrases. These changes have an unfortunate side effect in that they can punish your website when you have done nothing wrong. This happens when you are sharing a host server (computer) with other website owners (This is common practice at almost every website hosting company and with almost every webmaster). The computer itself where your website is hosted is given an IP address (Example: 92.118.62.148). If anyone else on that server (computer) sends out spam, has content related to yours, tries to cheat in the rankings, etc..., your website could be penalized despite that you have done nothing wrong. The solution to this is to get a unique IP address for your website. Spending a couple dollars a month could make a difference in whether thousands of people see your website in the search engines or not. You can do this very simply with most website hosting companies. The current rate for a unique IP address at Webmasters.com is $5 a month. Flash If you’ve spent much time searching the web you have probably come across websites that start out with some sort of flashy demonstration that may look nice, but does little to assist you in finding the “information” you are searching for, and has a button to allow you to skip the “show”. If you are like the vast majority of people on the Internet, you will click the button that says “Skip Intro” or leave the website altogether. It’s important to keep this in mind when your webmaster tries to impress you with the flashy presentation that they are recommending for your website (At a cost to you of course). My recommendation is to save money by skipping the fancy graphics and instead focus on helping visitors to your website find the information they are searching for. Keywords Any time you use the search engine you type in a single word or phrase. The search engines then basically compare all the websites in the world and give you a list of what they feel are the best sites that contain the words you are searching for. These words are referred to keywords. The success of any website in the search engines depends on selecting the keywords that potential buyers may be using in their own searches and then ranking high enough in the search engines to attract enough humans to the website to make a profit. Guaranteed Number 1? One of the quickest ways to lose your investment is to fall for a sales pitch where a website company promises to get your website placed as number one in the search engines. This simply is not realistic. For example other companies are competing against your website and other website companies are promising them the same thing. The truth is that no honest webmaster will ever promise anything in regards to rankings except to do the very best job they can. So if they cannot guarantee you the top position what is it that they are really trying to sell you? Sponsored advertising. Sponsored Advertising Sponsored advertising (Also referred to as sponsored links) is promoted by many companies through a large variety of sales pitches and even in the form of scams. The truth is that for most of us sponsored advertisements are more likely to result in a loss than a profit. To see an example of sponsored advertisements go to Yahoo.com and do a search for “watches” or some other phrase. There are a couple links displayed towards the top of the page in a light blue box. These are sponsored links.
* Actually cost per click can vary and go much higher
After website is completed, if it ranks in the search engines for its most important keywords then all visitors for many years in the future as basically fee. On the other hand, every visitor that comes to your website from a sponsored listing has a cost. As you can see from the chart above owning an optimized website that brings visitors from the search engines is much cheaper in the long run than sponsored advertising. Beauty and the Beast Most people assume the best way to evaluate a website is by appearance. For humans that may be true. But computers (search engines) cannot see graphics or pictures. They also cannot read the text on graphics. You could have the most beautiful website in the world, but if the website has no text that the search engines can read your website will most likely be so far down in the search engine rankings that no one will ever see it. Appearance (Beauty) is important for humans and therefore is important to your site. But there is something that is more important and that is how the text and computer coding for the website appear to the search engines. A beautiful website full of pretty pictures but which has no visitors is worthless. On the other hand the ugliest website in the world has some value if it is full of visitors because you at least get “a chance” to sell something. Which would you pick? Let’s say that today that your boss walks into the office and shows you two websites, that you are not allowed to make changes to either one, that you could not advertise this website in any way and that your raise and bonuses for the rest of your career will be tied to the profits (or lack thereof) for the website you choose. The first website is the world’s most beautiful, but will never have a single visitor. The second is ugly (the beast), but has a million visitors a day. Which one would you choose? Smart people would select the website that has the most visitors. And yet, most people select the company to build their website based on beauty rather than by the results of websites created by this company in the past. Website Designers Website designers (artists) are people have the ability to make you a pretty website that functions and flows nicely and they do this most often using programs designed specifically to build beautiful websites in the shortest time possible. If you want a good looking business card website and you are “not” attempting to attract visitors from the search engines then a website designer is the best choice. They can do the job quickly and easily with “Website-in-a-box” type programs and a substantially lower cost than an optimized website.
