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Where Should Your Internet Marketing Dollars Go Right Now?

Chris Schweppe
February 7, 2013
1 Comment
Email Marketing, Pay Per Click, Reputation Management, SEO, Shopping Carts, Social Media Marketing

I wanted to make a quick summary on what internet marketing techniques are perfect to invest in right now. Which ones are too experimental and would be better to invest in the future. And which marketing techniques you’ve missed the boat on and you’re too late.

It’s Too Late

-SEO: People had gangbuster success with SEO in the 2000’s. If you got in early, you not only got loads of free website traffic that generated sales leads, but you also got very valuable real estate on the 1st page of Google. In 2013, the people that are currently on the 1st page of Google usually don’t go anywhere. So if you want to crack the 1st page for keywords that are very competitive, maybe after a lot of hard work, maybe you can reach the 1st page after a year or so. Maybe. No guarantees. To spend a bunch of money in SEO these days with the hope of getting 2005-like results is like spending money on going to California because you think the gold rush is still going on.

-Shopping Carts: For small businesses that have shopping carts, they live and die off organic, seo traffic. They can’t afford to pay what large companies pay per click because the large company will almost always have a higher conversion rate. Why? It will take a large company less clicks to produce a sale on average because consumers are already familiar and will be more likely to trust the big company than some small company they’ve never heard of before. And because brand new SEO campaigns are almost impossible to be successful, the ship has sailed on shopping carts. The only exception would be if you’ve found a niche market and there’s no competition. Then the possibility for seo success and shopping cart success is out there.

Maybe Later

-Social Media: The past 5 years have shown that Facebook doesn’t drive up referral and word of mouth business. People just don’t do it. They use Facebook and other social media sites to socialize. Paying for clicks on Facebook is no different than any other form of display advertising, it’s just more expensive. If you’re a small business, you’re way better off letting someone else figure out the social media puzzle.

-Display Advertising: It’s on the rise and looks more appealing, but affiliate networks like Google need to do a better job localizing and properly segmenting the traffic. The conversion rates from clicks to sales leads is still ridiculously low because the location net is too wide and the segmenting isn’t specific enough. But I think Google will eventually get to where they need to be and that display will be a viable form of internet marketing by maybe 2015.

Internet Radio Advertising: I almost put this in the do it now category, but here at Customwave, we’re probably going to wait another year before completely jumping in and recommending it to clients. Too experimental right now, but it definitely has a future. I wrote a separate blog on it here.

Do It Now

-Pay Per Click: This is our bread and butter at Customwave. If you know what you’re doing, it works like gangbusters! You should have to know how to make sure the clicks you’re paying for convert into calls.

-Reputation Management: Lots of demand, not enough competent supply. Business owners are starting to pick up on the importance of their reputation online and it’s very do-able to help people with it.

-Email Marketing: An old school approach that still works as long as the people that are receiving your emails are familiar with you and interested in what you’re selling.

February 15, 2012

GoDaddy Peddles Junk

Let’s say you’re at a car dealership. You’re talking to the salesman and he tells you this shiny 2012 blue car runs great and you’ll love it. So you purchase the car and feel like the salesman was a sucker for giving the car away at such a low price. Then you wake up the next morning and the car won’t start. You bring in a mechanic who looks at the car and says, yeah, this car is junk, I can’t believe you were able to drive it home. It’s worthless. In my humble opinion, this is exactly what GoDaddy does to small business owners.

Last week while watching the Super Bowl, I saw a GoDaddy commercial advertising .co domain names and you needed to get one for your business ASAP! Those .co website addresses “get you noticed” and “smart businesses go with .co’s with GoDaddy”. And I can just imagine countless small business owners watching the commercial figuring if they buy a .co domain, their website will get more exposure, which will produce more sales leads and more revenue.

GoDaddy is peddling junk. Buying a .co domain name for your business won’t do anything. If Google or Bing decided to make a change in their search engine’s algorithm by giving websites with brand new domain extensions special ranking privileges, that’d be one thing. But that premise goes against everything Google stands for when deciding their organic rankings.

So will the .co domain name “get you noticed’? No. No it won’t. It won’t do anything. Buying the .co will not result in a single extra phone call, much less a new customer. The only value that domain offers is a piece of real estate on the internet. That’s pretty much worthless. Because .com, .net, and .org have been established as the premiere domain extensions on the internet and that fact has as much chance of changing as some new search engine knocking Google off it’s perch.

GoDaddy is making the internet marketing industry look bad. How would you like it if you bought a used car and it doesn’t do what’s advertised. That’s exactly what GoDaddy is doing here. And it’s because of companies like GoDaddy, that small business owners are still wary about spending more marketing dollars on the internet. Because there are still too many thieves that take advantage of people’s lack of knowledge in our industry.

May 18, 2011

Mobile Search Will Surpass PC Search Sooner Than You Think

Being busy on running Customwave Internet Marketing, I haven’t had as much time to blog as I’d like, so I’m getting to this story a little late. Fashionably late ; )

The New York Times, who is by far, not the foremost expert on internet related matters, actually had an interesting story on how mobile internet use is growing and what Google is doing to take advantage of it. No earth-shattering news there, right?

But the article actually gets interesting at the very end quoting Scott Huffman, a Google engineer, saying that “Mobile search is definitely going to surpass desktop search… and I think they’ll pass before anyone thought they would.”

So in other words, what he’s saying is that as more and more people get comfortable with using the internet on their cell phone or tablet, that these devices, which you can take anywhere, will become more popular than the standard desktop computer. And as a matter of fact, my last blog post was on a survey that said people prefer shopping on mobile devices more than regular computers.

It seems to me, the big take away from this, is that mobile websites are going to become way more important than regular websites built for desktops. And making sure that your website shows up properly on ANY device that gets internet access is going to be critical and essential.

February 28, 2011

New York Times Says Blogging is Dying. Oh, OK.

So, the New York Times put out a story saying blogging is waning because the youth of America is turning to Facebook and Twitter.

The idea of blogs going the way of the dinosaurs is just as ridiculous as the newspapers starting to make a profit again off print. Sorry, couldn’t resist ; ) In another textbook example of why newspaper companies are losing money, among others, is because there’s too many times they report on subjects they know nothing about.

If people at the New York Times were really as smart as people think they are, the story should have been titled “Email Wanes as the Young Drift to Facebook.” First of all, Facebook dwarfs Twitter in traffic. Twitter shouldn’t even be part of the discussion next to Facebook. Facebook has close to 150 million users who use the site at least once a month in the US. Twitter has close to 16 million.

The 2nd main part the NY Times is missing is that the youth are using Facebook over email. Not blogging. Teenagers and college age people are not using email as much to communicate because they are on Facebook way more. Not true for people over age 30, but for the under 30’s, yes. The Under 30’s were never using blogs to communicate. Blogs are for people who want content. Knowledge. Facebook and Twitter can give you a headline or a link but that’s about it. It’s not that complicated to understand.

Facebook and Twitter are used for communication. People go to Facebook to see how their friends are doing. But if they want information on how to do something like get on the 1st page of Google, you’re not going to be able to articulate it in 240-140 characters.