Sales

Louisville Kentucky Web Design & Why It’s Mostly A Joke

by admin on October 10, 2011

So your an up and coming business, or an established business that is needing a web presence and you think to yourself, “Who should I get to design my web site?”.

It is a common question and one that should not be taken lightly.

When you decide to hire locally, your hit with a ton of advertising from radio, billboards, cold calls, and even the search engine result pages. The only problem is, most of the providers here in Kentucky are just plain charlatans.

I have a friend that runs a successful online ecommerce store and I can not even count on my hand how many web design companies he has been with in the last 8 years. I know he has spent tens of thousands of dollars on his site just in rework alone from where other local Louisville and Kentucky web design companies have really done a number to his site. His company is about to spend another 6 figures just to fix what these web design companies have previously done.

The most common problem I see is just plain incompetence. Sure, they do their song and dance to get you in the door and win you over with their complete attention of your project before you sign that 12 month contract, but once you get locked in it seems like your just another number in their billing department to suck a couple grand from you every 30 days with little to no work on your project.

I have seen it myself first hand as well. Not only have some of my friends and business partners been faced with it, but I also have partnered with companies in the past where I was their primary “online marketing” guy. These companies would land a client and promise the moon to them, then scramble to hire outsourced workers to complete the different tasks of the job, and then start collecting payments from you while not having 1 clue to what they were actually doing with your project. Needless to say, I no longer partner with those companies once I find out how they really are.

The simple fact is, there is almost no barrier to entry to starting a Louisville web design company. All you have to do is have a little sales knowledge, study some lingo, and get yourself a solid contract and your in business. Once you land a couple clients, you outsource all the work to a couple 3rd party developers and manage the project and skim a healthy % off the top of the budget for yourself. When clients call and ask questions just keep them on hold for a few days, don’t answer your emails or pretend to be on vacation, and always blame someone else until you can reach that next 30 day billing mark and collect a few grand more. Even better, when the client doesn’t like what you produce, you tell them you will fix it for XX hours more billing!

The best of these setups even hire their family as their employees. Unless your the Jacksons, the Osmonds, or maybe Will Smith’s family, the people in your family generally are not going to be experts in whatever business you set up. We see right through it, your just hiring your family to give them a job and help make your fly by night web design business a lot bigger then what it really is. Is it really in your customers best interest to have your uncle do their web design, your brother to do their paid online marketing, your dad to handle their back end programming and your step mom to handle their web copy?

A lot of these companies are just 1-2 man operations where the “partners” basically have no web experience and just want to cash in on what they think is a money train. Their prior experience actually resembles something close to selling cheap patio furniture or frozen meat from the back of a truck and generally almost always has nothing to do with anything online.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no hate for small Kentucky Web Designers or Louisville Web Design companies. I am only trying to warn you of those that pretend to be these huge operations with tons of “combined” experience that I loathe. When was the last time 70 years of combined online web design experience helped anyone? The web as we generally know it has only been around less then 2 decades.

Just do your homework before you hire out a local Kentucky or Louisville web design firm:

1. Browse their site and read over their marketing messages.

2. Browse their site on the “Way Back Machine” and see how they have evolved over the years.

3. Check up on their customers. No, not the list they give you, but look online for queries like “Web Design by ( insert company here )” or view sites such as ripoffreport.com for their business name.

4. Demand your contract have solutions that favor you when they do not finish your project on time, to your specs, or if they drag their feet on questions you have that need answers. Make them accountable.

Hopefully this article will shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes with local web development companies here in our state and how you can protect yourself.

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Driving Traffic Is Only Half The Battle

by admin on September 8, 2011

Have you ever wondered why your site or marketing campaign is bringing you lots of targeted traffic, but you’re just not able to turn that traffic into the extra revenue you are seeking?

One thing I have noticed about Louisville web design companies is that many of them know how to initially set up a website for their clients but lack the foresight in helping their clients with their future online marketing campaigns. No, I am not talking about helping them with PPC or their Facebook page, but with their actual website and how their website can dramatically increase their conversions, revenue, and lead-generation goals.

I have been helping several companies with their local Louisville SEO projects, and almost all of them have asked me the same question, “How can I drive more leads/revenue into my site?” A lot of them simply think they can just drive more traffic to their site and that will fix their problem. While this sounds logical at first, the better method would be optimizing your site first and then driving more traffic to it once the site is optimized. Think of it like this, you wouldn’t crank up your air conditioning in your house when it’s hot outside while your windows are wide open, would you?

