I am currently in San Jose California on a plane and had an interesting conversation with someone about his company and the marketing they do. This is a large company that does about $2 Billion a year in sales.
I asked to see his website and when I went there I learned all kinds of things about this company. First of all I discovered that they are getting a large amount of traffic (over 282,000 views per month or around 10,000 per day) and a great deal of that is from PPC. In other words they are paying for people to visit their site. Some months they pay over $16,000 per day for these visitors.
But the real killer here is that they don’t have their website properly formatted for SEO and therefore not able to take advantage of free traffic. By just applying some basic principles they could have a tremendous amount of free, regular and steady traffic to their site. I am not sure who persuaded them to just do PPC and forget about basic SEO, but they must have some motive to do so.
I recently heard of a company that did about $10 Million per year and spent about $1 Million with Google PPC per year to accomplish this. But something happened (no one knows why for sure) but they were de-listed by big G and went out of business. A few hundred employees out of work because some bureaucrat didn’t like something and pulled the plug. The management swore that they were not doing anything unethical or illegal and they had no idea what happened or why.
Never put all your eggs in one basket with Internet Marketing! Make sure you have a good footing in many areas and not just one. There is too much power in the hands of some of these people and this is ripe for corruption.
If they would pull the plug on $1,000,000 per year in advertising dollars, they will certainly do it for a lot less, and possibly any other reason they can think of.