The Focus Method For Internet Marketing of Products and Services

Your business thrives on customers or clients. It’s built on finding the right person who needs or wants what you offer. How much does it cost you to find the right people and bring them into your shop, store or sales process?

In 2005, it cost me over $50,000 to attract the right clients for our real estate business. In 2010, it will cost me less than $5,000. Yes, in a terrible economy and a suffering real estate market, we are bringing in more clients than we did in 2005. In the past three days, we’ve had 16 calls and email leads and it’s just now 2:30 in the afternoon. Oh, and these leads came on a holiday weekend.

In 2005, print advertising and internet pay per click (PPC) advertising drove our sales. In 2010, we have no PPC and our print advertising is limited to promoting a few open houses in the local paper. What has changed is that we now have an internet marketing program that we’ve built over the past 2-1/2 years.

What about sales? Sales in 2005 were over $10 million. The market was hot. Then in 2006. the real estate market in Florida crashed. Our sales crashed with it. In 2007 sales were just over $1 million. PPC and print advertising were a money pit. In early 2008, we shifted our focus and started building our internet properties to generate natural or organic internet traffic. These are the results that the search engines show that don’t cost you money to display. The ads on top and to the right of those listings are paid. They are expensive for competitive keywords.

In 2008, sales were up 150% to $2.5 million and last year, in 2009, sales doubled to over $5 million. In this economy and the state of the real estate market, we believe that we are now more effective with our internet marketing program than we were in 2005 when we were spending over $50,000 on print and PPC advertising. Oh, and the $5,000 we spend now is for tools to promote and manage our web properties, not on advertising.

Now for the reason you need to keep reading. When I paid $50,000 for advertising, I had to keep paying for it to be effective. It was an expense. But, when I build web properties that send me clients, I own those properties. I don’t keep paying. I’m investing instead of spending.

The Birth of Crooked Palm Media

What’s missing from the real estate story above is what it took to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in internet marketing. There’s a lot of hype and promises, but while there’s a grain of truth in the hype and promises, it comes up way short. What works is pretty simple, but not easy.

Let me ask you a simple question – if you could create an internet presence and generate new business quickly and without a lot of work, how long do you think it would last before someone who had a longer term strategy and did a lot of quality work would surpass you?

Now I’m pretty technical. I started working with computers in 1979. I built my first website in 1997. I’ve programmed, built networks and large applications. I’ve been a Chief Information Officer for a large non-profit company and a Director of Information Technology for the 39^th largest industrial company in the world. I’ve also worked as a general manager, plant manager and operations director with an organization of over 650 people.

I’ve run companies and I’ve worked in very technical environments. I know marketing, computers, networks, and business operations. I tell you this to give you the background to help you understand that with my experience, I still spent over $25,000 and thousands of hours to figure out how to effectively market on the internet. It could cost that much or more, or, it could cost you much less.

I’m going to grossly simplify what I learned to be effective. It’s probably not what you want to hear, but here goes. Like anything of value, an effective internet marketing program takes time and work to create and nourish. We saw a trickle of results after 3 months, real progress after 6 months, and significant overwhelming results after 14 months.

How Much Time? How Much Work?

Okay, I’ve said it takes time and work – how much? Well, the simple answer is that it depends on how much the internet traffic for a topic is worth? The higher the competition, the greater the time and work required. Bad news if you’re trying to compete against Nike, but good news if you’re looking to bring people into a local restaurant or dentist’s office.

The competition will determine the difficulty of ranking in the search engines and you want competition. Why? Because if there’s no competition, there’s unlikely to be any value in the search terms. An exaggerated example will demonstrate.

Getting a number one listing in Google for the term “daytona beach tennis shoes guide” would be pretty easy. The problem is that no one, or very few people, are searching for that term; just 16,300 web pages have that term on their pages. Now, when we look at “Daytona beach tennis shoes,” the count jumps to 25,000. A little more difficult, but still fairly easy to achieve. What happens when we check just “tennis shoes”? 4,780,000 results are returned. Google reports that “Daytona beach tennis shoes” gets less than 10 searches per month, while “tennis shoes” gets over 1,000,000.

Attempting to rank number one in the search engines for “tennis shoes” would take a lot of time and money. Worse, it would probably be a waste. Tennis shoes in itself is not a buying term. So what do you do?

The Focus Method

Starting with the idea of ranking for any one term is a backward frustrating approach. It will lead you to wasted effort and money. In The Focus Method, we start with a simple question, what do you want more of?

