Marketing and promoting your business is only attractive when the return is greater than the investment. Although internet marketing is a cost-effective method of marketing, there are many that doubt the result. The only way to convince the skeptics is to calculate the return on investment (ROI) for internet marketing.

As an example, we will calculate the expense of a web site based on the LoyalStaffs Business Advertiser package for small businesses.

This package includes:

• building a web site
• hosting a web site
• submitting the web site to search engines
• advertising on Pay Per Click.

The total cost of the package is $150.00 a month with an initial set-up cost of $100.00. Since the initial set-up cost can be amortized over a year, total cost is $160.00 a month.

Imagine more than 500% return on investment (ROI)...

Based on the current price for pay per click, the package can generate up to two hundreds unique visitors to the web site per month.  Here's the calculation of return on investment.

• Let's assume two hundred web users visit the web site a month and the conversion ratio from site visitor to a store visitor is 1%.
• Based on this ratio, two hundreds click generate two new customers a month.  If they become regular customers, it is a revenue potential of $100.00 (average cost of service) x 6 (number of service per year) x 2= $1200.00.  Since the advertising expense is $160, the return is 1,200/160 = 7.50 or 750%.
• If that same customer looks for a plastic surgeon or photographer, the average service cost should be well over $2,000.00. If we use a conservative figures, then the revenue potential is $2,000.00 x 2 = $4,000.00.  The return is 4,000/160 = 25 or 2,500%.

This type of return is phenomenal and can't be ignored!

However, if a business owner or web master manages your web site, the return becomes significantly less. For example, if a business owner is involved in building a web site, the cost of building the web site can break down as the following:

• Hours spent to look for a good design or designer: 4 hours x $50.00 = $200.00
• Cost of building its own site: $1,000.00 minimum
• Web hosting: $20.00 / month
• Submit the site to a web search engine: 4 hours x $50.00 = $200.00
• Look for keywords for Pay Per Click: 4 hours x $50.00 = $200.00
• Register for Pay Per Click : 2 hours x $50.00 = $100.00
• Cost of Pay Per Click : $50.00

The numbers in the above example are very conservative figures. Based on these numbers, the total expense for building and managing your own web site is $1770.00. The ROI in this case is $2,000/$1770 resulting in 129 %. This is not an impressive number.

Also, it is likely the conversion rate is even less than the rate LoyalStaffs runs the advertising for you, since a lack of expertise in selecting keywords will result in a poor conversion rate. Keep in mind that even if some of the costs can be amortized throughout the year, running the program requires constant monitoring of results. Therefore, the cost of managing the program goes up and the return is still not impressive at all.

With LoyalStaffs web solution packages, not only will you reduce the expense of web site management, but also improve the ROI significantly because you will cut costs but not cut the quality of your web site.  Your web site will meld with your current advertising creating synergies not possible with traditional print and video mediums.