How do you make $1 Million on the Internet?

The following is taken from a speech I gave to Queen City Toastmasters.

How do you make $1 Million on the Internet?

Successful business owners have three major responsibilities:

1. Developing, operating, and implementing a successful business strategy.
2. Doing what they do the best they can.
3. Marketing that business to the Charlotte community.

Charlotte Web Development can help you accomplish all three.

Doing business on the internet is a fact of life. The Internet is not going away but your current and future clients and prospects may be! There are many ways that Charlotte Web Development can help put your business on the ‘electronic map’ and in front of the eyes of your prospects!

Search Engine Optimization

For your business to be as successful as it may be, prospects need to be able to find you when they need your products or services. The phrase ‘Google’ has become part of the Charlotte, indeed American, lexicon. When people talk about doing research, their first stop is usually a popular internet search engine like Google or Yahoo. Think about how often you use internet search engines. Have you used a search engine to find information on a good or a service in the past week? How about the past 3 days? How about today. Chances are you found this site through an internet search engine like Google!

Here’s a bit of news that no other web design, development, or marketing firm will ever tell you but Charlotte Web Development will. Ready? Here it is:

Charlotte Web Development can NOT guarantee you a high placement in Google, Yahoo, MSN, or any other search engine ranking!

And here is another search engine optimization secret; neither can anyone else. That is the honest truth. Google’s rankings are based off of a complex set of criteria and a closely-guarded industrial secret algorithm that are specifically designed to prevent tampering listings. That is why Google and other reputable search engines are efficient and worth-while to use. You cannot buy your way into high search rankings. You can pay to be listed as an advertiser, but we will cover that under Pay-Per Click Advertising later.

So why am I spending so much time talking about this?

Well, like I said, search engine rankings follow complex criteria and algorithms. Think of that as rules of the game. If you know the rules to any game, specifically how to play efficiently within them, you stand a much greater chance of success.

We here at Charlotte Web Development are expert at creating strategies to fall within those rules. We have studied these rules at the graduate level. We have studied them at the empirical level getting our own hands dirty implementing our own strategies. We can build a website that will thrive and excel within those rules. We can help re-design your website to the same end.

Search Engine Pay Per Click Marketing

As I just said, there is no way to buy your way into high rankings. You can, however, buy space to have your ads and links to your site along side high-ranking search engine results through pay per click advertising.

Pay per click advertising are the links shown as ‘sponsors’ or ‘paid advertisement’ along side search results. You may also see them as advertisements on other websites.

How Search Engine Pay Per Click Advertising and Marketing Will Grow Your Charlotte-based Business

First, allow me to make an assumption. Let’s say that you sell a good or a service that will make you $50 every time someone buys from you. Leading internet research shows that 3% of visitors to your website will make a purchase. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Let’s do the math.

If you contract $100 worth of Pay-Per-Click advertising for 10 cents a click, you are guaranteed 1000 views. If 3% of those people make a purchase, you just made 30 sales. 30 sales multiplied by $50 received amounts to $1500! That’s a $1500 return on a $100 investment! What do you think would happen if you made a $1000 spend on Pay Per Click advertising? In this example, you’d make $15,000!! That’s incredible. That is the power of marketing on the Internet!

Let’s take this exercise a step further. How much would it be worth to re-design your website to influence visitors to purchase more often? In other words, what if your prospect to client conversion rate was increased from 3% to 4%?

Let’s revisit the example. 30 sales now becomes 40 sales amounting to $2000 of profit on a $100 investment. A Pay-per-click advertising budget of $1000 turns into $20,000 of return! Simply amazing.

So, in conclusion, how do you make $1 Million on the internet?

With our example $50 product, you sell it 20,000 times! Assuming a 4% purchase rate, this means that you need 500,000 visits – and that is not counting repeat customers.

Sure, half-a-million pages viewed sounds daunting, but let’s break this up over a year. This comes out to roughly 1300 page views a day. Returning to our original example of 10 cents per click, that is $50,000 of advertising.

Would you spend $50,000 to earn $1 Million? I sure would!!