search engne optimisation, seo, ecommerce, web design

You’re selling a fast moving consumer product, say for example it’s a mobile phone. It’s really just like all the other mobile phones out there, same design, same spec, same manufacturer. Price might vary a little but heck, not enough these days to spend the savings on anything more than a half of lemonade and a bag of crisps. So here you are, no-one has ever heard of you until they land on your £200 website, and you can’t understand why people aren’t buying. Seriously people, get real. You can’t even pay on your site using a credit card without going through some laborious and seriously unprofessional check out made in your garden shed and backed by the might of paypal. Do you know what, I reckon you’d think twice before placing an order, and you own the bloody website.

So you can’t work out what’s going on, why aren’t people buying from your website, which to the casual observe looks about as professional and legitimate as a Republican presidential vote in Florida. Well let me be straight with you, I can’t really be with you on the phone it’s not polite, the reason you are getting less orders than a Jewish pork scratchings salesman is that everything about your outfit shreaks cheap and nasty. Why would anyone with even a half functioning brain buy from you? Even if you were almost giving your product away I’d look elsewhere. Now there’s nothing wrong with having a limited budget but huge dreams, but why can you not see the limitations of your business plan? Do you seriously think armed with a£100 budget and a website from the back of cereal packet you’ll be troubling anyone? Your not even doing anything unique, all you are doing is selling someone else’s products, badly.

So here we go, the call has been and gone, you have all the relevant details. You know the products, the site and the competition. You like the bloke you’ve just been nattering away with, you want to give him a break. You know a new site is an absolute neccesity but understand fully that they simply can’t afford it. Being the benevolent type of person that you are you give them a huge break, this is it you say it’s July and I’d really like to be keeping the geeks busy so we’ll make them an offer they cannot refuse. You let them have it, tell them where we all stand, tell them you cannot polish a turd and there will be no point directing any further traffic to their site which looks like its been designed by a four year old using an etcha sketch. £500 a month you tell them, twelve month contract. That’s for a brand new logo, brand, website, ecommerce plaform, onsite SEO and a full SEO package for a year, all beautiful and hand made. So the full cost of launching a brand new business is £6000, spread out into twelve bitesized pieces.

All I could hear was the sound of someone fainting and hitting the floor hard. In the backgrund you can hear people busying themselves fetching wet towels and mars bars. A couple of minutes later they regain composure and splutter down the phone. f.ff.fff…five hundred pounds? Is that per month or in total; they manage to gasp out? Erm a month you reply, seriously, I’m offering you a stunning new business for £500 a month. The money you make in a year will more than cover what you’ve spent, then you will still have this site, in essence I’m giving you a free website. You’d have thought I’d just tried to sell them a turd sandwich and called it nutella.

Now remember, I’m no snake oil salesman, I haven’t cold called anyone. These people already have a website, they already know they need help promoting it that’s why they called me. I presume they are aware of the work involved in SEO and web design, presume they know their market place and competitors. Even after all these years it never ceases to amaze me that some people feel they have a God given right to compete with the carphone warehouse and their £6 million annual website budget despite having all the finance backing of a lemonade stand.

So my message is get real. We offer amazing deals at lovingthe.net, for goodness sake if you have a budget of £100 a month buy loads of scratch cards instead of competing with a multi national, you’ve a better chance of getting some of your money back.