The Real Bruce

I can still remember the days when I fired up my Netscape Navigator and began to surf the web, at the incredible speed, of a dial up connection. There were few pictures, no music and definitely no streaming video. How the browser world has changed!

Each and every time a new browser version is released from Microsoft or Mozilla, I always think about what could they do to make it better this time? Most of the the time, pages load a little faster. I will say most of the time, because sometimes it seems as if has become slower. Normally, however, there are no major changes.

Probably the biggest improvement in my mind over the last few years has been tabbed browsing. At first I wondered how I would used tabbed browsing, but soon I found myself toggling back and forth with several web pages open at a time. How did I ever live without it?

Then came Google Chrome, and for me, everything changed. Not only is it the fastest loading browser, in my opinion, it almost doesn’t feel like a browser at all. It just gets out of your way and lets you use the Internet. I know that is what Google’s intent is. They want it to seem like your desktop. They want you to get use to using a browser for all your applications. Then comes Chrome OS. I know I am falling into their plan, but I am fine with it, because quite simply it is the best browser I have ever used.

Like I mentioned before, it just stays out of the way. There is no huge blue title bar at the top, instead a slim bar that shows your tabs, similar to the application bar at the bottom of your Windows desktop. Obviously this is not a mistake. Just think a year or two, or maybe sooner, we will be toggling between email, word processor, and Photoshop by clicking the tabs of our browser and running the Google OS in the background.

The one feature that stands out, above all else,  has to be the simplest feature of all. The address bar is also a search bar. I mean, how basic is that. Why didn’t every browser company think of this. I think IE may be doing it now, but wow, I love this feature. If I don’t know the URL I can just type in what I think and  the Google results come up. No more installing a Google toolbar every time I format my system. I just download Google Chrome and I am good to go.

If you spend a lot of time on the web and haven’t used Chrome, check it out. I am sure you will like it. If you have used it, I would love to hear your thoughts. Do you like it? Do you find it better than FireFox or IE? Feel free to comment. I would love to hear your opinion.

Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Advertising, Blogging, Pay Per Click, Interactive Strategy, Email Marketing, the list can go on and on. These days it seems everyone has a new area of expertise for generating traffic to your site, or your social networks.

While I believe in almost all of these Internet Marketing Strategies, I often wonder when do we talk about your Corporate Internet Marketing, or you Social Media Strategy, why do so many Internet Marketing companies fail to talk about the most important piece to the puzzle, CONVERSION.

Sure I can drive thousands of visitors to your site. I have used Google’s pay per click service with great success. I have seen companies drive a 100,000 visitors a month to their site using this service. I worked with one company in particular who would spend over $40,000 per month, just to generate traffic. Believe me, it does work.

However, when I asked this company the percentage of visitors they converted on their marketing objective they had no idea. After further review, we discovered it was less than 1%. I may not be a rocket scientist, but that seems like a waste of money. What about CONVERSION?

I now see all these companies who claim they are a Social Media Agency. I even saw a proposal that promised to increase the number of fans a company had on Facebook, and to increase their Twitter followers. Again, this is not a bad thing, but what about CONVERSION?

You need to have a Web Business Strategy for how you are going to convert your traffic to be customers or clients. You need to give them multiple opportunities to execute your objective, and you need to make it so straightforward your visitors have no doubt what you want them to do on your site.

As you make your plan, think about the typical grocery store. Where do they put all of everyday items like milk, eggs, meat, etc? Yep, you are correct in the back of the store. Do you think they have a strategy behind that. Absolutely. They are trying to convert their business objective, and to get you to purchase, look at, smell, and sample, other items on your way to the things you really need. They are all about CONVERSION.

As you look at this blog post you may notice small buttons, or self promotional ads all over the page. Do you thing that we just put them there for design purposes? Absolutely not, we have an objective in mind. We blog to get you to our site. We want to get you to our site to tell you more about Internet marketing and what we do as a Internet Marketing Agency in Indianapolis Indiana. We hope you find the information helpful and also candidly we want you to talk to us more and ultimately become your trusted business partner.

So before you spend next years advertising budget with Google, take a few moments to think about what you will do when you drive traffic to your site. Google may be great at driving traffic, but what about CONVERSION?