You've thought about it, but couldn't justify spending the money.  But the time has come - your business needs to be on the Internet, NOW!  It's where your customers are, and they are looking for you.

• 3 out of 4 Americans are online.  They higher the education and income, the more likely they are to be using the internet. (Click here for the latest figures from Pew Internet)
• 69% or people use the internet to the research purchases - even if they are buying in person. (Accenture Survey, 2007)
• Online retail sales now total $120 billion a year, up from $100 billion the year before.  Over 3% of all retail sales are online and that figure is growing rapidly.  (Internet Retailer, 2007)

Find out how many people are looking for you! 

Yahoo has a cool tool to find out how many times people have searched for your type of business.  You put in terms that people might use to find your type of business, and the tool returns a list of related searches that people did in a recent month, and the number or searches they did using those terms. (In our example the month was January, 2007).  

Here are the totals for a couple of terms:

Remember, these searches were done in January (a slow month for sales in most businesses), and only using two words, chances are there are many other words they might use. For instance, instead of motorcycle, they might use a brand name like Honda or Harley.  To get a fuller picture you should think of all the various words that might be attached to your business, and do separate searches for all of them.

It's interesting to note that, despite the fact that Phoenix has only had 7 years in the last century where the snowfall reached .1 inches for the whole season, there were 337 searches for Phoenix and Ski.

Now you need to adjust those numbers -UP!

Those numbers only come from Yahoo searches.  Yahoo currently has a market share of just under 30%.  So you can easily multiply those numbers by 3.  If you were a motorcycle dealer in Phoenix would you be upset if you missed 3,780 phone calls from prospective buyers?  What about nearly 40,000 calls about insurance?  Heck, with 1000 people looking for skiing, maybe you could come up with a way to ski indoors!  And let's not forget that these searches are only for one month.

It's time to get YOUR business online

You probably don't need to put up a full-blown e-commerce website.  But you do need a website to grab those people looking for your business online.  It's a great way to let people learn about your business, and start building a relationship with you that will lead to a purchase.

Besides, a website can be a great multiplier for all your other marketing efforts.  By inviting people to visit your site, they can go find out much more about you than you could afford to put in a newspaper or radio ad...and it actually could make those specialty pens and things pay off.  Just include your web address in all your marketing.

Good News for your budget!

If you have considered putting up a website, you probably think it's going to be very expensive.  Early websites had to be hand assembled using mind-numbing computer codes.  A webmaster was needed even if you wanted to make even a small change on a page...and the costs added up.  At McColley Marketing Media, we design your website using an award winning, state of the art content management system called Joomla that separates the computer code from the words on the page.  We won't bore you with the details on how it works, but the end result is that anyone who can use email or word processing can update your website.  And your startup costs are very reasonable, since Joomla is FREE!  Of course, if you ever need help, we're here for you anytime.

Call us to find out how really affordable our websites can be.