Internet Marketing Strategies for Small Business
By Stacy Quinn
Copyright © 2011 Stacy M. Quinn
Smashwords Edition
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Author: Stacy Quinn
Publisher: Hypervantage Marketing Inc.
Internet Marketing Strategies Introduction
Traditional Marketing Doesn’t Work Anymore
The Potential for Exponential Profit
Making Changes to Online Marketing Methods
Your Simple Online Marketing Plan
Prior To Starting Your Online Marketing Plan
Analyze Your Overall Online Marketing Plan
Analyze Online Marketing Plan for Each Line
Doing Detailed Keyword Research
Do Onsite Search Engine Optimization
Add a Lead Capture System to the Website
Report Generation, Testing and Tracking
Adding Testimonials Create Validity and More
Social Media and Social Networking
Outsourcing: Answer to Easy Implementation
Choosing the Right Subcontractor
Internet Marketing Strategies Conclusion
Techniques to Increase Your Business’s Profits
Internet Marketing Strategies Introduction
If you are the owner of a local business, you are probably suffering from a drop in demand for your products or services as a result of the economic recession our country has been suffering from for the past few years. In fact statistics show that small local businesses are making 30% to 50% less than they were just a few years ago. Some of the businesses that comprise this statistic include:
Plumbers
Dentists
Locksmiths
Restaurants
Plastic surgeons
Accountants
Carpet cleaners
Contractors
Landscapers
Traditional Marketing Doesn’t Work Anymore
The fact of the matter is that the marketing techniques that were solid and reliable for local businesses to use to reach their market in the past are no longer working. This means Yellow Pages ads, newspapers and other types of hard copy advertising are simply not bringing in business. That’s because people simply don’t use them anymore.
Businesses that are still using such outdated forms of advertising are throwing away thousands and thousands of dollars on ineffective marketing every month. If you are one of those people still investing in such ads, ask 10 people where their copy of the Yellow Pages is. Most can’t tell you or will tell you that they put it in the recycling bin shortly after it arrived. What does that tell you about the money you are spending?
Consumers are looking more and more to the Internet to find information about the services and products they are seeking, even locally. Therefore if businesses want to reach new customers they simply have to have a quality Internet presence. And that does not mean just a lame website that a kid could have put together!
Today’s websites that rank well are well thought out, interesting, personable and informative. They utilize a variety of savvy online marketing techniques in order to stand out from their competitors. If you have a site with no keywords in it and almost no backlinks, you are missing the boat and will never get to the top of the search engine results.
Specific Marketing Strategies
There are specific marketing strategies that apply uniquely to Internet marketing. If you do not use Internet marketing strategies, your website will not get traffic and you will not attract new clients.
One of the stumbling blocks impeding most local businesses from implementing such strategies is that they simply have no idea what needs to be done. Online marketing is so new and such unfamiliar territory for most individuals that they don’t know where to start. They spend so much time running their business, taking care of their clients and managing their staff that they don’t have the time to learn something new.
Ask yourself a few questions:
What are long-tailed keywords?
What is keyword density?
What is Web 2.0?
How do you set up an auto responder?
How do you change the tags on your website?
How do you create videos and audios for your website?
If you are like most business owners, you can not answer these questions. That is absolutely normal. You have spent time focusing on other aspects of your business, ones that you do indeed master. But now you need to learn more! Finally, the time has come for the average local business owner to discover exactly what needs to be done in order to effectively put an online marketing plan in place for his or her business.
Changes in Business
Today, local business owners are in a hungry market. They need more work. They need to attract more clients. They need to adapt to the changing economy. However, the market is changing, or more specifically, how to reach that market is changing. Understanding the change and meeting the challenges of it are essential to survival of businesses.
Case in point: One local business was spending $8000 per month on Yellow Pages advertising that cost more than it was bringing in. It doesn’t take long before smart business people realize that such a situation is a losing cause and needs to be fixed. So they stopped the ad. However, now they have an $8000 budget for marketing but don’t know where to put it, because they don’t know Internet marketing.
But these entrepreneurs realize the Internet is the future. More than 2.6 billion local searches are performed online every month. This number grows by more than 50% each year. In fact, 80% of people search online before they make a purchase. They now prefer this type of search over Yellow Pages or the newspaper. Therefore business owners need to be online in an effective way.
The Potential for Exponential Profit
Using Internet marketing can easily result in an increase in sales of tens of thousands of dollars. This is amazing considering the sheer number of layoffs, crises, and more that people are facing. Their old ways of doing things are broken and they have to learn something new. Many people who thought they had retired are back working hard in business. They are the people who can use an Internet marketing plan to save their business and their livelihood.
By putting online marketing strategies to work, you are not only positively impacting your own business, you are improving your local economy. More money is being spent locally. You do not have to downside or do layoffs. In fact, your business will grow, despite the economy because you are reaching those who are looking to buy from businesses like yours. And that is what effective marketing is all about!
Online marketing has the potential for exponential profit. If you are not ready for your business to double or even more, stop reading now!
