Two Moments in One Day
Posted On: 2006-11-30
And the general public thinks adult webmasters are a bunch of crooks?
This morning Steve and I went down to our favorite coffee shop and enjoyed a couple of coffees while all we did was watch the waves gently slap onto the sun-drenched sand. It was idyllic - you could not have hoped for a nicer setting for two people who wanted to get away from work for a little while.
But sadly work has a way of catching up with you even in idyllic places like that.
The $140 domain name
On our way out the owner of the café called us into his office. Almost exactly 12 months ago we had re-written a web page he has on a local site that sells web pages. It's a really crappy site - never gets updated but because of it's backlinks it has the number one spot for the town name.
For some time the café owner has wanted to have his own web site but we have been trying to talk him out of it. Basically he doesn't need it because that single page we re-wrote hits the number one spot for all the search terms he wants ... but he still wants his own site.
So along comes a local web design company and hits him with the heavy sell. They give him a quote and they'll even knock a thousand dollars off the price if he signs up this week. Now the guy isn't a fool but he does want that website, he's built up a really good business from not much at all so he's always a little cautious but likes a good deal. So he asked us to look at the quote.
Both Steve and I had the first WTF moment right at the same time. There in the quote was a figure for registering his domain name for 12 months. It was $140.00!
Twenty minutes later we had his domain name for him for $29.95 for two years.
We then sat down with the rest of the quote and picked it to pieces. It was basically highway robbery. They were promising that they could get his site listed on page one of Google for the town name. Because this is a tourist town with a lot of foreign tourists coming through any of the listings on page one is very hot property. Basically they had no way of getting him onto page one - but they were going to charge him over $3000.00 to build his site and then a monthly fee of $500 to keep him on page one.
The $550 website
The second WTF moment came a little later. Steve has been talking to another small businessman several states away who can't understand why his site is not on page one of Google for the term he wants. (Basically the problem is that he has no backlinks and is still in the aging process - but he doesn't understand that).
Steve had a look at the site and, after our experience earlier in the morning, decided he would ask this guy how much he had paid for his site. It turns out that he paid $550 for the website which sounds like a real bargain until you realize that he had to supply his own graphics, his own text and his own basic design. The web designer took it from there and guaranteed that the site would be optimized for Google and it would hit page one.
Of course you and I could pick that offer to pieces in about 30 seconds flat but this poor guy though he was getting help from an expert.
Why am I telling you all this? Because it has to show you that there is a place in your own hometown for people who know how to produce quality websites for small business and those people are you and I.
If you have been in adult marketing for any length of time you will know how to build websites, you will know how to optimize them for search engines without blowing smoke about optimizing for Google and you will know how to charge a reasonable fee for a reasonable job.
So what are you waiting for? Well obviously one problem you have to overcome is to get people to recognize that you are a competent web designer and the easiest way to do that is get a little corporate image going.
Get some business cards, invest some time in building a business website for yourself and spend a few bucks on some corporate clothing. Steve and I have some polo shirts on order that show our business name, our logo and our Christian name.
We're tired of local people knowing that we design websites but forgetting about us when they want a site built. So for a change we're going to make sure that we're in their face so to speak.
And you can do the same. You can use the talents and skills you have and have learnt here in adult and use them in mainstream. If the conmen and the shysters who want to charge $140 for a domain name can get business then so can we even if we only want to charge what's fair and reasonable.
Are Steve and I going to give up our adult work and go mainstream? Of course not ... and even if we wanted to we couldn't because people keep throwing more work at us ... but we're going to extend our mainstream reach beyond what it is now and maybe next year we'll extend our storefront presence and perhaps employ someone on-site to handle the grunt work.
Now isn't that a scary thought and enough to give me a third WTF moment for the day.