How I wasted the last three years of my Life
How many countless hours have you spend going over your website and creating countless keywords and phrases? Creating and submitting sitemaps, and throwing back links around like crazy. The amount of work that goes in to optimize websites on the internet is matched only by the work of Google trying to change the algorithms of the search engines to make search engine optimization less predictable. This is a simple capitalist concept, and one that has built an enormous mega-corp that is influencing the evolution of us as a species. Because most small business owners have a reasonably high level of intelligence, they understand that society has moved over into the digital world and in order to survive we must take our advertising dollars from conventional print media and invest it into the web based media. As Google has become the king of search engines, it has created a community that has engulfed all of mankind. People find information on Google.com. That is all their is to it. I don’t care if you love yahoo.com, ask.com, bing.com, or whatever, no one ever says, “did you yahoo that?” Google has taken over such a large share of the market, any analyst worth his salt would tell you it would be crazy to spend the majority of your advertising dollars on another search engine. Its kind of like why Apple computers rarely get viruses, why would they, they hold such a small percentage of the market share, that hackers prefer not to waste their time.
The problem small businesses run into when trying to advertise online is honestly the amount of choices. There is so much nonsense going around on the internet, that its almost impossible to really know who is telling the truth and who is lying. When I was running Advance Dental Art, I would get 5 calls a day from different online directories that wanted me to advertise with them. Unfortunately, at the time I did not know what I know now and I spent a ton of money for minimal results. I spent 3 years studying SEO concepts, reading countless blogs, researching everything I could. My evenings were spent in front of the TV with my laptop creating profiles in countless directories. I paid to in dentist directories like 1-800 Dentist, and the dental expo.com. (Its really kind of absurd when you step back and realize you are paying to be on a directory in a larger directory) At the end of those three years, it really started to pay off, I was getting between 35-40 new patients a month from my website, and the office was really growing.
Today I started a new job and learned how I just wasted the last three years of my life spending any time working on “Search Engine Optimization!” Why was I paying all of these random companies to be in their directories, just so I could be found when 80% of all people are finding their services on Google. Now for the other chunk of time and money I was wasting, because of my work online, I considered myself pretty savvy and started actually advertising on Google. I know it sounds like I just did a 180 there, but here me out. I was managing my ad word campaign and was getting a pretty good ROI, I was spending about $650 a month and based on my analysis, I was converting about 25 active patients per month. Please understand, I am charming and my conversion rate is higher than your average receptionist, but even so it would be pretty safe to assume at least 15 no matter who was answering phones. With the average annual value of a patient being $462 the ROI on these campaigns broke down as follows:
ROI=[($83,160-$7800)/$7800)]*100= 966.15
Obviously this is better than you will find with almost any sort of marketing program, but its not really accurate, because it does not account for my time. Like most small business owners, I tend to fail to see the value of my own time. If I include the $30,000 that I would have been paid were I to bill myself for the hours I spent managing my keyword campaigns, the formula would look a bit more like this,
ROI=[($83,160-$37,800)/$37,800)]*100= 120
Probably the more accurate number, and in terms of advertising, still a decent campaign. I am a thirty year old man, relatively young in the dental field, and certainly more web savvy than most dentist, and I only developed an ad campaign with a 120 ROI. Today, I found what I have needed for the last 3 years without even knowing it. Based on previous experience, I understand you need 3 things to successfully advertise on the internet. Your greatest return on your investment is NOT going to come from your website, its not going to come from any directory, it comes from insuring these three things.
- You have to be on the front page of Google.com!
- You have to be on that page 24/7 no matter what!
- You have to be on that page for ANY keywords that people will use to find your type of Business.
No matter who you advertise with, everyone agrees that if you accomplish these three things, and provide a quality local product or service that people are actually looking for ie., plumbers, dentist, contractors, real estate agents, etc., you will be successful. To be honest its really impossible not to. The company that I am working for can guarantee all three results and the part that is so brilliant, it is for a flat fee and is completely turnkey.
Today I reviewed numbers for current clients of my new company, PMP, and I found a dentist about thirty miles from where my office was. This dentist started with his campaign through PMP back in august of ’07, he paid a set up fee of $1,500, about half of what I paid for my website, and he was paying a fixed rate of $589 per month for this unlimited keyword campaign. In 2009, last year, he averaged 42 new patients per month from Google, and he didn’t even have a website! PMP does a landing page directly connected to the ad on Google that has most of the pertinent information about the office, but that is it. He never had to work with any keywords, he has been getting all of them free for the last 2 years, and his phone is ringing off the hook. I am telling you, these are sponsored links with unlimited keywords at the top of the primary way people find their dentist 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
The depressing part of the entire thing, is even after all three years of my back breaking work, this guy did better than I did for less that I spend on a quarter page ad in the local newspaper (only 57,000 in circulation) which only gave me 3 patients a month on average. The ROI formula looks like this
ROI=[($232,848-$7068)/$7068)]*100= 3194.40
3194.40, that is just crazy! That is three times what I did and he didn’t have to do a thing. If you are finding this difficult to believe, I completely understand. I had a really hard time as well. I swear its the truth and I will prove it. Call me at (949) 859-1874 x110 and I will show you. You have to spend money to advertise your business. Please call me, I can help you get more of a return on your investment than you can imagine!
The mistake most small business owners make with their Facebook pages is an over emphasis on the boring aspects of their companies and an underemphasis on why they go to work every day. Those of us that are optimist work hard when we need to and take the time to enjoy the little fun moments when they peak out. As a Social Networking Site, most of us go on Facebook to peak into our friends lives and see what they are up to. If you make the updates at your business fun and interesting, more people will read them and not “hide” you in their feed. Don’t get me wrong, the idea of the page is to market your business both by creating a loyalty and producing refferals from current clients. Promotional post are definitely effective, but only after a fun and reciprocal re-pore have been created with your followers. The more you respond to your clients post, the more influence you will gain in the networks.
rbenjaminblair
