How do you welcome your new customers? When they join your family do you simply sign a purchase agreement and fulfill your obligations or do you strive to create something more?
Do you aim to build long-term mutually beneficial relationships with all of your clients? Of course you do! How do you make that expectation clear and pave the path towards achieving this goal.
| I’d like to talk about a topic that most people avoid. It’s a taboo topic because most business owners are typically positive, upbeat individuals who tend to avoid the negative. Heaven forbid that any pessimism ever shadow the company! But… is it pessimism to admit one’s weaknesses? Absolutely not! So long as once the weaknesses are identified, the beholder of said information approaches these weaknesses with positivity and puts into place a plan to eliminate them. |
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So then, when talking about websites, how do we find our weaknesses and more importantly what do we do to fix them?
In the past several months, I’ve noticed a dramatic shift in the ranking of hundreds of companies on most search engines. Unfortunately, consequentially, I’ve also suffered temporary hearing impairment as a result of business owners’ alarm bells going off at decibel levels not previously witnessed to date. Why is that?
Quite simply, the Internet has become a critical medium for the generation of revenue for many companies. Many of these companies rely heavily on the revenues generated from their organic traffic, or unpaid search results. The result of losing even a few positions in rank, often times is the difference between a business that is thriving and a business that is bleeding. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much to shift the tide, and the difference between a few placements could easily result in the loss of 70-90% of a companies’ targeted traffic. Think about how you use a search engine. Most individuals open the first 3-5 links that catch their eye and within a minute they’ve narrowed down their potential customer list to 2 or 3 options at most. If your website is not one of the links that catches their eye, then you don’t even have a chance to make a sale…. zero percent!!! That’s horrible odds!
While a website is vital to the long term success of any business, it’s not of much use if it’s not generating targeted traffic and converting valuable leads into customers.
Why can small businesses no longer just get by with a website? A website on its own won’t create customers, it needs to attract visitors! Furthermore, these visitors must be potential customers. If you own a comedy club in Ottawa, and the majority of your traffic is from the US, you can be certain that it’s not generating you additional customers. Even worse, if it’s not generating traffic at all then it serves no purpose whatsoever.
“A website without traffic is like a business without roads to get to it”
– Brent Mondoux, CEO of N-VisionIT Interactive Continue reading
Thank you to my wonderful team at N-VisionIT Interactive for motivating me each and every day to give 100% and push myself outside of my comfort zone. Being recognized with a Forty Under 40 award is an honor and I consider it our entire team’s award, I couldn’t have done it without all of you.
Enclosed is a letter that our company sent to our customers and partners, but I’d also wish to thank all of my loyal blog readers as I sincerely appreciate your input, feedback and emails on a daily basis.
Dear Customer,
Every time we work on your website, mobile application or social media, we’re thinking about the big picture: How can we help you help others?
Because of N-VisionIT’s philosophy and because of the support of clients like you, our co-founder and CEO Brent Mondoux has just received the Forty Under 40 award from the Ottawa Business Journal and the Ottawa Chamber of Commerce. The award, which received 150 nominations this year, recognizes top entrepreneurs who give back to the community.
“I attribute this win to our team’s success,” says Brent, who co-founded N-VisionIT with Reid Ivens in 1999. Since then, our business has gone on to build websites, mobile applications and social media marketing campaigns for Fortune 500 companies including the likes of Sara Lee and Sony as well as both the Canadian and the U.S. government.
Just four years after we opened, N-VisionIT was named one of Profit Magazine’s Hot 50 Companies. Why? Because, as you know, N-VisionIT cares about helping you connect with and take care of your customers.
“We’re not here just to make clients more money. We’re making clients products and services that will help people, and this award is proof of that,” says Brent, who was named one of Ottawa’s Forty Under 40 because of his expertise in web development and social media, his achievements with N-VisionIT and real estate firm Amplified Investments, and his philanthropic efforts.
Thanks to a client list that includes you, we’re able to donate website creation and other resources to help charities and non-profit organizations help the less fortunate. Since we created N-VisionIT Gives Back, we’ve built websites that have helped raise money for rare diseases and donations for the homeless.
Please join us in congratulating Brent in his commitment to making the world a better place, and in his contribution to businesses like yours which are striving to do the same.
Sincerely,
The team at N-VisionIT Interactive
–
Brent Mondoux
CEO, N-VisionIT Interactive
brent@betterwebsites.ca
A few months ago, barely anyone even heard about Pinterest. Today, however, a very different picture has been painted. With a staggering growth of 261.6% in the last 3 months, Pinterest has been taking the social media nation by storm!
