When does my website start paying for itself?

A web site is no exception to this fundamental economic principle.

The reason for this is because the major search engines do not detect your site for the first few months.

You should not be discouraged by this.

Eventually, the search engines will find you and, with a well designed website, when a prospect searches for 'widgets in Sydney', they will see your site in the search engine results.

This is the main reason why we encourage first-timers to purchase our "bpresent Quick!" plan as this allows you to get your foot in the search engine door with minimal investment (less than $1 per day).

Our page "Some Ideas for Promotion of Your Website" highlights some of these. To summarise:

If you're setting up a new business, or you're about to embark on a new print run of your flyers and/or business cards then now is definitely the time to look at creating a website.

Starting off with the cheaper "bpresent Quick!" plan is a good option here as we can ensure that your hard earned web trafiic and rankings are not lost if you decide to move to your own domain name.

How we achieve this is discussed in our page Moving from a "bpresent Quick!" plan to a <Choose4Yourself>.com plan.

Within a few months of creation, your web site will be found by search engines. This, in itself, is of course no guarantee that you will derive immediate income but, being found is the first step on the way.

In most cases people will click onto your site (if they are indeed looking for 'widgets in Sydney') and, with a fast loading clearly laid out site, there is a good chance of an enquiry.

The rest is up to you and your sales team!

The measurement of ROI can become complicated depending on the extent (the breadth) of you promotional activities.

If your costs are directed through a handful of avenues only (for example, pay-per-click advertising) then it is relatively straight forward.

If your promotion is handled exclusively on the internet (and, in most cases, we do not recommend this), then there are quite precise techniques to find out where a visitor has 'clicked-in' from. However, determining whether these prospects resulted in a sale is not always simple.

If the promotion of your website is focused off the web (eg. local press) then it is possible to see how many people visited your site but again this does not give you the full picture. That said, it is possible to analyse visiting patterns over time and plot these with respect to your advertising campaigns.

As part of our quality assurance business processes, all bpresent sites are monitored regularly (daily for higher volume sites). One side benefit of this monitoring is an extensive set of traffic logs. These can be made available to you on request for a nominal charge (time based).