Why Using Cheap and Free Services Are A Waste Of Time
For the first time ever we started a PPC campaign for our web design service this week. I was a bit surprised when I took a look at my competition and found that all of them were build-your-own-site sites or template sites.
I was sitting here wondering rather this was the way to go. I heard one of the guys talking on the phone to a lady, that had just purchased a do it yourself site. She was needing help with the design. The simple and easy to set up site did not seem so simple. But that was not what caught my attention.
The guy she was talking to was not a salesman nor was he trying to sell her a job. But he did point out all the flows in the program to her.
1. She was using a subdomain name. This means she did not own the website. She could very well get links to the site and get it going good only to find herself out the door. And the competition owning her site.
2. She is limited by the program. When we design a website for a customer there are no limits. If the customer wants a small header, large header no navigation there are no limits placed on that customer.
I saw one website that bragged about having over 900 designs to choose from. Chances are there are only a couple nice looking designs. And the chances are even better that you are not the only one using that design.
There is no other place in the world that offers the ability to get some many customers for so little money. But if you try and save every penny possible then you will never make it online. Your website is an extension of you and the design has to convert your traffic.
have started running ads this week with Microsoft’s adCenter.
We are still setting up everything so I have very little to comment on there. Although the fact that I can use their tools to find out the age and sex of the person doing the searches makes it very nice for designing landing pages.
Here is what I have been looking into.
How is the launch of the new windows affecting MSN, Google and Yahoo.
As luck would have it, it did not take long to find this article. My feeling is that Google may have a hard time holding on to number one as more and more people buy computers with Vista set as the default search engine. As the graphs in the article show it would appear that Live is gaining while Google is dropping.
People using Google are normally web savvy webmasters and are not very good potential clients while MSN search has always converted better. Evey thing I have read so far online about Microsoft’s adCenter says the conversion rate is a little better than Google.
I would rather go with less clicks and a higher conversion rate myself but only time will tell.
It might be time to start ranking sites for MSN.
I have just now created a new section on GeeksOnSteroids about website designs the plan is to create this section of the site and hope it alone can do around $50,000.00 per month worth of business.
It is not easy task.
The idea is to customize each page for each keyword. Another words if I find that more girls click on a page than men then I will customize that page for girls. And of course if it is more men then I will customize the page for men.
While I am doing this I will also be writing text for each of my 10,000 keywords. Now that might seem like a rather large number to some people but the idea is that the more pages I have the more traffic I can bring into the site. While I am writing the text I will also start getting links to this section of my website and running ads with MSN’s new Microsoft adCenter.
I guess I better get back to work on adding more text to the site.
I have been playing around a little with Microsoft’s new adCenter.
It has some information that is worth knowing. I can find out the geographic location, gender, age, lifestyle and time of day people search for any keyword I enter.
This allows me to build pages and aim them at the type of people that will be landing on those pages. Helping me to convert more of my traffic.
I like this a lot better than Google’s AdWords and the conversion should be better, since MSN gets less webmasters and more real people.
I am going to give it a try and see what type of traffic it can send me.
I’m not saying that there is no need for on page optimization because it is important but I’m saying that it want get you traffic. It is important that you use SEO friendly url’s and it is good to use title tags, meta tags, alt tags, H1 tags, URL structure, internal linking, Content, site maps and the site is be usable.
But none of these things will get traffic to your site and are easy enough to add to a site. There is no reason to hire an outside firm to do what your web designer or CMS (content management system) can do at little or no charge. People hire an on site SEO firm thinking that they are going to see traffic to their site and many times this is not the case. The increase that can be seen with an on site SEO firm is very little in most cases and none at all in others.
Your return on investment would be better seen using PPC or going with a marketing firm that will work on getting links and traffic to the site as well as taking care of on site SEO needs. If I had a choice of hiring someone to handle SMO vs SEO, I would go with the SMO.
SMO (Social Media Optimization) will get both links and traffic to your site while on site SEO will not get either to your site.
