Are you in need of a real bargain for your next website? I have a great deal for you today, and it starts at just $175,000 and $25,000 per month maintenance cost. But wait! There’s more!

It sounds like a great bargain, right? Well, maybe and maybe not.

I wish I had recorded the conversation I had with a woman desperately in need of an answer about website pricing. She just wanted to hear the answer that agreed with her. She did not have any desire at all to hear the right answer. I do have the urgent voicemail message she left for me, and I will include it in the podcast.

After hearing the voicemail message, I promptly returned her call and she was even more frazzled in real-time. The purpose for her call was that she was frantically seeking some way to sway her business partners from an offer made by a website development company for what she believed was astronomically high. The part she could not answer was why it was too high, or how much too high it was. All she knew was that it was too high, and she wanted ammunition to fire back at the developer and her business partners.

The Internet has created a lot of change in culture around the world. It is not true for everybody, but on a large scale, globalization and greater awareness of the world is a reality. People learned more about the other side of this planet in the past decade than in all those thousands of years prior to the Internet. We have embraced other cultures that we were not previously aware of, and we have blended into a larger culture … the Internet culture. The Internet truly has been instrumental in creating the more global society we know today.

If you make your price the first priority in a cost to value comparison, you may want to reconsider. Cost is a fast way to get a lot of public attention, but it can also provide a negative net return. Showing a low cost has a solid place in some markets, but consider evaluating the cost and value propositions you present to your market. If you are building upon only an audience of “glancing prospects”, you may miss your best customers in the process. What I call glancing prospects are the ones who are out for cost, and that is the primary factor in their decision making. They glance in your direction and give little consideration to anything but how much it will cost. You may like these customers if you are content to offer the lowest cost, but they are also often not return customers or loyal to your brand. It is not just because you didn’t provide value, but because value is not what they were seeking. Thus, they never realized your value.

Is there such a thing as natural ability in marketing? Some talents seem to come from birth, but like developing any talent, it takes time and hard work. Talent comes with a cost.
Marketing Talent Comes With a Cost
There is a hidden cost to marketing talent that is often difficult to realize. Whether you are hiring it out or trying to develop marketing talent for yourself, it has a cost … often a huge cost. So, where does marketing talent really come from, what is the cost to get it, and why are marketing talents not all equal? Allow me to [...]

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How often have you said to yourself, “I need to hire a Web developer”? My guess is that it is not something you do every day, unless you are in the business. I suspect that the question of hiring a Web developer  or hiring a search engine optimization (SEO) professional is relatively foreign to you, so allow me to help you.
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Many businesses of all sizes and industries had a sharp blow to the budget in late 2008. This should not be a shock to anybody who has seen the news recently. Fear not, my friends, for the money fairy will be making Santa-like deliveries in January 2009. At least this seems to be the consensus of business owners and managers that I have talked with and read about recently.
I have operated businesses for decades, but I have never seen such a confused view on business and economy as the past quarter. I have had many conversations with brilliant people in many industries, and without fail, they [...]

“How much does a Website cost?” is very often the first question I hear from a prospective client. I have answered this question in so many ways over the last decade that I get a chuckle remembering some of my answers.
If price was truly the primary concern, every Website would be free. A quick Google for “free website” returns well into the hundreds of millions in results. There is surely a reason that I still have a job. So why do so many people still ask me the question: “How much does a Website cost?”
Whether you are a prospective Website purchaser [...]