The following opinion is probably highly debatable and may not even be a popular stand at that. I feel that the craze of Twittering is a waste of time in terms of ROI. As is many of the other forms of marketing that is not directly related to the Internet.
Hopefully some of the dust has settled from that last paragraph!
I personally subscribe to the philosophy of exerting 20% of my effort toward realizing 80% of my returns. Rather than spending 80% of my time to gain only 20% return on my time invested. That is how I feel about some of these avenues of marketing a business.
Please don’t get me wrong I have a Twitter account and Twitter on a semi-regular basis. But I am realistic as to the hopes of ever realizing a return on my investment of time.
I don’t think anyone has ever sold a John Deer tractor on Twitter!
I believe that owning and operating an Optimized business website can’t be beat when it comes to return on investment.
When asked by a business owner that wants to realize additional revenue from their business on the Internet how this can be accomplished my answer is always the same.
- Develop a business website that reflects the business personality and professionally offers the public your products or services offered.
- Aggressively invest in that website with an off page optimization campaign. This means invest not only in having your website optimized but engage in a back link campaign that enhances your website, the keyword phrases you are marketing, and the products or services you offer the public.
Many a business owner has had a beautiful website designed and unfortunately not by a website designer that is well versed in Internet Marketing or SEO. Unfortunately this website will never be a real asset to its owners without marketing it properly. It is lacking the juice that will drive it to the top of the organic search engines. This where profits are generated, ranking well in the organic search engines.
Internet marketing starts with a business website that is designed with SEO in mind from conception and once launched live invested in with back link building. Being a portland oregon SEO firm, we are expert in designing SEO friendly website.
Back links can be procured by many means. Below is a list of the most fertile means.
- Article writing and publishing online as a guest blogger on other peoples blogs.
- Press Releases published professionally on the Internet.
- Adding your business in directories with links into your website.
- Commenting on other peoples blogs so long as they do not have no follows.
- Link baiting is the best way to generate natural back links
This type of work acquiring links is very time consuming and sometimes it is more cost effective out sourced to companies that specialize in this type of marketing.
Bottom line of all the ways you can participate in Internet Marketing there is better way of realizing a good ROI in both time and money than with a well engineered business website that is participating in an off page optimization campaign.
Of course it is not worth it if the ROI is not met by any marketing campaign. Twitter, on the other hand is not a loss if you try a bit of marketing which is completely focused on your followers.
So marketing in general should be targeted or else it’s waste of time and resource for anyone.
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Thanks For sharing dude.. :)… well obviously Most Of the websites are designed for marketing purpose only 🙂
When producing lead generation websites, you really need to make the lead capture form as viewable as possible. Make it stand out and make sure your website visitants know to fill it out. Use call to action�s to get them to submit the form.
A really good mix of responses from this article. I am pleased that it gets so many of you thinking, as this article was intended. Check out my blog at http://www.blog.joomlaunlimited.com for more interesting articles, comment I do show luv!
My company follows a similar philosophy in our Internet marketing strategy. I actually have a list of sites that sell a quality product but have an unprofessional and/or unoptimized website.
I have to say lately that I have met with some really interesting people on twitter. I am a twitter addict.
I completely agree with you about twitter, that it is almost a complete waste of time. It can get a few links back to your site, but for the most part social media traffic is basically looking for entertainment. They are not looking to shop.
Thanks for sharing.
I’m a Twitter user and I agree for the most part. However, I’ve connected with some excellent people on Twitter. That’s my ROI for what its worth. Time will tell.
Twitter was never meant to be a sales funnel, and anyone attempting to use it as such WILL be disappointed.
It’s meant as a traffic funnel and works extremly well for what it was designed as.
I personaly have to agree withthe writer on htis one. How much time does participating in Twitter take up?
If that smae time were invested in marketing your website through various means such as Blogging, SEO and neworking I can personaly gaurantee that your time would be greatly rewarded.
The 20-80 rule does apply here. Why waste 80 percent of your time to get a minimal 20 percent return, when spending 20 percent of your available marketing time can generate considerably more leads.
But then it does come down to what we enjoy doing with our time.
http://www.jimhayseo.com
I guess I will have to politely disagree on the Twitter (surprise!) While you may not make many sales on Twitter (and I have made a few), the power of networking on Twitter is real though and can't be denied.
An example of this is when I owned a fence contracting business, I used Twitter to follow people in my local area, general contractors, and real estate agents. This proved to be worth it as I gained more than a few customers because I was unique by even being on Twitter in my industry at the time.
Also, the 80/20 (or 20/80) rule you mentioned (I think I read in Tim Ferris' 4hr Work Week book), doesn't work when your customers are mainly one time buyers (like with fence or other contracting businesses I have owned where you deal with homeowners). Every customer is important (or potential) and that rule doesn't work very well in that example.
I will agree that the optimized site is imperative too though, but complimented with other factors…
Keith, I can understand your point about twitter. here i want to convey one very important message to the people working in internet marketing field. According to me, ROI is very important but i am also taking care of the time and effort i am giving to particular project for generating sales.
Again, i admit that twitter can generate sales but one have to give more time and effort for generating inquiries as compare to other internet marketing methods.
I am pleased to know that you have read Tim Ferris’ (4hr Work Week book) as it is one of my favorite book and i am reading it these days. Few of the techniques is debatable in that book and i recommend to check this article that emphasis on the same topic: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/01/10/what-can-you-learn-from-the-4-hour-workweek/
have a nice day
twitter type website could be better for consumer or say FMCG product.
obvious it is not a site for b2b promotion….
Hey guys! Get into one of my topic: http://www.hacktutors.info/2009/11/warning-do-not-turn-your-blog-to.html
Designing a website requires a lot of efforts and handy knowledge of coding languages such as HTML, CSS and as the trend changes you can’t settle on these. you have to go for PHP which is used mostly in these days.
And finally your graphics designing knowledge and creativity.
TO build a successful and an attractive website these things should be come first before entering in this market.
Mmmm nice wirte up
OPtimising website in companies is totally different from what we are doing..
Yes Sudharshan you are wright 🙂
We bloggers start up with scratch and start optimization of sites , but these employees are well trained before only , they know what they need to do and how to do it 🙂 🙂