Saturday, January 11, 2014

Navigating the World Wide Web



One of the many things that I have concentrated on this off season is to create and define a web presence for Leaf It To Us. In the ‘golden days’ of the internet that meant throwing up a web page and doing a bunch of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If anybody has seen the 2k decade lately please tell them I want my internet back. 

I don’t seriously want to go back to what the internet was; but I am struggling to keep up with what the internet is becoming. Pages, even entire sites are set up specifically for the plethora of mobile devices that everybody is armed with; the watch that is a phone or the T.V. that is a P.C. or the wifi enabled reader that does more than my computer did just a decade ago and who knows what is behind door number 3!

SEO is now a thing of the past. Local search is in vogue now as is optimizing content and segment specific searches. Does building a page and linking every place that your business appears on line back to it even matter anymore? As of this moment, my incarnation of Leaf It To Us does not even have a dedicated web page. 

We can however, be found on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Blogger, Angie’s List, Pinterest, Houzz, Thumbtack, Landscape Networx, and a few others; I personally can also be found on LinkedIn. With 12-15 different active bulletin boards/social media sites, how does a small business manage them all? To be quite honest a few of the sites that I’ve listed frustrate me to no end. The user interfaces vary widely and some are not very user friendly; some have hidden costs that unless a small business is willing to incur severely reduce the accessibility of the sites. 

The most important factor in any marketing campaign is ROI, Return On Investment. I struggle with how to get the most out of the few dollars that I have for internet marketing. I am also challenged with determining what is providing me the most bang for my buck, even if all I am spending is time creating or modifying content. 

This is all a process. What may work well for one business may provide painful results for another. This process also takes lots of time. No one expects a campaign to provide results overnight. This means that as a small business owner you have to know when it is time to say; “I’ve made a serious effort; but, this isn’t working for me”, taking a loss and moving on to the next thing. 

These are just some of the challenges of a small business owner in regards to navigating the World Wide Web.

No comments:

Post a Comment