The Small Business Local Search Marketing Advantage
For the longest time local companies had the edge in small town U.S.A. Big businesses needed huge markets to survive and they left the towns to small companies. Then one day the concept of the big box retailer showed up. At first they did the same thing as every other big store. They tackled the huge towns. And still small companies in small towns had the edge. Then one day big box retailers like Wal-Mart and Target stated “hey we are able to sell to small towns too”. And so they started moving in and small businesses suffered.
Then one day the net appeared. Big box retailers rapidly saw the benefit. We’re big and the net can easily make us bigger! Local small businesses didn’t see that same advantage. They said “we’re local and so are our customers, what can the web do for us”? And then one day things changed. Local search had arrived and small enterprises finally had an edge, due to the fact that they’re local.
If you own a small business then local search marketing can be a real benefit to your enterprise. But now is the time to benefit from it. Since there will soon| be a day when the big box guys and other big companies will definitely turn their marketing budgets to prevailing over local search advertising too. Wal-Mart as an example does oil changes at a great many of their locations. However do they promote those locations through local search marketing? Not yet but they might do it earlier than you might like. Costco offers caskets however that isn’t found with a local search either. But if you own a local furniture outlet you’re probably currently competing with a big chain outfit like Ashley’s Furniture. However is Thomasville on the listing too?
Local search advertising for small businesses is still a substantial opportunity however it should be benefited from now. And for the most part it’s not. The rough estimation is that just 11 % of small businesses have actually claimed their listings with sites like Google Places, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local. Not to mention the hundred other spots like SuperPages.com where your listing can be claimed.
Many small business owners are missing out on a wonderful possibility to get seen. 20% of the searches done online today are done by individuals looking for a local business. They’re searching for a beauty parlor, car repair shop or merely a great place to eat. And these people really should be discovering you. But if you haven’t claimed your listings then they may be discovering your competition as an alternative. So a little local search advertising is assisting them but not you. Now might just be the right time to start a local search marketing campaign of your very own, don’t you think?
Is Online Marketing The Answer For You?
Promoting a product or business has changed a lot in the past few years. Online marketing has opened up a new avenue for businesses to make money. However, online marketing is only the answer if you approach it correctly.
1. Cost. Generally online marketing is thought to be less expensive than offline marketing. This is only the case if you know what you’re doing. Let me give you an example.
Years ago I decided to do pay per click advertising with Google Adwords. I didn’t take the time to learn a few of the basics.
I just dove in head first and set up a campaign that night before I went to bed. When I got up the next morning I had spent over $500 promoting a business opportunity and did not even get one lead from it.
Pay per click advertising is still a good way to drive traffic today. However, you obviously need to know what you’re doing or you may end up wasting a lot of money.
2. Quality of traffic. You can get excellent traffic on the Internet, or you can get a lot of visitors with little result
For example, I have found traffic exchanges to be a cost effective way to get some visitors to a website or landing page. This is based strictly on working the numbers because this is not the highest quality traffic.
Forum marketing has always been a good source of high-quality traffic. People who come to your website from a discussion forum are curious about what you have to offer.
Long term article marketing has been a good source of quality traffic in the past. This still works although it’s not as effective as it used to be.
Certainly social networking is a powerful form of quality traffic. Making friends and getting traffic that way is working on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This is also good for viral marketing as people tell their friends who in turn tell their friends and so on.
3. Local business marketing. One of the top business models to benefit from small business Internet marketing is in the local business arena.
How many times have you picked up the yellow pages to look for something lately? Do you read a newspaper as much as you used to?
Television advertising and radio advertising continue to be effective because there is a captive audience. Yellow pages and newspaper advertising don’t work as well because people are not using them like they used to.
Local businesses that market online with their own website, and Facebook page are smart. You also need a mobile website because people access the Internet on their smart phone more than they do their computer.
To ignore online marketing is a kiss of death for your business. Not only is it the answer for you today, but you must be smart about how you spend money and the type of traffic you are getting.
Are You Too Busy To Do Internet Marketing?
I think one of the reasons most people fail with Internet marketing is they feel they are too busy to consistently do it. When I hear this excuse I have to wonder how serious they are about using the Internet to make money.
One universal truth is we all have 168 hours in a week. That is 24 hours a day, seven days a week. How we choose to spend that time is where everybody is different.
You really need to sit down and write out exactly how you spend those 168 hours. Hopefully you are getting 7 to 8 hours sleep a night. Let’s call that 50 hours a week sleeping.
