I was talking with a Pleasanton cabinet retailer who had just read Your Marketing Sucks and was starting to realize that his very pretty website was not designed to drive leads. In spite of this he was still able to see a 300% increase in the amount of business he generated from the Internet over the past year. This may be off a small base but still, he sees the writing on the wall.

I happened to overhear him talking to a local print sales rep who was promising him thousands of impressions on their local site but all he wanted was performance based ads. As he was sketching out his new home page designed for conversion I asked him how much he wanted to spend on a campaign. He said “If the ROI is there I will spend as much as I can”.

As I said in my 2008 predictions post, this is the year that small businesses finally get it.

Share This Story!

About Author

8 Response Comments

  • Internet Business  January 15, 2008 at 10:11 pm

    Home based business are also providing high ROIs when properly taken care of. Of all home based business, Internet marketing is the most affordable and lucrative .

  • Robin Jacob Abraham  January 16, 2008 at 10:27 am

    It is true..Infact many companies have started approaching us as well for Local Search Marketing.It seems 2008 is the year of LSM as well:)

  • SEO Consulting - Terry Reeves  January 17, 2008 at 11:29 am

    I have already spoken with quite a few small business owners this year that seem to agree with you Andrew.

  • peter caputa  January 24, 2008 at 5:08 pm

    The tools are now available at a very affordable price for small businesses to start generating significant business from their website. But, as you point out, they need a platform that helps them attract traffic through blogs, blogging, social media, SEO and SEM; landing pages and calls to action that convert visitors into leads, and marketing analytics (and maybe CRM) that measure what’s actually resulting in business, so they can double down.

    All this stuff is available now for a few hundred bucks a month. And there are platforms now that integrate it, so that the small business owner doesn’t need to figure out the tech stuff. They just need to focus on content creation, link building and interacting with prospects on social media sites.

  • bob  February 6, 2008 at 10:32 am

    mind if I cask , why you guys do NOT have a newsletter for sign ups ? or some contact other than the RSS…which I do not know how to use ?

    thanks

  • satyaban mandal  March 2, 2008 at 7:04 am

    good evening,
    i have an one individual web site.but i don’t how i will do make web design.and how i will do upgrade to the site. my web hosting midphase.
    but i should not afford to buying web designer.who will make to my site.
    thank you very much.
    your’s sincerely,
    satyaban

  • Misty  January 19, 2010 at 12:19 am

    With all the attention focused on the internet today, I think we sometimes overlook one simple fact – Marketing is Marketing. For the most part, Marketing is promoting a product, service, brand, or business. When promoting one of these elements live – we are promoting using either face to face communication, telephone, video or written communications. When marketing on the internet, we are still trying to get in front of customers – BUT – we have to work with different online elements…i.e. websites, search engines, local business directories and so forth.