Website optimizers (technicians) specialize in making your website attractive to the search engines. The vast majority of their work is not readily apparent to the average website visitor or owner and yet it is highly critical to success in the search engines. Unlike website designers, website owners cannot use “website-in-a-box” programs because these programs tend to produce large amounts of excess computer coding (Search engines do not like excess computer code) and these programs do not allow the optimizer to go into the coding and make changes that are critical to the success of your website in the search engines. In fact, the best website optimizers make substantial changes to the website coding by hand because even the very best website programs cannot compete with a skilled optimizer. As optimized sites take almost three times as much work to build the cost related to building an optimized website is generally two to three times what it would be to build a similar website that was not optimized. The Best of Both Worlds The best solution for your website needs should now be obvious. You want a website that looks good to humans (design) and to the search engines (optimization). The solution is to find a website optimizer who also does website design or has a website designer working with them. One thing to keep in mind is that the optimizer will need to place some limitations on what the designer creates to balance and blend what humans see with what the search see. Difference between Designers and Optimizers The biggest difference you will see between professional website optimizers and designers is that the designer will start off typing “www.........com” to show you websites full of pretty pictures while the website optimizers will have you go to the search engines and search for the products their clients are marketing.
There is one simple way to find out who is a good website optimizer is and who is not. It has nothing to do with looking at pretty pictures. Instead it is asking the optimizer “What products do your clients sell, what keywords are they trying to rank for and what is the name of their website?”. Then you can simply go to Google, MSN and Yahoo and see if the website they built is at the top of the search engines rankings or not. If the websites created by this company do not rank in the search engines for their most important keywords then most likely neither will yours. Run, do not walk! On the other hand, the more phrases that a company has showing up in the top results of the search engines the more likely they are to build you a website that will be a success. Size matters Size matters when it comes to building websites. It is unrealistic to believe that you build a small website that you are going to outrank those whose existing websites are huge. For instance, if you were selling a single watch, it would be unrealistic to believe you were going to beat every watch website in the world. Some of these sites offer thousands of watches and thus have tens of thousands of pages of text and pictures. No matter how you stretch the material you cannot generate more than ten or twenty pages about a single product. And it is unrealistic to believe that a twenty page website is going to beat a ten thousand page website in the search engines.
Something that many website owners overlook is that for the purpose of making your website a valuable source of information for visitors and for increasing your sites rankings that your website will be linking to other websites which may change from time to time. For instance you may be linking to specific page on someone else’s website and without your knowledge that website could shutdown, move or delete that specific page. This means that the link to that website from your website will no long work when visitors click on it which can lead to them leaving your website prematurely. Just as important the search engines check your website on a regular basis to look for broken links. As a basic rule the more links that are broken the farther the search engines will move your website down in the rankings. With that in mind your website should be checked for broken links at least once every two weeks and all broken links should be fixed. Otherwise your website that is currently sitting at the top of the search engines could slowly begin to slide down in the rankings until it (and your profits) disappear. You need to be aware that some website companies count on their clients being uneducated on how websites really work and with that in mind (especially if they received a bulk payment for the website rather than being paid by the hour) they do not take the time to check for or fix broken links. If you currently have a website we would be happy to run a check on the links of your website and send you the results.
There is a simple way to make a decision about how big a website that you would realistically need to win various phrases. This comes from a comparison of the size of existing websites who are currently competing in existing markets. The chart below is an illustration of an educated guess of how many pages of text and pictures a website would need to win phrases related to cataracts and eye care in a given population. It also demonstrates an educated cost difference for building an optimized website capable of winning the search engines for phrases related to that city. One key point here is that you do not need or necessarily want your website to rank world wide or even state wide. For instance if you have a small practice that does cataract surgery in Florida why would you want people calling you from California? For that matter do you really even want people contacting you from over a hundred miles away? Probably not. Realistically one of the first two choices below is what you need. The good news is that if you win phrases in the search engines relating to your city name (as shown below) that have to do with eye care then your website will most likely end up making a significant profit.
