Comedian Lewis Black noted that the economy must be turning around because if Facebook is worth 50 million dollars, imagine what real sh*t’s going to be worth!
It seems like every other day is April Fools’ on Wall Street with news of some high tech company going public and raising billions of dollars before they even make a dime.
Like your company, Deep Footprint makes money one dollar at a time, customer by customer. It didn’t begin that way. When we first started in 1999, we had the “build it and they will come” pipe dream that never materialized. We got a few investors but our plans on global domination fell apart when the tech bubble burst. My business partner and I had to pick up the phone and cold call local businesses one by one.
Nowadays, we still cold call, but not nearly as much. With rise of Google dominance and mobile phone usage, we have found some other great avenues to attract new customers.
Here’s a quick list:
- Google AdWords pay-per-click advertising allows you to bid on keywords like “Chicago Lawyer”. When someone does a search with these words, your site will come up high in the search results. This is a fast, sure-fire way to get more people to your site.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is when you go through your website page by page and optimize your titles, URLs, and content for certain high value keywords. It involves a lot of research, competitive analysis, grunt-work, and weekly monitoring. It’s best to hire a professional who adheres to Google’s best practices so you aren’t banned and get some real, long lasting results. SEO can be a slow process, but once the snowball gets rolling, it can bring you a lot of new business.
- Google loves blogs! When you blog interesting articles every month, Google takes note and sees you as an expert in your field. Google favors recently written articles. Would you rather read an article written in the past month or an article published in 2006? We’ve found that more people arrive at our site through our blog posts than our homepage!
- Optimize your site for mobile phones. Nearly 30% of website traffic comes from mobile devices (see source). Mobile phone users are more likely to contact you if they can see your content and find your contact information on a small screen. Don’t close the door on potential business.
Next time the next Internet sensation gets a new round of financing, don’t waste your time reading about it. Odds are you probably weren’t even invited to invest because you don’t play golf with the bankers at Goldman Sachs. Instead, think about how to increase the ROI of your website by making small investments of time and money using some of the methods I listed above.
