A question to [offline] business owners

I don't currently own or run a B&M business. From conversations with those who do, I can tell you that the stuff you outlined is trivial.

If you can prove that buying/renting your website will make the register ring, you're gold. That ring may come in the form of increased foot traffic, phone calls, etc., but unless you can demonstrate that you can put more money in the till than you can take out of it, colors or ad locations are meaningless.

Simple... traffic and sales... sales being the most important component.

Tsnyder

The answer is really simple - if you can prove that your services will provide a positive ROI to the business owner, then you don't really need to do anything else or spend a lot of time explaining additional benefits.

Don't overcomplicate things - if you can accomplish this one task effectively, then you'll see the sales rolling in like clockwork!

Paul

I've been a brick and mortar business owner for more years than I care to count.

It is not at all about the look of the website as much as it is about how much additional sales that site would bring in.

For many years, the very expensive Yellow Pages brought in around 10 times cost each month. Then as the internet became more popular with people searching local businesses, the effectiveness of the Yellow Pages began to drop substantually.

The cost of the website and SEO would need to bring in the amount of sales that used to come from the Yellow Pages.

Most small business owners are clueless about using an autoresponder to capture names and email addresses. They are clueless about setting up effective email sequences. They don't have an ebook or report about their business, showing why someone should purchase from them, to give away as the way to acquire opt-ins.

You can provide this.

:-Don

Because we are involved with SEO and all of the other marketing tools available , marketers often make the mistake of thinking everyone else knows about it too, even what we consider to be something fairly simple (signing up for google listing) is really a big deal to offline business' who often only have time to ck email.. before they crash.

Having been a B&M owner for many years, I wanted my site to produce leads that I could convert. The next thing I wanted was to offer them tons of information to that they would remember visiting my site and come back when they were ready to contact me. Everything else is moot.

Well dear work your part honestly according to your market requirement, but we all work well but its luck that matter at the end, some business owners work on every bit of advertisement but do not get the target.

Hi Collatio,

Yes, what you are talking about now is creating lead generation sites. You would redirect manually after capturing the enquiries with Aweber or similar. See this Lead Generation WSO for a really good (cheap) product on just this by Peter Maxwell. I have it and am following same path now.

I'm not sure, but maybe a set of opt in service. Meaning that the business will get opt ins of people and be able to create some type of list.
I know that for me that's very important, if not critical.

Maybe also some type of way to edit parts of the site at will.

What is shouldn't have - well - I guess not to look amaturesh and very unprofessional I guess.

I think some of this perspective gets back to the very narrow focus of SEO only marketers in not understanding the wider view of marketing in a business.

SEO search is but one of many avenues of traffic. The fact that someone is approaching the entire idea of knocking off a #1 return and then offering to rent the site is not only a terrible perspective, it's unsustainable in the marketplace over the long haul.

Businesses aren't there to be extorted from, and business owners don't take kindly to that sort of tactic - and well tell everyone about you at the next chamber or rotary club meeting.

Local marketing isn't the same as pure internet marketing, and businesses do NOT rely upon a #1 search listing - nor is a #1 search result any guarantee in increase in business.

I have a client company right now that has consistently ranked #5 in their industry. They get invited to submit bids because they're in the top 20, and consistently beat the #1 & #2 company.

I suggest that SEO-only marketing folks spend some time learning the deeper function of marketing in a bricks and mortar business.