How well is your Internet marketing working for your business?

[whitbycottages]

Not asking about specifics of money, but this is just a general question to see what kind of return people get for their Internet marketing time investment..

I would say I'm getting  over 40,000 hits per year for one business which is holiday cottages but I only own one cottage and act as an agent for three other clients. Because the campaign is working well for me at the moment I get probably 95% occupancy throughout the year, which you would have no chance of accomplishing without SEO intensive input.

If I had to pay £0.50 a click approximately obviously it wouldn't be worthwhile, especially when you realise that a percentage of the traffic and not related to your product. I also have a second business which is installing wireless security alarms over the Internet and once again approximate traffic at the moment is almost approaching 40,000 again per year.

Now I'm sure there are some big hitters out but my general question is how productive, is you're organic results and Internet marketing for your personal business in comparison to what it would cost you if you had to pay per click?

I'm kind of wondering how well the Internet is working people on this forum for their particular businesses?

Good, Bad ? whats your story ?

Cheers alan

[whitbycottages]

Hello Thomas

I understand your point that if usually an financial investment gets a good enough return in an ideal situation with unlimited funds you just go for it, but in the real world unlimited funds don't exist usually.

The 95% occupancy throughout the year is only because I've worked at getting every aspect of the business correct the facilities of the cottage after this spot on with the films tour etc. the other properties I represent on the same website and not quite as good and do not get the same occupancy rates so you've just got to get everything correct it appears.

I can see the you probably would get diminishing returns at some point on search engine results in comparison to time input but I've never got their because I've probably managed at this moment in time to get around 60% of the high traffic keywords working for me above the fold on page 1 of Google but there's still room for improvement. Only limited by time and money

But like you I love SEO it's become a way of life which is enjoyable on many levels.

[whitbycottages]

Interesting, thanks a lot for your detailed response. It seems like you've worked out very clearly the customer returns in comparison to the money spent well done.

I find Google Adword does work, but I found it to be generally too expensive. I would think if my business for holiday letting was larger with more properties it would then be worthwhile, but at the moment with my own doing fine and only representing three other properties if I said that the campaign could easily run through £25 a day and I suspect wouldn't get enough bookings back to warrant it. We don't seem to get many people signing up for e-mail news from the website either so to be perfectly honest most of the businesses coming directly from the website only.

I tried Facebook advertising and found it to be very ineffective for both the holiday cottage and installation of wireless alarms, virtually nobody showed an interest it just costs money.

And I've not tried any of the online or off-line paid for directory advertising although it might be worthwhile I'll look into it.

[MassivePrime]

Hi, apart from owning iPositions I have shares in a cleaning business and certain other businesses in the wedding industry. Like Thomas said internet directories like the yellow pages still bring a return and we do in fact use them. We also advertise with Google Adwords and even though we are also ranked highly for our local keywords I would never stop using Adwords.

For the cleaning business Facebook advertising was useless but for the wedding ones it works great, so again it's all about trial and error.

We do a lot of email marketing and it has a very very high return simply because our followers are people that would have already bought from us before and are keeping an eye out for more of our email-only offers.

In total our internet generated sales can be divided into the following demographic:

Organic positions on SE: 20%

Paid listings like Google: 25%

Paid listings like Yellow pages (and some other niche directories for the areas): 30%

Facebook: 5%

Email marketing: 20%

Most of our traffic comes from  organic positions but we seem to get better conversions from our paid efforts.

Hope this helps

[Thos003]

Well Alan, that is fairly specific numbers on your sites, and if you are hitting 95% occupancy then it sounds like a success, albeit I don't know your time/value on the online marketing.

You will find at some point, diminishing returns on your marketing efforts. How much time and how successful you can be with internet marketing depends entirely on your business model and the industry you are promoting.

As for me, a pest control guy, I've found that I only have so much money with which I can invest, i.e. market. Yellowpages still have a return, if that return fits your model then it could still be a good form of advertising. While the phonebook may have good returns, online marketing has better returns. If I have limited money and can buy a customer for $1 then why would I pay $10 for the same customer? If I had unlimited money, then I would buy all of the $1 and $10 customers that I could. (theoretical figures)

Sorry that's a long answer... in short, I believe that most marketing attempts have some return, its a matter of figuring out what the return is and how much it's worth to you. I personally love SEO.