Most business owners will say they want more sales or to make more money and that’s where we start, but then we drill down to what drives those sales. In the case of our real estate business, we drive sale through leads. We need more leads to create more sales, but a restaurant needs more walk-in traffic or reservations. A different focus is required for these different requirements. There is no one cookie-cutter formula.

The Focus Method is unique for each business. It’s overused and over-hyped, but your business is different from your competitor. The question is, good and bad, how are you different and why do people care? Why should they care? Why should they do business with you?

Combining what you want more of, with the reason people do business with you is the beginning of building a focused campaign – the beginning of building focused web properties that you own.

Let’s take our fictional tennis shoe store. We find that the owner wants to sell more shoes. That makes sense, but what kind of shoes? After drilling down, we find that the store sells few athletic shoes for kids. We know this is a big market. Thousands of kids play sports in the area. There are baseball, football, basketball and soccer programs in several communities. Thousands of shoes are purchased every year – as kids grow, so do their feet. If we sell more kid’s shoes, we can grow the business.

Why should people buy their kid’s shoes from this store? Here’s what the owner might say, “The right athletic shoe makes a difference in performance and injury avoidance. Poor fitting shoes can cause injuries like sprained ankles and twisted knees. If more parents knew about the benefits of a good shoe fitted properly, they would want the best for their children.”

What else makes your store attractive? “We are located on a main road close to other shopping locations. Our only business is shoes. Our people are shoe experts. We don’t hire high school or college students; we hire people for the long haul and we train and certify them. We’ve been in business 7 years and the average employee has been with us for 5 years. Our store is bright and clean with plenty of seating.”

There may not be much traffic in the search engines for “Daytona beach soccer shoes,” but when we take into account all the different types of shoes (baseball, football, basketball,…), with all the different communities, and then talk about fitting, the right shoe for a child, training tips for each sport and on and on, we can build a lot of traffic from a lot of different search terms.

In May of 2010, our real estate sites had over 13,000 visits from different sources. The highest total for any one keyword from the search engines was 143. Our highest traffic keyword brought in 1.1% of our traffic for the month. Our top 50 terms brought in 943 visits or 7% of our traffic. 93% of our traffic comes from terms with less than 10 hits per month.

We received traffic from 2,371 different keywords. We have about 700 pages that are attracting that traffic. There are competing websites that bring in more traffic than us. Our power is in our focus and the clients we target. We are reaching the people we want to reach.

Let me remind you – this is all “free” traffic. We pay to build our web properties, but we don’t pay directly for any of this traffic – it’s natural or organic.

How many pages on kid’s shoes and related topics could our shoe store owner create? I’m thinking hundreds, if not thousands. Fortunately, he wouldn’t need to create nearly that many to start bringing in targeted traffic.

Over the course of time, as we build your web properties, you will also rank for higher competition search terms. This is natural as you build more pages and some of them become popular. The Focus Method includes these top keywords in our strategy, but we focus on the result you’re after, not general search terms.

How Much Will It Cost?

I wish I could tell you how much it will cost you to build solid traffic generating web properties. I can’t. Anyone who gives you a fixed price for this sort of thing is focused on their cost of producing certain deliverables, not on producing a specific result for you. They may build you a website, a blog, and other properties, but if they are coming in at a low price, they are not going to generate a lot of traffic for your business.

I can build you a website and blog. I can give you a fixed price for hosting and adding content. However, if that’s all we do, you will gain little in results.

As you understand The Focus Method better, you come to realize that we first define the results you’re looking for and then determine how we are going to reach those results. I’m going to tell you bluntly that building a website or blog and other properties is less than 10% of the process.

Let that sink in for just a second. If building properties; the design, coding and hosting are 10%; what’s the other 90%? The 90% factor is laser-like focus, the value and quality of your message and content, and promotion of that content.

Your cost will be in how you go about generating your content and promoting that content and your unique business. The more you and your team do, the less outside costs are involved.

Crooked Palm Media will provide you with everything from full implementation to consulting and training service only. Your costs lies somewhere between Crooked Palm doing all the work and your team doing all the work.

What’s Next?

If advertising is a considerable expenses for your business, let’s talk about converting a good portion of that expense to an investment.

People are making money on the internet with little to no business knowledge, lousy service and poor execution. Imagine what you can do with a real business; with your knowledge, experience and execution.

A short talk will start the process. There’s no risk, no obligation, only upside for your business. Please call Mike Byrne at 386-295-2049.