What are your costs?
- Design and development of your website
- Domain name
- Hosting
- Fees for online software services (e.g. for email management)
- Maintenance and updates of content on the website
Consider not only the amount of money – but also the time committment – your time, and your staff time.
The time factor is a significant one. What is the value of your time and if you are working on an unfamiliar area such as programming a website is this a drain on your time that you could be spending with clients.
ROI – Return on Investment
When considering the return on investment on your website consider the following factors
- Each time a person uses your website to find you when they are in need – what would be your AVERAGE that you would charge
- For each NEW customer that you get – what is the LIFETIME value of the client (i.e. what would they pay you over 5 years, 10 years,)
- For each question that can be answered via the website vs calling a customer service person – how much of your staff time do you SAVE
- For each inquiry on the website where the person fills out the details e.g. on a Request a Quote form – how much time do you save? Also consider the convenience and accuracy of the details.
- How much more PROFESSSIONAL do you look in the eyes of your customers to have an up to date and professional looking website that is available to them 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week?
- For each REFERRAL that you get from someone that refers new business to you by forwarding your email news – think of the VALUE of this as a new client.
- For the relationships that you build through your website, email newsletter and social media – how many new clients and customers do you create?
Each business and organization is different. You may be a sole proprietor, a small business or have a staff. You may want to do all the work in-house or partner with an outsource individual or company that specializes in Internet work.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. davies@alephinc.com or post your comment here.
This is a solid breakdown of ROI in regards to online investments. To be frank, any business who is not online is simply out of touch with reality, and there business will suffer. They certaintly aren’t realizing their true potential.
Justin
http://healthyexecutive.wordpress.com
Hey this is great. I just found what I was exactly looking for . Your knowledge on this is subject is vast and I would love it if u could write more articles on this subject. I m looking forward for more of your articles. I m really impressed with your work . Please keep posting
Thank you for your comments. To keep up with new postings please click on the SUBSCRIBE button on the right column – or you can subscribe to the RSS feed to view in your RSS reader. I use a Google home page to read my RSS feeds. All the best for your business and hope that these articles are helpful.
Denise Davies
davies@alephinc.com
http://www.alephconsulting.org
Hello. This is kind of an “unconventional” question , but have other visitors asked you how get the menu bar to look like you’ve got it? I also have a blog and am really looking to alter around the theme, however am scared to death to mess with it for fear of the search engines punishing me. I am very new to all of this …so i am just not positive exactly how to try to to it all yet. I’ll just keep working on it one day at a time Thanks for any help you can offer here
Hi John – thanks for your question. What is the link to your blog? I can tell more when I see it.
There are a couple of major things about your menu and look of the blog
1 – the THEME. In your dashboard – click on APPEARANCE – then Theme. You can either browse through the themes – or use the filter to select for things like 2 column, 3 column or colors that you like. When you see something you want to try you can click on the PREVIEW – and it will show you what your own blog would look like with that theme. If you do find one you like then you can apply the theme. In my experience most of the items would translate to the new theme – but you may have to redo some of the widgets. Your posts and comments will all be ok but you should check formatting.
2 – The WIDGETS in Appearance are what you play with to customize the content on your left and right columns (in a 3 column theme) – or the single column in a 2 column theme. As you work through the different widgets you can be creative using the TEXT, Image, RSS feeds etc to maximize the use of the space. I always add a text box with a STATCOUNTER code on the bottom – i like those statistics because they give a lot more information than what you see on your dashboard.
Hope this helps. I have setup quite a few blogs for clients. You can see a couple at
http://www.toobusytofundraise.com
http://eckova.wordpress.com
Best of success and send me your link to take a look 🙂
Thanks
Denise