MJ Penner Consulting - www.michaelpenner.com

Using Your Website for Marketing

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web marketing ideas I've got a website. Now, when can I expect new clients? The question implies that a website is able to, by its very nature, automatically increase the number of clients your business will serve. This may have almost been true back in the early to mid 1990's, but it is certainly nowhere near true today. You can expect new clients when you have connected to your audience and convinced them of your value as it pertains to their lives. If you do that correctly, you should get new clients within 90 days of starting your efforts, and more importantly lower the cost of cross-selling your existing clients.

Web marketing, or internet marketing as it is also called, puts your website investment to work. Sometimes it means your website is the first contact someone has with your company via a search engine. We'll call this Situation A. Sometimes the contact via your website occurs without a search engine. We'll call this Situation B. There are others, but for brevity we'll keep it to these two situations.

Both of these Situations operate within the following context:
  1. It takes twice as much effort (or more) to keep a client than to get a new one.
  2. It takes approximately 7 contacts with a potential customer before they become an actual customer.
  3. Correctly implemented, web based promotion costs 1/3 (some even say 1/10, but I am conservative) of what print promotion costs to reach the same audience at the same depth.
  4. Word of mouth is essential to the success of any marketing effort. With the web, this takes on a whole new meaning and this is where your web marketing efforts far exceed what print, radio, or TV could ever hope to achieve alone.
Web Marketing requires consistent efforts based on strategic thinking. The value of Web Marketing, when implemented correctly, is that it achieves reduced cost / time outlays when compared to strictly offline efforts, and does so by creating a sustainable presence in your market space. By "sustainable presence" I mean the ability to stay in front of your audience consistently without huge continuous outlays of time and money (which of course would be something few of us could sustain for very long). To a large degree I also mean that there is a self-perpetuating nature to Web Marketing that exists in no other medium. More on that as we get into our Situation B scenario.

Due to its length and depth of information, you need to download this article to continue reading it. We will cover specific things you can do to get the word out and market your business effectively using your website as the center piece of your marketing efforts.