Having already reached 2.2 million daily active users and gaining the coveted rank of being the 59th most visited website in the world (16th most visited in the US), there are already rumors of Pinterest being considered as an acquisition target of social media industry leaders, Facebook and Twitter. Think the growth is about to wane? Actually, it’s the opposite… now that the site is getting to be known, it’s growth is about to explode at an exponential rate that hasn’t yet been witnessed to date!
| I’ve been having a lot of discussions about what an Internet presence encompasses. Only a few years ago this conversation would have been brief, discussing primarily website presence, but today an Internet presence has dramatically evolved into much more! Today Internet presences aren’t centralized around just a website. While a website is an absolutely essential aspect, other presences have also become vital in ensuring an edge amongst competitors. Chances are if you’re not there, your competitors are and they’re gaining business from potential customers that don’t even know you exist. This is almost like if you were a farmer trying to sell your fruit and vegetables on a side street when there’s a huge farmer’s market around the corner. Quite simply… by not using common sense you are missing out and helping your competitors to get rich while you accept the status quo! |  |
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After years of discussions with thousands of business owners, I’ve come to the realization that there’s no single location to find clear, concise and non-technical descriptions of keywords related to our industry. For this reason, I’ve decided to create a list of acronyms and abbreviations used when describing projects related to Internet presences on all mediums – web, mobile and social media. |
Because technology evolves so quickly I will be adding to this on an ongoing basis so that hopefully it can remain a helpful and useful resource for our leads, clients and any website visitors that may come across this. If there are acronyms or abbreviations that you feel are too technical and require a more simplified description, or if you feel I’ve missed one that should be added to the list, please leave a comment.
Please feel free to bookmark this resource and refer to it on an as-needed basis.
You’ve decided to take the leap, the daring yet completely sensible move to launch a website for your business. You know that an online presence is vital to the success of your business. After all, in practically all cases, online presences have become the primary method with which potential customers are introduced to businesses. In the last week you’ve even used the Internet to research day cares, televisions and organic food suppliers in the area and made purchases as a result of that research.
You’ve hired the right team and ensured that your online presence is better in every way to that of your competitors, because you cleverly realize how vital it is to stand out. Thinking about how you shop online, you realize each time you perform research, it feels like a speed dating session whereby you, like the majority of others, quickly browse 5-10 websites and within mere minutes have narrowed down your potential supplier to one or two options. A combination of first impressions and your own personal priorities have been the criteria in which you’ve narrowed your choice.
So you’ve got the most visually appealing website that’s the easiest to use in your industry and your products and services are among the highest quality. Your prices are even amongst the lowest… everything is going for you! You’ve even ensured that your website has been optimized for indexing by search engines (if you don’t know what this is, please read this article next: What Most Search Engine Optimization “Experts” Won’t Tell You). But… there are no customers! Why?
Today is a symbol of summer’s end. It’s also the day of the year when the proximity of physical and supernatural world intertwine and magical things can happen. Sounds to me like an every day sales pitch of a search engine optimization “expert” actually.
I’ve talked to hundreds, if not thousands of clients about their websites, their visitors and the vital link between their websites’ traffic and increased profitability. During these discussions, I’ve been privy to many insider stories about past experiences with previously hired search engine optimization experts and I can only wish that I documented the feedback that I’ve received over the last dozen+ years, but I had no clue that these particular conversations would have been so surprising, so revealing and so frightening that I never thought to do so. Sure would have made for a spooky and spine-chilling Halloween story… but because it wouldn’t have been fiction, it would have bordered on the line of witnessing a real-life Horror and since I haven’t bought the “Halloween chills” binder on my liability insurance I’ll save that story for another day…
Instead today I aim to teach you a thing or two about search engine optimization, and about what search engine optimization experts especially don’t want you to know. I’ll empower you so that in turn you can help yourself to succeed. If you’ve got the time to learn and to execute, you will be able to take these steps to help increase your targeted traffic and of course your revenue as a result. You may not be able to do it as fast or as effectively as a search engine optimization expert that has years of experience, but at least it’ll start increasing your revenue so that you can start to realize the value of search engine optimization services and make the decision as to when you want to invest in an experts skillset and at the same time have a better understanding of what they will be delivering.
Why am I doing this? Why reveal what SEO experts won’t tell you? Because I can! Because I am 100% confident in my abilities and because I know that it takes years to gain the skills and experience that I have, and while you are perfectly capable of performing the steps that I’ll outline, you’ll invariably spend more time and lose significantly more money than you ever thought possible. I can hear you all now “But how can I be losing money if I’m not spending?” The answer is simple, you’re losing money because your competitors continue to grow and reap the rewards while you experiment and tweak your SEO efforts in an attempt to gain higher search engine ranking.
So then, let’s get down to the details…
Learn the Secrets to Online Success 