Your website cannot do it alone

When our company, Return on Initiative, began more than ten years ago, websites for businesses were a very big deal. Back then, if you wanted to sell products through an online store, or if your goal was to have people contact you via the Internet, you needed a website to make that happen.
You still need one, of course. But for many businesses, the function of a website has become merely to supply an answer to the question, "Do you have a website I can look at?"
Mid way through our first year, we recognized that a business website was simply not enough, regardless of whether the company in question was brick and mortar or click and order. In the overwhelming majority of instances, what our clients desired was for their website to serve as a vehicle for commerce. In some cases, that means attracting people to purchase products and services directly from the website itself, as with Skin Cream USA. In many other circumstances, however, our clients wished to have their website act as a source of information for their own prospective customers with the ultimate goal being that the prospect would be persuaded by the website into becoming a loyal customer. But with billions of websites operating throughout the world, these goals were no longer realistic. A business might have the most drop-dead gorgeous website imaginable; the owner might have spent tens of thousands of dollars enlisting the services of Wordpress experts; new content, meta tags and images might be added to the site constantly; and impressive amounts of traffic might even have come to the site--but the conversions, the contacts, the sales still were mostly coming by word of mouth.
And so, by our sixth month of operating, we developed a smart, intuitive system for preparing people for the experience of visiting a given website. Our system involves three major components. And they work.
By far, the largest part of our program involves a strategic approach to target marketing--social media. We have observed--as have you, no doubt--that many companies throw away their money on social media campaigns that simply throw spaghetti against the wall in the hopes that something will stick. They automate the process of sending out thousands of tweets, updates, Facebook posts, LinkedIn data and other platform exercises. Or they invest their clients' money in social media ads that attempt to gain Likes and Followers.


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​We approach social media from a different perspective. We see the users of a given social medium as a database from which we draw likely customers whose behavior patterns on that medium indicate a likelihood of interest in our clients' products and services. Perhaps a certain Facebook enthusiast has liked and shared information about an event hosted by a success coach six months ago, and maybe that person has even indicated that he or she has attended such an event. If you are a keynote speaker yourself, you might like to have a company such as ours reach out to that Facebook user directly on your behalf. We do that for you because it often adds credibility to have a third party speak well of you. And when we speak well of you, we address the individual by first name and make reference to that person's previous relevant experiences. We include pertinent images and close with a link to your website. This more than adequately prepares and entices the person to engage with you once he or she arrives at your beautiful website.
We also make regular posts multiple times every day on your behalf, using all relevant social media, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and many others.
Those efforts account for eighty-five percent of our work. The other fifteen percent supports the social media work. Both of these initiatives are accelerated search engine optimization techniques. We index your website through fifty essential search engines every thirty days. Many companies do the indexing every ninety days. But our belief is that new content will be happening to your site far more often than that. So we index your website each and every month of the year.
The other crucial component to a successful campaign is backlinks. We provide links to your website from high-performing websites. This remains the surest way of communicating to the search engines that your website deserves premium placement.
What types of businesses do the best with our services? I am happy to say that we have helped connect our customers with new clients and our customers come from many different fields. Some are artists, such as Mark Valinsky, Lucretia Torva, and Sarah Baptist. Others are involved in helping entrepreneurs, such as Mariel Miller, Jody Harris, Fred Gleeck, and Hugh Ballou. Still others have products and services they sell directly from their websites, such as Amen Collection and Kangen. We also have some long-term clients who themselves are connected with media enterprises, including Regency International Pageant, Bikini USA, and LPC Magazine.
Whatever the nature of your business, there is a solution to the time-consuming problem of attracting new customers. Return on Initiative is that solution.
By the way, we still design and develop websites, too.