SEO is a fraud or a sham, and sometimes both, and you are the target. SEO and online advertising does not work, it cannot work. There are several academics by the name of John Spiers around the world, but I come up #1 on google search. It cost me nothing, but it does not get me any more business either. If you believe SEO matters, or online advertising is effective, then you are working from false premises. Happily you can test your hypothesis, quickly and inexpensively.
The game is to equate SEO with advertising impact. Long before there was an internet, David Ogilvy wrote a book with a simple point: people looking at an ad does not mean they will buy the product or service. But you can know if your ad works. He explains in his book, and it applies to the internet today. Some things are true no matter what changes.
Here is the problem: the cost of getting customers from the internet is far more than the possibility of profit. So if you sell a $100 thing that costs you $50. The problem is it costs you far more than the $50 profit to get a customer. So you sell a $100 thing that costs you $50 to buy and $100 to get a customer with online advertising.. So you lose on every sale. If it is a $5000 item, it costs more than your profit to get a customer. The lower the cost of the item, the less chance of making a profit. And that assumes you are getting full retail for your item online. Because the internet makes it so easy to compare prices, no one gets full retail online, so your chances are worse than even I say.
Those who offer SEO and online advertising generally are just resellers of googleAds. They will take your money and charge you a premium for what you can do yourself. If the people you hire are not using googleAds, you will just waste more money faster.
They will claim they have expertise that makes all the difference, and you will make beginner’s mistakes. Really? Then they will have plenty of references that tell you what wonderful work they do. They don’t.
But do not take my word for it, you can find out for yourself, quickly and inexpensively. GoogleAds will give you a free service coupon for $75-$100 to try them out. So come up with a test budget, of say $150. $150 + $100 coupon is $250.00. Use a googleads account, with their literally billions of dollars with of advertising technology and expertise, and see how far $250.00 gets you. And if you like, hire the experts at the same time. They too can get you a $100 coupon. So, double up... now you get your $250 campaign, and their $250 campign, a total of $500 in advertising online for $300.00. And I tell you, there is so much amazing power and know how inside of google ads that the $300 is well spent if you look at it as just an online seminar. You’ll need to look at it this way, because you will get nothing for your $300. You’d get nothing for $3000. You need to spend much more than that to get anything going, but in any event, you’ll see that you cannot make money advertising online, that SEO means noting to your bottom line. But that is just fair warning. And it is a great seminar. Then you will know.
So test out for $150 or $300 and see what happens. Advertise what you think you would sell online and make money. Don’t worry about having to deliver if you get orders, you will not get any orders. But if you are so worried, then find a local source downtown for your product. Say it is a fancy chocolate bar you are selling for $10.00, and you can buy it retail for $10.00 downtown. Then adverise it, and if you get any order, take the $10 payment and buy the chocolate and ship it to the customer. Then you have no risk of stocking something that will not sell. And of course like very many online retail models, you may make no money on the item you sell, but you can try to make money on shipping and handling.
I have tried all of the above, and I know you cannot beat the old fashioned kinds of advertising. For the last decade I have offered one and all a bounty of $47.50 for anyone who can sell a class of mine for $95.00. No one can do it, in ten years of trying. GoogleAds could not do it. But at the same time the cost of getting a student to pay $95.00 for an online class costs $7.00 when advertised in that paper catalog of courses schools mailed out to homes in their area. We know online advertising cannot get a student for $47.50. What would it cost online, $100? $500? Who knows?
I do know there are 1300 schools, all with wonderrful talent, trying to figure out if students can be recruited cheaper online than through a catalog. If an when it is possible, they will find out and we will all know. So far, we are not even close.
But Google is making billions off online advertising, and a heavy advertiser is schools! Yes, of the 300 million people who have ried to sell things online, maybe a couple of dozen make money. For example, University of Phoenix sells a bachelors degree, which may cost them $1000 to recruit a student, but the school then sells the student a $100,000 loan the student will never pay back, the taxpayer bails out the loss. (the co-president of the school was paid $12 million last year). Ally bank is a huge advertiser, and Ally is the new name for the busted GMAC finance, which was bailed out. The auto companies are big advertisers, which you pay for with bailout funds. The military advertises big time. Shell Oil advertises that they are a ‘green” company online. See a pattern? People who do not have to make a profit “succeed” advertising online. And not to put too fine a point on it, Google pays practically no taxes, which is a great way to have a profitable business, it makes for a competitive edge against smaller biz that pay taxes. But that is another point.
The internet is a terrible place to build a business. It is an inexpensive place to communicate with customers you gained elsewhere. Put your advertising dollars where they will work, and you can know they are working.
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