In this installment I will discuss a few ideas about Internet marketing.
By Tom Day www.longtermcarelink.com
I am by no means the expert on Internet marketing, but I am using it successfully. The National Care Planning Council has achieved our growth primarily through using the Internet. As far as I can remember, we have never spent a dime on hiring salespeople or using traditional media advertising strategies. Our primary website — www.longtermcarelink.net — receives about 800,000 hits a month from roughly 60,000 visitors a month — almost all from search engine searches. We currently have a Google page rank of 6. We are ranked by Alexa at around 500,000. People find us through approximately 16,000 keyword searches a month. At least 15 of these keyword searches are common public search engine inputs for long-term care issues and bring up our site in the top three returns on a Google search.
In September, we will have a brand-new version of www.longtermcarelink.net and expect this will increase our traffic and our business by 20% to 30%. We are already in the process of redesigning our state council websites and this has brought increased traffic as well.
Our other 20 websites are also popular for certain keyword search strings and come up in at least the top five searches on Google for these categories. In addition, we maintain another 83 websites for our veterans benefits consultants. We are adding 6 or 7 new websites a month. A year from now, we will have well over 180 websites generating leads for our members.
Our websites are designed to produce requests for help from the public. The number of these requests has doubled or tripled every year. As an example, the search category that attracts the public to our primary website on the aid and attendance benefit is currently producing about 10 to 20 requests a day for all of our veterans aid and attendance consultants. The volume of these requests has quadrupled over the past two years since we started offering this service.
I’m sure many of you are well-versed in strategies using the Internet to attract new business. I will share with you a summary of some of my observations on Internet marketing.
Using a Website to Establish Your Credibility
When someone contacts me about our services, I go to that person’s website. If I don’t get a URL or recognize a domain from their email, I will do a Google search until I find a website. If there is no website, I will go to the specific search links that reference that particular person to learn as much about that person as I can. Sometimes, a website will give me an idea of who people are and what they do and give me some confidence in their services. I would like to think I’m not alone in this behavior. I believe more and more that the public is doing this or will be doing more such person-specific Internet searches in the future.
I realize that social networking websites can serve a similar purpose. Quite frankly, I am older — a baby boomer — and I don’t feel comfortable registering for a social network site to find out about someone. Somehow I think this more of an activity for people in their 30s or younger. These people are not our target market. It is either the older folks or their children who are in their late 40s or in their 50s. My personal opinion is having a website is more effective than using social networking sites to tell people about you.
I believe there is a trend for the public to rely on Web searches for an unknown individual to check that person out and to try and get an indication of that person’s credibility. I know this isn’t fair and might not even be true, but I often judge a person’s ability by the design of that person’s website. A crummy looking website gives me a negative feeling about that person’s abilities. If I have this feeling about websites, then perhaps others may as well. I might not be alone in the way I relate people to their websites. Here are some of the things I look for when I land on a website. I could write pages on each one of these items. There is simply not enough room to do this here.
· professional and pleasing design
· intuitive and easy navigation of the site
· generous content on a number of pages
· clear message of the services provided
· good biography of the people offering the services
· compelling sales message why I should use the services
· third-party endorsement by being a member of one or more recognized organizations
Using a Website to Establish an Identity and a Presence in the Community
It seems that everyone in business has a website. Those who don’t have a website are likely at a disadvantage to those who do. I think it is getting to the point that the public expects any organization offering services to the community should have a website or that person or company might not be considered to have an identity or a presence in the community. The lack of a website may result in losing some new business that would have been created had there been a website.
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