Are You Paying Your Website Minimum Wage

Are You Paying Your Website Minimum Wage?

Let's face it your website is like one of your employees. In fact in many ways a website can be your best employee. Look at it this way, when you close your doors at night and you and all of your employees go home, who stays to take care of your customers? Your website will be servicing your customers long after you have called it a day. Your website never goes home, never comes in late and never calls in sick. Your website doesn't even take a vacation. So why are you treating your website like a temp that you don't intend to keep?

You pay your employees a salary but how much do you budget for your website? Year over year online business increases while traditional brick and mortar business decreases. If you are not budgeting website maintenance, search engine optimization or even email marketing, then you are neglecting the one employee that can be the most productive for you and your business. Most successful companies have realized this and take their website into consideration when planning the yearly budget due to the impact it will have on their sales.

Don't forget web based marketing when you are building your website growth plan. Unlike traditional marketing with web based marketing you can get real time data to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. You will know in a matter of days the return on your investment and at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing. For around $300.00 you can have an email based ad created and emailed out to around three to five thousand recipients depending on what firm you are working with. Best of all you will know immediately who opened the email, who forwarded it, and even who trashed it. With traditional mail marketing you can never know any of these things.

A website should be a living breathing vehicle that grows with your company and its objectives. As a web designer I always caution potential clients that websites are not "set it and forget it". If you look at any successful company today they put as much effort and energy in developing their website as they do in developing their employees. It just makes sense in our digital world. You give your employees regular evaluations to let them know how they are doing and how you would like them to improve. When is the last time you gave your website an evaluation? There are so many tools out there for your web design team to measure the effectiveness of your website. Your web design team can tell you how many visitors your website had, from where, what items they liked the most and more importantly if they stayed on your website for a while or just backed out. Whether you budget weekly, monthly, or yearly don't neglect your website and its importance to your business. Get your web design team involved. Together you can identify what is working, what is not, and where to go next.

Christopher T Wowak

CEO Last 7 Studios

www.Last7Studios.com