This is not something you want to compromise. Internet marketing is done sitting behind a computer. You can not effectively make money at home online if you’re tired.
If you work a full-time job you are probably spending 50 hours a week getting ready, going to work, working, and coming home. When you add this to the 50 hours a week spent sleeping you have committed 100 hours a week of your time.
This leaves 68 hours a week spent doing other things. I’m a firm believer in having balance in your life.
You should have a spiritual life, spend time on physical fitness, family time, and recreation. If you allot 40 hours a week for these activities you’re still left with 28 hours a week to spend on your Internet business.
For most of us that would work out to about 4 hours a day. Some days you may have more time than others, but on an average it works out to 4 hours a day to spend on your business.
This is where it gets exciting to me. You may be only spending four hours a day building your business, but the Internet is open for business 24 hours a day. You literally have the chance to earn money 168 hours every week even if you are not working on your business.
Think about the power of that statement. You need to build systems into your business that allow it to run automatically to create you income.
Another thing you can do to create more time in your business is to outsource. You can hire a Philippine worker for $300 a month full Time. When you do this you just added 40 hours a week to your business for $75.
One other thing you can do is join start a home business in network marketing, affiliate business, or direct sales. When you understand how the compensation plan works in network marketing you can leverage your time and duplicate your efforts when you enroll new distributors.
This is just one way to have thousands of hours a week being worked in your business when you’re not spending any more than your 4 hours a day.
So again I ask you the question of whether you are too busy to do Internet marketing? This is not for everyone. You need to evaluate whether you’re willing to work the minimum amount of time to reap the rewards from it!
Search Engine Placement Increases Traffic To Websites
What is SEO? Search engine optimization is the process of getting your website ranked on the front page of major search engines. The process takes making a website that is easy to maneuver with relevant content so that it is easily recognized by search engines. As you guessed there is a lot more to it than that but in general that is what it takes to get your website on the front page of Google, Yahoo or Bing.
You may ask yourself why it is in your best interest to rank on the front page. Why is this important? How often are you searching Google and find yourself looking at the results on page five? Never! That is because the most relevant information to your search has come up on the front page. Within the top ten results you have an answer to what your search was. It is proven over and over again that ninety-five percent of all traffic to a website comes from front page search results. People are impatient. They want to get the information they need without searching any further than they have to in order to get it.
What does this mean to you, a business owner with an ineffective online presence? You must work toward a long term SEO solution. Many times this involves working with a search engine placement team of experts to analyze, fix and maintain your website and develop an online marketing plan. The forefront of the plan involves making sure your site is functioning optimally. This means looking into the content, the backend, the website design and the overall ease of maneuvering through the site. Look at it from a customer’s point of view not as a business owner. Sometimes too much information can be as off putting as too little.
It is helpful to go into any new business venture with eyes wide open. The same is true when hiring a search engine optimization team of experts for your online marketing presence. There are some key terms that get thrown around a lot that can be confusing to someone just entering the search engine race. Below you will find terms and definitions to help you come out on top when finding a search engine placement team to work with for your SEO needs.
SEM – This acronym stands for search engine management. This entails the process of designing and marketing your website for the best online presence possible. The goal is to position your website in both search advertising and paid advertising. Paid advertising is a whole other beast we can talk about at another time.
SEO – This is the acronym that represents search engine optimization. This is what we talked about earlier, making the sites content and design relevant for search engines to index and appeal to users.
PPC – This acronym is all about paid advertising and stands for pay-per-click. This is, in very general terms, when someone places an ad and pays each time someone clicks on the ads.
Natural Rankings – A term that is used for any listing that your site comes by in the free or unpaid sections of the web.
The following terms are used for the design element of the site that really is not relevant to the visual aspect of the site however is needed for indexing purposes.
Meta Tags: This is the information that is seated in the backend of the website. The Meta tags are not really relevant to the person searching in any aspect other than they help with the indexing of your site within search engines. Many people will never even have knowledge that such tags and back end info exists.
Title Tags: This is a Meta tag that briefly describes what the page is all about in short. This is a perfect spot to use the keywords you are aiming your search engine results towards.
Description: This is a description found on each page that describes the content in detail.
Keywords: These are the exact terms in word or phrase form. These keywords will be entered in the text as well as the back end of the site in an effort to improve your search engine rankings.
What Is Really Required To Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing?
