We thought you may wonder why we are providing links to some of the great SaaS services that we use in our business – “Are you not shooting yourself in the foot?”
Well, in a way, but for reasons of progress. You see, we have been building quality websites for business, government and private sectors since 2007. We build and continue to build great websites our clients love. But we’ve learned something…
While creating a beautiful looking website with awesome functionality is a great achievement, it does not automatically bring in customers that pay you money. Creating a website for your business is merely the first step.
We’ve also learned that it takes a great deal of marketing expertise to create advertisements, funnels, campaigns that attract the right demographic of customer to a compelling offer just at the right time. This stage effectively happens after you build a website… AND this is the harder part.
So while many people are able to build a simple website with tools and platforms available today, the truth is those people have no idea how to get traffic to the site, grow it’s audience and get leads that convert into sales.
So Marketing Now has made a transition to focus primarily on lead generation and switch gears to a Pay Per Lead Agency. This is where our skill and expertise has lead us – to a place where we can be of most benefit to our clients.
Our process involves create advertisements, funnels, campaigns and attracting the right demographic of customer to a compelling offer just at the right time. But this all takes place ‘under the hood’. The client just pays for and gets quality leads.
Getting the leads directly to our clients CRM for their sales team to follow up on is our focus.
Let’s face it…. all businesses want targeted, quality and warm leads to make their sales process easier and grow bottom line revenue.
With the rise of user friendly website page builders over the past decade, many people have the perception that you can build a website for free. Certain “free” website builder software, which is heavily marketing to the general public has in some ways, has enabled many to create a website for free.
But is it really free?
Keep in mind 2 things:
- If a big corporation is offering a service of perceived benefit to any person who merely signs up for a ‘free’ account, then that person is actually ‘the product’. Rest assured, that big corporation wants something from you in return. Generally, it is the ability and permission for them to market to you, but you are also giving them your data.
- With websites, in particular, if you create a website using their website builder, you do not own the website. It is their platform and it remains theirs, you cannot take it with you or move the website (as a whole) away from that platform, and therefore they are effectively ‘owning’ your website for life. You can always manually remove each piece of content from each individual page, but this can be very time consuming and they rely on this as a deterrent for moving away.
Marketing Now have used a few different platforms to build our client websites. We started with HTML & PHP custom sites back in 2007. In 2011, we became Adobe Business Catalyst Premium partners and build a number of websites offering an all in one solution with multiple integrated module. A few years back, Adobe announced end of life for Business Catalyst, however we had already started building WordPress websites for business.
We primarily use WordPress now and after trying and testing many, many different WordPress themes, WordPress plugins and tools, now use what we believe to be the best tools to create a website for WordPress.
So now that we are focusing on a Pay Per Lead model for our clients, we still want to guide and assist those potential DIY website creators and give them the benefit of our years of testing and trials by listing the best tools to create a website for WordPress.
If you still decide to use one of those ‘free’ websites, that’s fine, however do keep those 2 points mentioned above in mind. If you’re creating a website for a hobby then no problems. However, if the website is for a business that you think will grow, then give it some serious thought. Having used many platforms, I personally am bias towards WordPress. It’s certainly not a perfect platform, but if it’s set up well and for the relatively small investment, you cannot ignore it.
