Our company has been doing what we do for long enough that we can see the reasons for the small businesses with a successful website and the ones without a successful website. And we are not talking about whether you are “getting rich” or not getting rich from your Internet venture. Basically, we are only talking abut the websites that are making money every month and paying for themselves or the ones that are not making money every month and not paying for themselves.

The first reason is false expectations and the negative thinking that comes from it. We see people that think that once they have a website it should somehow become successful and then when it doesn’t they become disillusioned.

No matter how hard we try to explain to them what needs to be done to become successful they just don’t seem to get it or seem to be willing to “pay” for it. If you don’t invest in success, success will probably never come.

The websites that are successful become that way because they follow the single most important Internet website rule. And that rule might be said to be “what is in constant movement gets stronger”. A stagnant website that is not applying the 4 principles of: ongoing search engine optimization, ongoing search engine marketing, web analytics and constant updating and change tends to falter and fail.

Whereas, the websites that apply those 4 principles WILL be successful. Sure, it may take some time but in the long run it pays off in the form of profitability.

If you are doing it to “get rich” good luck. But if you are doing it to enhance your income, pay for itself, make something extra and you are following the 4 principles, you will succeed for certain. And perhaps even get rich. Patience is the key and constant movement the deciding factor.

The largest corporations follow those principles and they do it in largesse. Maybe we don’t have the millions of dollars they do to invest but we can still have a piece of the pie. Did you know that the hourly rate for a professional web analytics and website marketing analyst to a large corporation is anywhere from $275 to $1000 per hour?

Our top specialists are CIW Certified Web Professionals which according to a recent CIW income study can command on average $120 per hour. But they are also certified search engine marketing specialists which get on average $240 per hour. Not to mention that we are web analytics specialists as well which average somewhere around $320 (or more) per hour. Which, together is an average of about $226 per hour we could command in our industry and we would get it too if we marketed ourselves directly to major corporations. In fact, it would likely be reasonably easy for us to make that type of income since we would be pricing ourselves much lower than our competition and considering that our own websites are at the top of all of the major search engines for very significant industry competitive keywords and phrases it is very obvious we know how to do what we say and we do it every day. Many of our so-called competitors charge ten times what we do and get it every day yet are not even ranked nearly as well as we are in the search engines which is where it counts. They simply get where they are because of pure aggressive marketing and advertising which we do not do.

But our philosophy is different. We got into this business to help small businesses compete with large corporations on the Internet. That’s our “niche” I suppose you could say. Did you know our average hourly rate is $59 per hour? It might seem expensive but that doesn’t go to pay one person our “hourly” involves research assistants, technical staff and much more. In fact we have on average 3 man hours for every hour we bill. We keep our overhead low, own our office property and do everything we can to keep that hourly rate as low as possible so that the small business can afford us. Yet many of them still don’t get the value of being able to hire someone that is “worth” $300 an hour for a cost of less than 20% of their actual worth. And then they don’t understand why their website just isn’t going anywhere. We even put together a program for $149 a month, less than the cost of a monthly newspaper advertisement that applies the 4 principles on a monthly basis and guarantees after a specific amount of time that they will be at the top of the search engines and have a dramatic increase of relevant traffic to their site which is the most important step to a websites success. Many are not willing to invest in the program yet still expect or hope their website will pay off, somehow.

If you don’t apply the 4 principles day in and day out, it never will. We have a saying around here, “Do the right thing enough times you WILL get the right results.”