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A website without traffic, in other words, without visitors, is like a restaurant without patrons. Much like an off-line brick-and-mortar business requires visitors that can be turned into customers. A website requires visitors in order to provide business value. Think of it this way: what if you built a wonderful restaurant in the middle of the jungle with no roads, waterway or other known means for people to find and get to your restaurant. It would not matter to the business what world-renowned chef was hired or the quality of the ingredients used to produce the dishes as there would be noone to serve.

NO visibility = NO traffic = NO business

Much like a restaurant, a business website needs to have visibility and the means for people to easily discover and get to it in order to have visitors and therefore deliver business value. Oftentimes, business owners will make significant investments in very well-designed, highly functional business websites without much thought or regard to how people will find and get to their website. Then, eventually, those same businesses will ask the questions like: 

• How many visitors are coming to the website?
• Where do the website visitors come from (e.g. links from other websites, search engines, which ones)?
• What words or phrases did visitors using search engines use to find the site?
• How many are new versus returning visitors?
• How many pages did visitors view on average before leaving the site?
• How long did visitors who come to the site stay on average?

The data can be collected and tracked automatically on these key metrics which is part of the beauty of Internet marketing. It’s only natural for business owners to want answers to these questions so that they can find ways to increase user engagement and increase visitors and their time on site. Once business owners have this level of visibility, usually the need drive more sustained, targeted traffic to the website becomes clear.

The good news for business owners is that there are number of affordable options to market a business online, some for little or no out of pocket investment. The choice of not using the word the free was deliberate as nothing in life is free. Affordable recognizes the very real cost of the time required to take advantages of the many “free” opportunities to market a business on the Internet. The key to success is to prioritize investments of time and money based on those opportunities that can have the maximum ROI. Some of you are saying “well DUH!”  but you would be surprised.

Like anything, to be effective, marketing requires an investment in time. What the Internet really provides is affordable and cost effective and targeted distribution of messaging for maximum advertising efficiency and ROI. If you have more time than Money, the Internet, mixed with creativity, drive and a thirst for knowledge can translate into real business.

However, time is a precious commodity indeed and for those who have more money than time, there are plenty of options to cost-effectively purchase targeted traffic for your business website including using contextual advertising, behavioral targeting display advertising, targeted advertising on social networks and search advertising, all of which can be used to identify and match users with specific purchase intent with relevant business and their offers.

To learn more about these kind of opportunities to use the Internet to attract targeted, prequalified visitors to your website, contact eBiz ROI for a complimentary 30 minute traffic consultation valued at $99 by emailing us at sales@eBizROI.com or by contacting eBiz ROI through any of the means below.

eBiz ROI, Inc.
30 Rosemere Rd
Ballston Lake, NY 12019
http://www.eBizROI.com
+1 (518) 557-3502

Free web conferencing software can be used to drive sales while boosting your ROI. Web conferencing software provides businesses with a cost effective a global platform to communicate in a more intimate way than is possible on a voice sales call. As any successful sales executive knows, there is simply no substitute for face to face sales meetings, but if the alternative is to delay a meeting or limit the customer interaction to a conference call, then web conferencing software is a great enabler to selling into large, dispersed, and even global markets. Web conferencing software is a must have tool for any sales organization.

My experience with web conferencing software is fairly extensive, having used WebEx, Microsoft LiveMeeting, Centra, Citirx GoTo Meeting and other web conferencing solutions to train an International sales force and global system integrator partners such as Accenture, IBM and T-Systems while using web conferencing platforms to support selling to clients on the other side of the world (being in the USA, that means primarily India and China).

When launching eBiz ROI, Inc. as part of the communication plan, we were on a mission to find good free web conferencing software application to use in sales calls with national and international clients where we find it useful to share our desktops, reports and applications.

It was a short search (one Google search for free web conferencing software) until we stumbled upon a company called DimDim, which was ranked #1 in the Google search results:

As an SEO practitioners, we appreciated the fact that DimDim is ranked #1 in the search results for the query free web conferencing software which gave us the confidence to click through to their website and sign up for a free web conferencing account.

After signing up for a DimDim free web conferencing account and installing the DimDim thin client, we were up and running in no time. As a new business, we have started with the free service level, in addition to which, DimDim provides a number of enhanced paid service levels including DimDim Pro and DimDim Enterprise. We were pleasantly surprised that the DimDim free services supports such features as:

• short, permanent vanity URLs used to conduct meetings,
• public meetings profile page,
• instant screen sharing, white board and document sharing, co-browse web pages,
• Multi-platform support for Windows, Mac and Linux users,
• integrated free audio conference and automatic meeting widgets
• Supporting web conferencing meetings of up to 25 participants

To date, eBiz ROI has not yet outgrown the DimDim free service level. For those interested in learning more, check out the DimDim feature comparison which compares the different DimDim service levels against WebEx and GoTo Meeting, two of the leading, paid web conferencing infrastructure service providers.

In terms of ROI, managing costs is a key part of the equation and it is hard to beat free. I strongly encourage readers to give DimDim a try. I am not currently associated with DimDim, but like the product so much, I am thinking about participating in the DimDim affiliate marketing program managed through Commission Junction.

Stay tuned for upcoming posts on additional free tools that you can use to fuel the growth of your business while increasing your marketing ROI.