I'm curious to find out how many here do online marketing, and how you feel about it. There are a lot of great ideas for offline marketing but the online part seems to be conspicuously absent.
I'm going to guess that there are those who don't market online for one of a couple reasons:
- Too expensive (custom website costs + hosting)
- Too inefective (not good ROI results)
- Too scary (tech talk and computers are the enemy!)
There may be a couple others but I imagine those are the main reasons. So a month or so ago I decided to start an experiment - just to see if I could get a decent return from marketing online.
I'm going to write everything up and publish it as an article, so keep an eye out for that, but let me say that I am pleasantly surprised at the results so far. I haven't done any "pay-per-click" advertising in the search engines and really haven't spent much money on the project beyond buying a domain name and paying for web hosting.
Anyway, I'm getting off-track. Let's get an initial discussion going about online marketing. I think there's a huge opportunity for individuals to get a strong foothold in their niches online - especially when you consider that something like 70% of home buyers begin their home search online and around that same percentage do mortgage research online before applying.
That's a lot of potential business.