Introducing Valdosta Internet Marketing

At Valdosta Internet Marketing, we have a very different way of doing business. Some people have called us crazy for it, but we believe that good business sense and smart business practices apply just as much to marketing online as they do offline. Yes, I know, it sounds crazy, but let me give you an example.

When you market offline, you expect a return on your investment that is greater than what you spend on your marketing campaign. Let’s say you do a direct mailing or some other type of print campaign. You spend $5,000.00 or $20,000.00 or more on it, and you send them out. If you only got back $500.00 worth of orders because of that mailing, you’d either change what you did or how you did it, or you wouldn’t do it again. On the internet, a lot of people do it the exact same way they do offline campaigns. They build a website or sales page, bring as much traffic to it as they can, and then hope and pray it works… which it usually doesn’t. Then they abandon it and say stuff like, “I tried that internet stuff and it didn’t work.”

Most of it works the same way online as it does offline except that online you can test it first. You can put up a website or sales page or signup form, point some traffic to it with pay per click advertising, tweak it till it’s profitable, and then throttle up traffic to it so that you make as much money as you can with it. That’s the smart way of doing it, however a lot of people are still doing things the old way and getting the same old results.

At Valdosta Internet Marketing we’re not your average internet marketers; we’re Business Minded Internet Marketers. We’ve worked with companies that spend as high as $60,000.00 per month on pay per click advertising on Google alone. We’re not your home town do it all, jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none type guys who only look like experts because no-one else is around. We’ve been doing internet marketing for years, and for a wide variety of clients from manufacturing, to retail, to service based businesses on the high and low ends. So what are we doing in Valdosta?

That’s a great question. Internationally, the local search segment of online marketing is a 43 Billion dollar business, and no one has figured out the best way to service this market. That is, until now. We’ve teamed up with a local business, Valdosta Web Design, who in our opinion is Valdosta’s ONLY real internet marketer. Sure there are guys around who do pay per click, but are they certified? Do they track and IMPROVE your campaigns? Are they making you PROFITABLE campaigns that you can’t throw enough money at? Or are they just tinkering?

The first way you can tell the difference between a real internet marketer and a tinkerer is that a real internet marketing professional abides by long established, proven, sound business principles. They don’t take your money and put you in the top spot because that’s what you asked for. Most businesses don’t do as well in the first PPC ad position as they do in the 3rd, 4th, or even 5th position.

The second way to tell a real internet marketer is that they will improve your results over time. He will test your ads against new ones until your ad is converting the highest percentage it possibly can, and while he’s doing that, he’ll keep making changes and modifications to your landing pages so that they convert the traffic into sales the best that they can. If he’s not doing testing and tracking he’s not a professional, and any internet marketing professional will tell you that.

The third way you can tell a professional from a tinkerer is how they start. A real internet marketer doesn’t do internet marketing without doing research, the same way that a real offline marketer does market research before they begin a campaign. You can get a printing company to do a print campaign for you without doing any market research; but that printing company is “flying blind” matching the message to the market and your results will always show it. Online marketers research the “market” for each and every keyword that may be worth going after. They find out before you start what the people who type those terms into the search engines are looking for and should know with reasonable certainty what it’s going to take in terms of time and money and content to obtain the top spots for those keywords, and they should tell you what it’s going to take up front, before you begin marketing.

One more example of online marketing following good business principles is the concept of hiring an expert.  I'm a very capable programmer (I code in ASP and am learning ASP.NET)  and I'm ok at designing websites (I can hear Barbara laughing now).  But I don't do either of them professionally, because there are many people more talented and capable than I am at those things, that aren't as good as I am at internet marketing.  So I let them do what they're good at doing, and I do what I'm good at doing and we work together synergistically.  Now I know, when we tried to "work together" in school it was called cheating, but in the real world of business it's called cooperation and its responsible for most great successes. 

In my (maybe not so) humble personal opinion you shouldn't buy a home without hiring a realtor, you shouldn't go to court without hiring an attorney, you shouldn't cut your own hair, pull your own teeth, perform complex medical procedures on yourself, fix your own car if you're not a mechanic, build your own home if you're not in construction, etc. etc..  Judging by the proliferation of service businesses in the country, most of the time, we don't even cook our own food, watch our own kids, mow our own lawns, fix our own computers, or do a million other things that someone else is more qualified and talented to do.  So why, I ask, would anyone think that their office manager or secretary or personal assistant or manager, or I.T. guy or anyone else other than an internet marketer, no matter how brilliant a person they are, should do your internet marketing?  Why not have them cut your hair or fix your car, or clean your teeth while they're at it?  And yet, I see a lot of (mostly small) business owners wondering why that doesn't work.  Don't let yourself be one of them, but if you do, don't be surprised when you get what you pay for.

We hope this information helps you get what you’re paying for in terms of internet marketing no matter who you hire. We know that by holding ourselves, along with all the others who call themselves internet marketers, to the highest standards we can help you get what you’re paying for from us internet marketers. It’s your money and everything you do online is traceable; don’t just throw your money at the internet and hope it comes back, make it come back by hiring a professional internet marketer.