Do you have a desire to make money online with affiliate marketing, but are not sure what is required to accomplish this goal? Then it is past time for you to learn what is really necessary to successfully make an income with affiliate marketing.
There are a lot of things that will be required to build your business to become successful, but the following things are what will be necessary to help you get your own business started earning an income for you.
One: Online marketing system – When you have an affiliate marketing business you have to know how to market it to as many people online as you can reach. There are a lot of internet marketing methods which can be used for building traffic to your business.
You just need to either educate yourself on all the internet marketing methods and set up your own marketing system, which is going to require a lot of time or you can find a marketing system that is already set up for you and begin using it right away to get your business out in front of as many people as possible.
Two: Business building tools – There are many other business building tools that will help you make an income from your business, but some will also help you make even more money. One of those tools is an auto responder that you can use to set up your own email list.
This list will let you keep in contact with each person that signs up for it after they have left your site so you have more chances of making sales with them. This is only one tool you will need to use in your business.
There are many others and you need to take time to find out how to use each one effectively so you can use it for the most benefit for your business.
Three: Commitment to building a business that is successful – Too many people get online and begin an affiliate marketing business believing that they don’t have to do much of anything to make that happen. This is not true and every person finds that out eventually.
You will need to be committed to building a successful business because there will be roadblocks and bumps along the way that you will have to go over, under or around. This makes many people want to give up, but if you are committed then you will become a success story and not a failure story.
These are the most important requirements for anyone that really wishes to make money online with affiliate marketing. You just need to ensure that you can do these things and if you can, get started right away so you can start making the income that you deserve to earn.
3 Crucial Points To Swell Your Online Marketing Profits
There are all sorts of recommendations to take into consideration if you want to be positive that your online marketing business is going to be profitable. It is very easy to slide into bad habits and generally get caught up in the whole concept that “quantity” is better than “quality”.
So here are 3 critical details that you must consider as you build up your internet marketing venture:
1. Remember Content Is Vitally Important To Your Success:
The content of your website has become significantly more critical as search engines like Google and Bing fine tune their algorithms in an attempt to eliminate poor quality sites and those with duplicate content. To rank well in these search results, your website’s content must be unique, of the best quality and offer the type of information that your potential buyers are hunting for.
Google, Bing and the other search engines can evaluate these factors and are then in a position to use that information to rank your website in their search results. For example, they analyse the amount of time that a potential buyer spends on your site as a way of assessing how informative your content has been. And a website that is light on relevant and useful information will suffer as a result.
The most successful online marketing sites update their content on a regular basis, adding top quality informative posts and comments that their customers want to read. They offer their readers just the sort of thing they are looking for in other words.
Incorporating a choice of different kinds of mediums is also likely to maintain your customers interest. Include a video occasionally, remember to add relevant images where appropriate and provide internal links between your various pages and posts. These hyperlinks will encourage the search engines to index your site successfully while ensuring it is easier for visitors to find their way round the areas of your site that interest them the most.
2. Keyword Analysis Is Worth Spending Time On:
This is often ignored, but is vital if you are looking to make the best use of your time and help your customers to discover your site.
Your website will be ranked and indexed in line with the relevance of its content. It is therefore necessary that your keyword selection guides the search engines in the relevant direction and helps them establish what your website is all about. You will end up ranking for the words that are important to you and will also make sure that you stay focused on your main niche as well.
Include latent semantically indexed (LSI) keywords too as this will create a more rounded picture of what your website is all about. Latent semantically indexed keywords are terms that the search engines identify as being affiliated with your principal core keywords and you will sometimes find that a well written blog post will automatically incorporate some of these keywords anyway.
3. Use Soft Messages To Get A Sale:
There is not much that is more off-putting for plenty of people than a non-stop barrage of pressurized sales messages. Most of your potential customers do not want to be sold to, they prefer to make up their own minds and will rapidly leave your website if this guideline gets ignored.
You can be more subtle of course when it comes to talking about your sales messages. A gentle reminder, maybe a link to a relevant and high quality product where appropriate, or a more subtle message included within a video posted on your site, will sometimes be far more effective than a more forceful “in-your-face” type of approach.
Remember, trust plays a considerable role in whether someone buys from you. If they have confidence in what you say and if they consider that you are actually trying to be helpful and are providing good, impartial advice, you will have a much greater chance of clinching the sale when you ask them for it.
Follow these 3 guidelines and you will see the level of visitors and then your online business profits improve as a result.
