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). 
Why should I believe what I read here?
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. In the long run a website that ranks at the top of the organic searches for your products and services in your local area will be far more effective and have a much lower cost per new customer than any other form of advertising. Why are websites cheaper than other forms of advertising in the long run?
There is a very simple reason why websites are cheaper than other forms of advertising in the long run. Once built they can remain online for 10 years or more for only the cost of maintenance and SEO to keep them fresh and infront of people. 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 ten years with only a minimal upkeep cost.
Life Expectancy of Advertisements | | | Life Expectancy | Result | | Flyers | 10 seconds | Thrown in trash | | Mailers | 1 minute | Thrown in trash | | Phone Book | 1 year | Thrown in trash | | Newspaper | 1 day | Thrown in trash | | Radio | 1 minute or less | Commercial Ends | | TV | 1 minute or less | Commercial Ends | | Websites | 10 years | Can be renewed forever |
How many times will you need to buy each form of advertising over 10 years?
| Number of times you will need to buy this form of advertising | | | Month | 1 year | 5 years | 10 years | | | Flyers | 500 | 6,000 | 30,000 | 60,000 | | | Mailers | 1000 | 12,000 | 60,000 | 120,000 | | | Phone Book | 1 | 1 | 5 | 10 | | | Newspaper | 4 | 48 | 220 | 440 | | | Radio | 10 | 120 | 600 | 1.,200 | | | TV | 10 | 120 | 600 | 1,200 | | | Websites | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | | 
Cost per new customer
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. | Cost Per New Client | | | 1 year | 5 years | 10 years | 20 years | | | Website | 50 | 10 | 1 | 50 cents | |
Oh... And websites are the only type of advertising that can actually go up in value over time. Afterall, if you use a generic domain name composed of what you sell and where you sell it that ranks at the top of the search engines anyone wanting to buy your company will see this as a valuable asset and so it adds value to your website.
Why do I need a 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 Bing “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 “Insurance Ft Myers”. 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. 
Optimized website or business card website?
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. | 
