Bret Blevins Website. Want a custom commission of your own? Order online today!
The Internet offers something to small businesses that no other medium can offer for a reasonable price. Global Reach. There are no limits on who can potentially view your business website online. While you may be a small mom & pop shop in Boseman Montana, someone sitting in Paris France could be looking at your site.
Local reach still costs
Advertising in the Yellow Pages, taking out ads in local newspapers or magazines, local radio advertising, and even local cable advertising. They’re all within the reach of small businesses across the country. Interestingly enough, they still cost a pretty penny as well. The difference between spending on a well built website and one of these mediums? Well, there are actually several differences, but the key one has to do with reach.
Where your local newspaper, magazine, radio station, or cable venue covers your immediate area, your website is immediately available for anyone in the world to view. Better yet, if you’ve done your SEO right, potential customers will actually be seeking you out online.
Your website is active advertising. People who want to find you are actually looking for you. The other media types mentioned are actually passive. They’re listening to a radio station and they randomly hear your ad, or randomly see it while watching re-runs of Matlock.
Global reach that lasts longer
Unlike a local newspaper advertisement, your website doesn’t go away. It stays there working for you day in and day out. You invest in it one time, and then it continues to function even when you’re not looking at it, or you totally forgot you even have a website. The other methods mentioned above do disappear. Magazines get thrown away, radio ads are random and eventually you need to pay more, and local Cable ads need to be renewed and paid for as well.
Once your website is up, it is up. It may cost $200 a year for hosting, but what’s $200 a year? That’s $.55 per day for your hosting for a year. Way cheaper than a latte’ at Starbucks or any other coffee shop for that matter.
The true cost of your website long term
RLC Design creates websites that our clients can manage. We build on a platform that allows easy updates after we’ve completed the site. So over time our clients can adjust, fine tune, or even completely overhaul their sites on their own. That means your investment in your site will last for years!
Our standard package for a full site build out is basically $5,000 for a complete rebuild of client sites. They are trained to use the site, given a video series for refreshing their knowledge of how to work with the site, and they’re always welcome to get in touch if they need some more “heavy lifting” done.
Let’s say their site remains super relevant for the next 5 years. That’s $1,000 per year for advertising with global reach. That’s about $2.75 per day in advertising costs. Plus your $.55 per day for your hosting. So lets round it out and call it $3.50 per day of year round advertising. For folks with the super fancy latte’s that’s still cheaper….
While I owned my studio and gallery I spent thousands of dollars per year on magazine advertising and local advertising. My website always yielded better results than those mediums, so I stopped doing them.
Well built sites work
Point of Rocks Website traffic is booming. And their reservations are booming too
We can say for a fact, the sites we build not only work, but work really well. A few examples:
- BretBlevins.com: We’re currently adding a few simple items to Bret’s site. He’s now offering commission pieces. Moments after turning on the commission sales two large orders came in. We’re talking within 15 minutes. His fans stay up to date with his site thanks to our design work.
- VacantLotsandLand.com: A new client who just had us create the structure and security for her site. Heidi (our client) created her pages on her own with the help of our instructional video series. In under a month’s time she sold a build ready lot in Florida for a tidy profit, paying off the cost of her website in one sale! She’s already had multiple new clients signing up through her site.
- PointofRocksRVCampground.com: Point of Rocks has had an extremely busy season. The office staff have remarked to me that the phone ringing off the hook is my fault. Well, it’s the website’s fault. Since the redesign in January of 2015 their site has had over 22,000 unique visitors, with over 100,000 pages read! Their old site generated less than 5,000 visitors a year.
- QueenValleyRV.com: Queen Valley RV Resort is part of the McGavin Holdings family of parks. Sally, the park manager, was kind enough to call us and let us know that she booked a $2,000 reservation the day after we had completed work on her park, and the guest told her the website sealed the deal. Since that reservation in June, Sally has informed us that the park is completely full for the 2015-2016 “Snow Bird” season!
We could go on about our clients’ success, but I think you get the picture. Bottom line. A well built website is probably one of the cheapest ways available to generate new leads on your customer base. When you look at website design pricing, you can’t think in the short term. The site we build you today will be around years later. So your cost of advertising globally per day is pretty darned reasonable indeed.