Take a minute to visualize your website as a store in the center in the very center of a giant mall. Millions of people are walking past the four sides of your store every hour. At first no one enters your store. This is because you have not created a doorway for them to enter through. After your website is finished you have a doorway and people start to trickle in. This doorway is referred to your keywords. If you successfully design your website to rank for specific keywords people will enter your website (store) from listings in the search engine ranking for that phrase. Most people are educated enough to know that it is important to be as close to number one as possible for your keywords. What most people (including most people who own businesses building websites) do not know is that each page of your website can be designed as a separate doorway (meaning it has different keywords than the other pages. For instance a 50 page eye care website could be designed to rank for fifty different phrases relating to eye care. This is very important for you to understand. If you hire someone who only tries to rank your website for a single phrase (as most website-in-a-box-programs are designed to do) you risk only having one small doorway for visitors to enter your website from the search engines. It is important for you to ascertain if your website designer is taking the time to design each page as a separate keyword doorway. One way to do this is to go through the website they propose to build for you and ask them what each of the pages is intended to rank for. If they get a confused look on their face or give the same reply that they gave for the home page you should probably hire someone else. Text – Original or Spam in a Can? There are many ways to hurt your website rankings. One of the common is to hire a company that mass produces websites that are nearly identical. There are many unscrupulous companies who will build a website for your company, who have or will build many other websites using the same text. They may change the graphics, pictures, top banner and contact information to personalize your site, but at the same time the majority of the text on the website may be almost word for word the same text they use on many other websites (Search engines refer to this as spamming the search engine). For instance they may explain cataract surgery on a dozen different sites using the exact same words. The problem with this is two fold. First the search engines are trying to punish those involved in copyright fraud (Cloning text from other people’s sites without their permission) and also have a vested interest in making sure that they do not send visitors to multiple sites that have the same text. With that in mind search engines will automatically rank your website lower if they find that the text on your website already exists on someone else’s. Original text is the only answer if you want to create a profit driven by new clients coming from the search engines into your office.
There are three ways to protect yourself against your webmaster using cloned text (spam). The first is to put in writing as part of your contract that you want “only” original text and that your webmaster cannot copy this text to or from any other website. The second is to write all the text yourself (Recommended). The third is to actually go to your own website and copy a paragraph from your website and paste the paragraph into the “Search Bar” of Google. If you do a search like this Google will show you other sites that have the same or similar text. Simply scan down the results and see if Google says someone else has the same text as you. Replace any text that shows up this way, unless your website is listed before all the others in which case Google is indicating that yours was the first website to use this text. Good Text Sells Good, original text, about your business will not only help attract visitors to your site, it will also help keep them there, keep them coming back and best of all convince them to come into your office. Talk to the people on your website as you would talk to them in the office. Make it personal. Not some boring resume. If people see you as a kind, caring, ground of people they are more likely to respond than if they get a sales pitch or resume. Advertising versus Information Chances are you find advertisements “boring”. So does everybody else. People can get advertisements on TV, radio and in the newspapers. When they search the internet they seeking “information”. For instance they do not want to hear “We do the best cataract surgery in Chicago”. What they do want is an explanation such as “Cataracts are caused by... The symptoms of cataracts are... The types of treatments available to those with cataracts are... We recommend ....”. Information (Not advertising) is the key to making a profit on the Internet.
Imagine that you are feeling good because you invested in a website, it moved to the top of the search engines, you started to see new patients coming into your office and that everyone is congratulating you on making a wise business decision. The website rankings begin to fall, the number of new patients coming from your website drops off and finally your website is no longer on the first page and you are getting no new business. This is a very common phenomenon and is generally caused by having a website that is optimized well enough to make it to the top of the search engines, but which has little information of actual interest other than your business name, location and phone number. The reason for this failure after initial success is the result of Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines monitoring the actions of your website via small software programs called “cookies”. These cookies are designed to tell the search engine how long visitors spent on your site, how many pages they visited, how many links they clicked, whether they saved your website to favorite places and most of all if they ever come back to your website for second, third and fourth visits. Basically, search engine optimization (SEO) can get you to the top of the search engines, but it is the visitors to your website who through their actions (or lack of actions) determine whether your website stays at the top of the search engines (profit) or falls so far down the list that few people will ever see your site.
One of the single most important factors in the success of your website will be providing the types of information that make people want to come back over and over again. Not only does this increase the chances that individual visitors eventually coming into your office, it can also greatly affect your sites rankings. Beware of Webmasters Who Work for the Competition One of the most critical items you need to verify before hiring a webmaster is that they will not be doing a large number of websites that will be competing with yours in the same local market. Imagine if you paid “X” number of dollars for a website to rank for phrases relating to cataract surgery in Chicago, only to find that the person who built your website already built sites for ten of your competitors and has plans to build five more. This means that the webmaster has no loyalty to you, could take your money and actually be the one to build sites that outrank you in the search engines thus killing your profits. There are two things to do here. First ask if the webmaster has built any other websites for similar clients in the local area. The second is to get the webmaster to sign a non-compete agreement. The Beginning This is merely the beginning of the things that you need to be aware of in order to have a successful website. It may seem like a lot. It may seem like everything you need to know. But it's not. This is simply a starting place. It's basically enough information to help you avoid making huge financial mistakes by choosing the wrong website company. If you would like to know more please give me a call and I'll be happy to sit down and help you learn what you need to do for your business to be successful and profitable on the Internet. Thank you for your time and I hope you feel you learned something important today... Steve Nunnally, NotJustWebsites.com, 239-878-9310 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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