Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

This morning Schrock Innovations issued a press release about what the company is doing to help businesses use their websites to weather the Great Recession.

Here is the text of the release:

Schrock Bets on Lincoln’s Digital Recovery With Hire

With the prospect of a double-dip recession looming, Schrock Innovations is betting Lincoln’s businesses will turn to the web

Lincoln, NE, March 29, 2010: Although Lincoln’s economy is the nation’s second best for its size, that doesn’t mean local businesses are escaping the pinch of the Great Recession.

Schrock Innovations, a local Lincoln computer company, has hired Brian Augenstein to captain the company’s Web Development Division as demand for their local web-based services grow in the face of a recessionary business environment.

Thor Schrock owns Schrock Innovations and he believes that businesses are turning to the web because, when used properly, it is less expensive to generate leads, sales, and profits online. Schrock has been buying media in Lincoln for 11 years and he is seeing the signs of a business environment that is scared to take chances.

“When I can buy commercials during the NCAA Final Four for $10 per spot, that speaks toward the business climate,” Schrock said. “Couple advertising cuts with layoffs, outsourcing, and rising taxes and the result is a timid business environment that is fearful for the future.”

For what it would normally cost to run a single television commercial, Schrock Innovations is redesigning websites to make them more efficient at delivering information, generating leads, and bringing shoppers through the doors of Lincoln businesses.

“For many businesses, their website is an afterthought in the marketing budget. With marketing dollars becoming scarce, tweaking a company’s web presence is becoming more attractive because local businesses see immediate returns that go on over time without continued investment.”

Schrock points out that many businesses have all of the information they need right now to boost sales and profitability through their websites, but simply don’t know how to do it. Rather than designing a website for a client and walking away, Schrock Innovations helps its clients see the potential in the present and the future.

“In the past it was enough to know who your customers were,” Schrock said. “In today’s web world you need to know who they are, where they are coming from, how to reach them, and what they want. If you use your website to get that information, sales and profits are a natural conclusion.”

Schrock’s team of internet marketers and designers evaluate a company’s web presence based on three criteria. If a client is missing any of the three, Schrock shows them how to claim the business they are missing out on:

1. You don’t know how many of your customers or clients come from your website. There are numerous free online tools that allow you to track how many customers search for you, find your website, and then what they look at before they leave.
2. Your website has few visitors. Many of the websites designed between the late 1990’s and the mid 2000’s were designed as an online brochure rather than a marketing piece designed to attract visitors and convert them into paying customers. If you didn’t own the company, what is the #1 reason you would go to your website?
3. Your website is not reflective of what you do. Companies are necessarily focused on the day-to-day activities of running a business. Over time, businesses can evolve to offer new products, services, and even change their look. Does your website represent where your brand is today, or where it was 5 years ago?

“If a company’s website has traffic, tracking, and conversion that means they are making money. A website is more than a billboard. It should work for your company day and night. If it is not, your business is missing an opportunity to make money in the toughest of economic times.”

I received this email from Go Daddy a few days ago If you have any 10-year domain reservations to make, you should do it before July to save a little money! On July 1, 2010, VeriSign®, the registry for .COM and .NET, will increase prices – .COM will go up 7%, and .NET by 10%. […]

I had some conversations with a client recently about their websites. This is a multi-million dollar company that operates over 12 websites that are used mainly to promote their other products and services.

Each of their websites was attracting less than 15,000 unique visitors and each visitor was consuming about 2.25 pages of content per visit. They were not making any money on the websites and that’s why they wanted to talk to me.

Defining Success:

They thought their web statistics were great, and they thought they just needed to find the right mix of technique and opportunity to cash in on their traffic.

I was in the uncomfortable position of telling him that the stats were not that great – a good start – but definitely not capable of generating the six-figure return they were seeking.

How would You Define Success With Your Website?

That got me thinking about how success is really a relative term. It means something different to every person based on their expectations and who they are comparing themselves against.

Some webmasters would be perfectly happy with a couple hundred dollars of income every month, while others would be looking for thousands.

What is your dream website income and how close are you to achieving it?

Developing a Plan and Executing

Obviously for my client we needed to bring more traffic to his websites before he would have any hope of generating the kind of money he confided to be “success.”

It always comes back to content. Sometimes you can beg, borrow, or even steal it – but it always boils down to you making some of your own.

Do you generate enough content to make your dreams of website success a reality?

ShowTek Events in Denver, Colorado wanted their website revamped so it would stand out against the competition.

Rob from ShowTek reached out to Schrock Innovations to build a site that would maximize its SEO benefits, and plays a song of the day. Rob wanted multiple video & images, simple navigation, vibrant colors, while at the same time have the website run completely from his own server in an easily updateable framework.

Brad went over each specific detail Rob wanted and then create a site design that would house the ShowTek Events vision of the new site. He created a unique design using a one button menu bar. Combining this with a BACK and HOME button, the site is very simple to navigate and makes it easy to find each product.

The desire to avoid third-party services and the ability to have a song of the day was solved by Schrock building a custom Flash player for their content. The Flash player also allowed the vision for a video gallery to play on the same page when you click a thumbnail.

To keep the updating easy, we built his site was built using PHP, CSS and JavaScript. Upon completion Brad met with Rob for a brief introduction on how to update the website and manage its content.

Now ShowTek Events has a site fitting their vision which is simple to navigate and update

Alarm Equipment Inc. (AEI) in Omaha, NE came to Schrock Innovations for a website “freshening” a few months ago.

AEI’s website was not ranking in Google for the key search terms they needed to bring in new alarm business. Today more people use Google than the Yellow Pages so ranking when it counts can be vital to a business’ success!

AEI Asked Schrock Innovations to modify their existing website to modernize its look and improve its SEO performance without changing the basic layout and styling of the existing website.

Schrock Innovations Web Development Team has been busy the past few days testing our clients’ website to make certain they will display properly in IE8. In the coming weeks, IE 8 will be pushed to every Windows XP and Vista user through Windows Update.

If your webs-ite is not compliant, it could look awful in the new browser, and your company’s image could be slighted in the eyes of millions of web surfers world-wide (IE is still the most widely used browser by far).

So what do you need to do to see if your website is impacted? Follow these steps below to check your website and then take steps to correct the problem.

Microsoft’s long-awaited Internet Explorer version 8 is complete and will be released this morning via at 11 A.M. CST as well as the Internet Explorer 8 Website and thousands of websites will be instantly broken by the new browser.

Everything about IE8 is pretty much run of the mill with a couple exceptions. IE8 will conform to standards set by other browsers such as Mozilla’s Firefox. As a result, websites that were coded to work exclusively on previous versions of IE may not display correctly in IE8.

If you own a website that is not displaying correctly in IE8, Schrock Innovations offers a special program where our web design staff can bring your website into compliance at a discounted hourly rate. Contact Schrock Innovations for more information on the program.

The new Schrock Innovations website I talked about a few weeks ago is now live and more content is being added daily. I completely underestimated the amount of content our old site had archived, so we decided to launch the redesigned website and add the old content in as time allows. As if that was […]

Creating a hybrid video, text, and image website is challenge nough, but keeping everything organized in a way that people will be able to find it and enjoy it was a huge undertaking.

Here is something interesting I found today on the web that should keep you amused for a while. The internet archive is a repository of web pages form the past. In a way it acts like an internet time machine to show you what a website looked like years ago.

This website allows you to look at the revisions of a website over time going back as far as 1996. The Microsoft we all know and love today has a pretty advanced website, but that was not always the case.