The hard part is, many of these same clients had a website built for them that they are not able to edit. Either their web design company has them “locked” into a system that is not user-friendly, or they simply have a system that is so grossly complex that if you make one change you have to edit several files and spend lots of time to make that one simple change.

I was working with one Louisville ecommerce company that was receiving hundreds of targeted visitors for their products every day. They were only converting maybe .30% (yes, only .30) of their customers. I devised a plan to help them convert more of their customers with ideas such as:

1. Capturing their email before the sale/before they left the site (to be used in a Louisville email marketing campaign.)

2. Install a live chat system to help customers that were on the site find the product they need.

3. Add in upsells and cross sells to the checkout funnel.

4. Change up the “calls to action” on their buy-now buttons and quote cart system.

5. Offering different payment options for those that would rather pay with Paypal or Google Checkout.

I had determined that these changes would result in my clients’ conversions being raised to a full six percent, which would result in a change of over 1,270,000 dollars in revenue per year for them. The problem? The web design company made it to where their site was almost uneditable. Making these changes would have resulted in hours and hours of programming because the clients’ code was not commented, locked down to a proprietary system, and encoded with source code encryption. Not only that, the web design company wanted to charge 300 dollars an hour to make these changes and had projected these changes (that only they could make) would take three months to implement.

Optimizing your site will provide you the largest gain in ROI that you will ever see, but if you do not include a knowledgeable online marketer in your site-planning projections, you will only end up hurting yourself and your business later down the road when it is time to ramp up your marketing campaigns.

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Top 10 Reasons You Are Not Getting More Sales

by admin on July 25, 2011

Here is a list of reasons I see most commonly with clients that are not getting more sales/growth out of their business.

1. You are not split testing.

2. You chose the wrong niche.

3. Your margins are too slim.

4. You don’t know your market well enough.

5. You don’t offer an advantage.

6. You don’t reinvest into your business.

7. You don’t network/listen.

8. You invest in the wrong people/tech.

9. You don’t have a plan.

10. You are not split testing.

I know I listed one of those twice, and that is for a reason. Most people are not split testing ANYTHING they do with their business when it comes to marketing or their business in general, and that is, by far, the biggest problem I see today.

“You are not split testing.”
Most people build a website and set up some Facebook/Google ads and spend a couple hundred dollars and get ZERO sales and then say to themselves that Facebook traffic must not be worth their time. Those same people never tested multiple images in their ads, multiple headlines, bid ranges, or even calls to action.

Too many people are not testing out all the variables and giving up way too early. It takes a smart person to even know what the variables are to begin with, how to change them, what to test, and then what to measure. The world is full of people willing to “do it once and do it one way” instead of testing out and finding out what the real problem is.

When you were learning to parallel park at 16, did you get it right the very first time you did it? Why should you think your website or ads are set up correctly then the first time around?

“You chose the wrong niche.”
Do you really think there are a ton of people online ready to buy your WalkMan that is specially designed for parrots? We can bring you traffic to your site, but that doesn’t mean you have a product or idea that can b grown.

“Your margins are too slim.”
Your margins could be slim for a lot of reasons. However, when you allow this to happen, you cut yourself at the knees and you also cripple your marketing department. Want to try paid marketing? You need to split test paid marketing a lot to make it bring in big bucks for you. If you’re running on slim margins you almost cut out any type of paid marketing that could be done correctly to help increase your customer base.

Want an affiliate network promoting for you? Affiliates like good margins paid to them. They only see the end user price, not the price you paid and are making on margin. They will not like the slim CPA (plus network fees and the fraud that comes with it) that you pay out from your already thin margin. Lots of them will abandon ship after a few weeks and promote some other offer that is making them a hefty EPC or CPA.

Contest, promotions, and special deals are all out the window (or really limited) as well. If you have slim margins, you really need to optimize the traffic you have and you need to get creative… fast.

“You don’t know your market well enough.”
I can’t count how many times I have seen this. I have had business owners tell me their customers don’t do this or won’t like that. Specifically, I have had owners tell me promotions will not work with their clients. How simple is it to send out an email to your customer base and just ask them what they want?

I recently did this for a company that swore up and down to me for years that promotions will not work and are too gimmicky for their customers. I finally convinced them to let me send out an email to their customer base that was a survey of 15 questions about how their customers buy supplies for their businesses, and offered the customer a choice of a gift card, free lunch, or discount on their next order, and NOTHING at all for filling in the survey. We had an overwhelming response to the gift card and gained a ton of useful data on their customers they had never known. We also had a ton of people filling it out for free as well. Just ask your customers what they want if you want to make more money.

