In our business we have found that basically we have three types of Internet Marketing customers that come to us. Let’s call them internet marketing customer A, B and C.

Here is an example of internet marketing customer A, based upon our real world customers. (We won’t mention any names or other identifying information as to which specific customers these are, so as to obscure their privacy, however the scenarios we will be outlining are based upon actual customers.)

Customer A decides it is time to get a website to sell their product on the Internet. They’ve been doing pretty good selling it on Ebay but are tired of the rising cost of selling products on Ebay and all of the red tape. They purchase about $7,000 worth of product which is stored in their garage and they invest a couple of thousand dollars in a real nice website from some web design company (not us). Their shopping cart (which was created by this other web design company) doesn’t quite work as well as they would like it to as there are some issues in the checkout process having a few too many steps but they finally get all of that worked out (they think).

This was two months ago. Now, it is two months later and they don’t understand why they don’t have any traffic or are not making any money. They thought they’d be doing as well as they were on Ebay by now. (Meanwhile, they’ve closed their Ebay store and would have to start all over again with a new store if they go back to Ebay.) They went back to Ebay and opened a new store but then got themselves suspended because, oops, they didn’t know they couldn’t put a link to their website in their listing.

So they talk around and after talking with a few people they are of theunderstanding that they need to do some search engine optimization.

That is how they find us. They explain to us where they are now and how they got there (see above) and explain that they need to start making some money over the next couple of months or they are just going to give up. They also don’t want to invest much more because they already have invested all the money in getting the website, plus the $7,000 in stock. They want to know if we can help them.

The answer is, no, we cannot help them. (Unless they are willing to change their way of thinking and make the decision to invest an appropriate amount of dollars into marketing their website properly).

And here are the reasons why. First of all, they have a false sense of how it all should work. Customer A seems to think that if you put a website online and believe you have a great product that is very popular and at a great price people will automatically beat down your door to get it. Customer A is also not willing to invest the minimum amount of time and money it requires for their website to be successful. The average website requires a minimum of 6 months just to get on its feet (even Google “sandboxes” new websites to a certain extent for the first 6 months because they don’t wan tto put a lot of energy into indexing it at the “top” when it might not be around 6 months from now) and one to two years to establish itself. (although we have many professional techniques to minimize this time frame and speed things up considerably for our clients as well as get them to the top of the search engines more quickly than they would on their own).

The average small business related website requires a minimum investment of real dollars as well in order to be successful, at least somewhere in the range of $1,500 on the low end and $25,000 in the middle range and customer A believes they have made all of the necessary investment when they bought their stock and built their website.

Customer A will NOT succeed unless they decide to become like Customer B or Customer C, which we will discuss in subsequent posts. If you have a website and believe you might be like customer A, it might be time to rethink your strategy, get a solid battle plan and become a serious Internet marketer. Otherwise, to be honest, don’t expect to be successful on the Internet marketing your website. We’ve been involved in Internet marketing since the Internet began and we can tell you, it just won’t happen.