Is Your Company's Website "Lost In Space"

Ours was.

I am a long-time entrepreneur and operate a small
company with www.BackgroundNow.com as its main product. The site was
launched August-2003.

The programmers that
built the site did some optimization for search engines and we hired a
couple of different firms to promote search engine rankings. Neither of
these investments produced customers. Next we turned to pay-per-click
(PPC) ads, which produced customers at a healthy ROI. However, costs
per click gradually rose beyond justifiability. The campaigns were
discontinued.

The company maintained email
and other affordable marketing campaigns. I built a LinkedIn network of
6,000 direct connections with entrepreneurs and professionals and
networked my way to new customers, but found the growth slow going.

Without
a PPC campaign or a search engine optimized site the number of new
visitors to www.BackgroundNow.com shrank to nil. At the beginning of
2008 Alexa ranked its site traffic at #5-million in the world. Dismal.

I
decided to try search engine marketing (SEM) on my own, learned to
write some elementary HTML and began optimizing and marketing
www.BackgroundNow.com in April 2008.

The results have been surprising:

• In May 2008 Alexa gave www.BackgroundNow.com a 3-month average traffic rank of #4,101,715.
• Compete.com did not rank the site.  I guess they didn't realized it existed.
• In June Compete.com took notice and ranked the site at about #500,000.
• Compete.com increased ranking to #305,254 for July.
• First
  of August, Alexa showed a 3-month traffic average ranking of #686,297 -
  a ranking improvement of 3,415,418 - plus a ranking for that week of
  approximately #250,000 in the world and #91,000 in the USA.

References:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/backgroundnow.com
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/www.backgroundnow.com/?metric=uv#
http://www.cheezhead.com/2008/07/09/ved-backgroundnow-ceo-releases-secrets-to-public/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/backgroun...

 I recommend getting your hands dirty. Tinker with your website, do your homeworkand discover the differences youcan make.

Lee Hill, CEO, www.BackgroundNow.com