Over a period of months I tried a lot of different things to grow the business. I even launched a mail order catalog, but the breakthrough I dreamed of just wasn’t happening. You see I was the marketing manager for a small retail store back in the mid 90’s. At that time I was just starting my career and I was very focused on growing this store to the next level. I remember reading an article in the Wall Street Journal around that time about how the Internet would revolutionize the way business was done. I was fascinated with this possibility, so I decided to put this theory to the test. I invested a great deal of time and energy in building a website for the store – I even learned HTML programming, but sales didn’t change until…
Until I changed the fundamental assumption that I was operating under, sales from the website remained a mirage. I could see it in the distance, but I just couldn’t quite reach it.
Myth – If you build it they will come
As a kid I loved to make things and frequently had some invention that I was working on. I grew up hearing the old expression that “if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” This may be true, but only if you have the right marketing strategy. I learned the hard way that “if you build it they will come” is a myth without advertising. If nobody knows about it, they can’t possibly come.
A needle in a haystack
Without Internet marketing, finding a website on the Internet is a bit like finding a needle in a haystack. The reason is very simple. Right now it is estimated that there are roughly 450 million websites on the Internet and this number is growing at a rate of 4.5 million new websites being added each month. For any given search phrase, there are likely to be thousands of results returned. If you want people to find your website in the search engines, showing up at the top of the search results needs to be a priority.
Internet sales success
Although I had high hopes for Internet sales when I launched my first website back in the mid 90’s, I was initially disappointed. It wasn’t until I positioned the website at the top of the search engine rankings that sales increased dramatically within only a few months. Needless to say, my boss was thrilled and began telling his friends. Soon other business owners began contacting me and asking me for help. The rest, as they say, is history.
If your Internet sales are not what you want them to be, you need to make your website show up at the top of the search engines when people are searching for the products / services that you provide. Even without any search engine optimization (SEO) work, your website should naturally show up at the top of the search engine when someone is looking for you by name. This is good, but in order to reach new people who don’t yet know about you, you need to make sure that your website also shows up at the top of the search results when people are looking for what you sell. When you do this, your sales go up.
