Why Wouldn’t You Market Online?

MoreVisibility - December 29, 2006

I have been employed at MoreVisibility for one year and it has taken that same amount of time to explain to my parents what I do for a living. They finally get it. At first they thought I was building websites, which took about 3 months to convince them otherwise. In trying to explain internet marketing and search engine optimization to two 70 year olds, there was bit of frustration. However, they are both somewhat computer literate; my father looks up stock market information; my mother shops at her favorite online stores.

After our holiday dinner last week, my father stood up from the table and said “come look at this”. He was referring to a trip itinerary of a recently booked tour to China. I asked how he did the research and he said he just typed “cheap tours” into Yahoo! and clicked the first few listed websites (sponsored listings) that appeared. He now uses the same website to book all of his tours since his first online experience was so wonderful.

My 70 year old father may have just paid in full for the monthly PPC spend of your website. My parents booked a tour to China and a tour to Europe and you just made your money back from your initial investment. And to think that it was MY parents!

If you are not marketing your website, you are throwing money away each day. I don’t understand how prospects interested in SEO question the value of having a properly optimized site. I hear daily “I don’t think my target audience is searching online for my services.” Or, “I have put online marketing on the back burner for now because my sales are down and can’t afford it. I can’t imagine why sales are down!

It just doesn’t make sense to me that there could potentially be millions of people searching for your website, and you don’t do anything about. It is the start of the New Year. Perhaps its time to think of putting some effort into internet marketing, so that someone else’s father can pay your marketing bill.