“You don’t offer an advantage.”
Why should a customer buy from you? Do you offer the same thing as the other nine websites on the front page of Google? Better yet, why should Google or Bing rank you higher than X competitor and give you more customers? With the growing influence of bookmarking and social circles, there is an immediate need for your business to stand out and not be in the same herd as the other websites in your niche. When you are a mover and a shaker, people talk, people share, and people want to buy from you. If you offer the exact same service/experience/and similar cost as your competitors, you’re just doomed from the get-go. I have one client that offers nothing exceptional from their competitors and they wonder why they are not growing at the rate they had expected. When you are like everyone else, the first responder to my needs gets the win.

“You don’t reinvest into your business.”
Even I have fallen for this one. Not reinvesting into your business causes it to fall in on itself sooner or later. You must reinvest in your people, in yourself, in your tech, and in your revenue streams. That service or product you offer today will not be as hot six months from now, and the traffic source you get your customers from will not be as plentiful either. Put some money back every month and reinvest into your business. Make sure you get retrained, go to tradeshows, expand out your business, hire new workers, and dominate new niches. If anything, just invest the money wisely if you cannot think of a way to reinvest into your business. Money making money never hurt anyone.

“You don’t network/listen.”
I don’t care who you are. You are not smarter than me. I am not smarter than you. If you think you know it all and don’t take the advice of others, you are going to fail at business very soon. There is a reason people like the President, Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, and even Tiger Woods surround themselves with people smarter than themselves on a range of different issues. It is not your job to know everything; it’s your job to get people who do know it around you, helping you. Find a mentor or a group of people that are doing what you wish to do. Ask them questions; hang out with them; plan meetings with them, and get their advice.

“You invest in the wrong people/tech.”
I have seen too many companies never get to where they should be because they don’t value their largest two assets: their employees and their technology. Taking your employees out to lunch, throwing them parties, and maybe giving them a ham at Christmas is nice, but for your employees, that doesn’t pay their bills. So when it comes time that they have a financial hardship, one of the first things they do is start job hunting for better pay and benefits. I can already hear some of you saying, “It’s not my fault they fell on hard times.” Well, it will be when they quit and take all their knowledge with them and now you have to scramble to find another worker, interview them, train them, get them to up to speed, and then repeat the same cycle over and over again every seven months. “It costs more money to find new customers than to keep them,” and the same holds true for employees.

Top talent is passing you up when you ask for the moon and back and only want to pay minimum wage salaries. I have seen this with at least five clients in the last two years. They want someone with a degree, who can speak four languages, knows how to program in eight languages, can get them to the top of Google in two weeks for ultra-competitive legal terms, and bring in an extra two million dollars in revenue a month… but only want to pay them $32k dollars a year. Did you know people at fast- food restaurants make up to $32k dollars a year? Did you know I can get paid more on unemployment than that? Do you really want to disrespect someone enough that can make a HUGE impact to your bottom line and yearly bonus with the same wage as someone doing nothing on their ass all day on unemployment?

Also, I see a ton of companies pay for an outsourced firm or cheap part-time worker to build their technology for them. Even worse, they hire an intern or someone right out of college desperate for a job but with no real world experience. They get heavily invested in getting their ecommerce store set up in ColdFusion, only to find out later they cannot change or grow their website when needed. They then have to spend triple the original amount to have someone sit down and go through the original mess and recode the site for them to meet today’s standards.

You would have saved a ton of time, headache, and money if you would have hired the right person out of the gate and paid them their expected salary and then also paid to have the correct tech in place as well. I know one such small business that has wasted seven years and millions of dollars because they cannot keep employees and keep letting the wrong people handle their tech. The only thing worse than this is to hire three people to work on 1 task and think that they will get it done faster then one person working on the same job. So Much Fail, and yes, I have seen this with my own eyes.

“You don’t have a plan.”
I see this more with young or starting affiliates/business owners. They make a couple bucks, everything is put together on a string, and they hope for more profits as they burn through accounts at ad platforms and affiliate networks. You need to write out a plan and stick to it. Plans can change; goals can change, but you will never achieve anything without a plan or goal in mind. Until then, you’re just getting lucky and living for today. Having no future is one scary way to go through life. Having a proper plan sets a course for you and your business and helps ensure what decisions you make when you face hard times.

Conclusion:
Put the effort into your business that it needs and treat it as such.

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