Though professional website design has become more affordable enabling smaller size companies to benefit from similar opportunities as the larger corporations, it is important that you budget for expenses related to your site and online marketing efforts. December is the perfect time of the year to do so but, if you missed this post, do it today! Any month is a good month to review your budget.

Website expenses:

If your website has been recently redesigned used up-to-date coding techniques and fully responsive to mobile devices, then the expenses should be limited to the following:

1) Monthly maintenance: Though not always necessary unless you are on a platform that requires updates). Some programmers charge as little as $100 per month if you just need a WordPress site maintained.

2) Hosting fee: Typically you would host your website with web hosting company and the monthly fee would range from $5 to $25 per month. If you subscribe to monthly backup services then the fee ranges from $50 to $100 per month.

**Note: We highly recommend that you have regular backups of your website saved on your server but also on a local hard drive and on the Cloud.**

3) Domain name registration: You should budget for $12 per domain per year. So if you are a domain name hoarder like we are, you may have 10 domains and the cost of re-registering them each year will add up.

4) Updates and upgrades: Even though your website may have come with a content management system, there may be times when you will need a webmaster to upgrade an item or change a form which is a typically hard coded file. Generally you should budget $100 per month even if you are only ask for such changes twice a year as it may cost you a few hundred dollars for the work order.

5) Redesigning your website: It may be time for a professional web development team to redo your website to keep up not only with new Internet trends but also with your online competition. After all, your visitors will judge (that you like it or not) your company, services and products on what they see and feel from your website. If this is the case, then you should budget $7,500 to $15,000. Budget more if you accept payments on your website or have a membership website. Just like any other marketing tools, you have to consider the ROI “Return on Investment”. If you are a general contractor and gain one prospect because of a new powerful website then a one-time $7,500 investment makes absolute sense.

Online marketing:

The investment can range from $100 per month to thousands of dollars. You should speak with your webmaster every December to review your business goals both offline and online to see what adjustments need to be made and what online strategy you should have.

Pay-per-click can be quite expensive but are sometimes necessary if you need a nationwide campaign or are located in a very competitive market and industry. The same is true for inbound marketing which can be a solid yet expensive investment.

With our company the minimum monthly investment is $600 per month and goes up from there for any online marketing campaign. If we are hosting with us, we will typically wave the hosting fee if you are on a monthly plan. Our fees cover anything from monthly backups, continued upgrades to a website, content marketing, adding and optimizing new web pages, blogging, social media management, organic SEO, article ghost writing and more.