Statistics You Need to Know
The following statistics give you a glimpse of how people are using the Internet in their choice of businesses to frequent.
64% of U.S. Gross Domestic Product comes from local businesses.
4.2 million local small businesses are in the $500,000 to $20,000,000 range.
Over 2.6 billion local searches are performed monthly and that number grows more than 50% each year.
98% of searchers choose a business that is on page 1 of the results they get.
41% of clicks go to the #1 ranked site in a search.
12% of clicks go to the #2 ranked site in a search.
8.5% of clicks go to the #3 ranked site in a search.
These statistics prove the importance of prioritizing an online marketing strategy to get to the top of the search results for your keywords.
Making Changes to Online Marketing Methods
In order to make the changes to your online marketing methods there are a variety of things that you should know.
First the potential to grow your business using online marketing is phenomenal, no matter what industry you are in. You just need to cultivate it.
There are 5 extremely useful Internet marketing techniques that no one is doing. Learn them and put them into practice and you will outperform all your competitors quickly.
You need to achieve local online domination. It is a 4 step process. Focus on it to get the results you want.
There is a simple online marketing plan that you can follow to make sure you get all the tasks done in order to get to the top of the search results and get more new clients to your site.
Before implementing your new marketing plan, take the time to thoroughly analyze what you are already doing, so you know where to go from here and so you can have a baseline to measure against.
Make your tasks more reasonable by breaking them down. Start with the tasks that are one-time jobs, as they provide the foundation for your marketing plan, and you will have the pleasure of checking things off your list.
Only when the one-time tasks are completed should you begin the tasks that repeat. These are long-term commitments that will require monthly, weekly or even daily attention.
You should consider seeking out subcontractors for a portion of or the entire online marketing plan, for the sake of expediency and skill. There are many who can take on select tasks to facilitate the process for you.
You will conclude the implementation of your marketing plan with an increase in your business income.
5 Things No One Is Doing
While some people are using select Internet marketing techniques to drive traffic to their site, others are doing nothing at all, except hoping for the best. Using a wide variety of tried and true online marketing methods is the best way to see real results in your sales. A great place to start is by opting to implement the 5 things practically no one is doing. These things produce serious results and should be used by every business with an Internet presence. They include:
Blogging
Auto responders, building an email list and following up
Free reports
Online video
Basic SEO
Blogging creates a steady online presence that increases your chances of being at the top of search engine results for your keywords. Using a blog you can get content containing all your long-tailed keywords on the web. In addition, it allows you to build a following of customers and potential customers who are interested in what you share and who provide valuable feedback to you. This audience is ripe for being marketed to when your business is in a slump.
Auto responders are tools that allow you to build an email list and easily follow up with those on it. They are a set of standardized letters that are set up once and the necessary contact with each new individual who opts into your email list is taken care of automatically. Auto responders are an indispensable tool which saves time for you and actually does some of the lead nurturing that is absolutely essential in demand marketing.
Offering Free Reports to those who are interested is another of the underused tools in the online marketer’s toolbox. Everyone loves getting something for nothing. If you offer free reports on an area of interest to your potential customers you will establish yourself as an expert in that field and you will easily be able to get them to give their email or other contact information in exchange for a report that actually provides useful information.
Online Video is the video version of blogs and articles. You can reach numerous customers and potential customers with this new hot online marketing tool. You can create a simple video from text slides and voiceover or music or record a video of actual products and services in use. Be sure to place video both on your site and offsite for maximum effectiveness.
Basic SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is another tool that goes unused by those looking to promote their business online. It is simply making sure that your website is as appealing as possible to the spiders that crawl the Internet collecting information for search engines. This includes strategic use of keywords, backlinks and more.
Many businesses pay a lot of money to have someone create a fancy looking website for them, but it simply is not search engine optimized, so it will never get ranked in the search engine results. Without the strategic use of keywords, a significant number of links to their site and the removal of sluggish elements like Flash, a website will never achieve a top ranking.
By putting in place these 5 things that no one is doing you will be able to easily set your website apart from that of most of your competitors. Your search engine results will begin to quickly climb and you will find that more and more customers are “stumbling across” your website.
While it sounds rather ominous, online local domination is exactly what you want for your business in order to be a huge success. Online local domination means that you are the #1 authority online for your local market. You get that distinction by taking your business from hard-to-find online to literally being everywhere online. You will be in the top 10 of the local search, natural search and Pay-Per-Click campaigns. Your content will show up in top results and you will have more consumer reviews than any other local business in your market.
Once your business is consistently the most popular one found in any type of online search, and you are absolutely everywhere your local clients look, potential new clients quickly come to recognize that you are the authority in your field. They will want to do business with you because they will recognize you as the best. And who doesn’t want to do business with the best?
Online local domination is simply being the most readily found business of its type in a given local area. If your business is consistently at the top of local search results, normal search results and geo-targeted generic results, you have achieved online local domination. If your business is at the top of normal search results not including an indicator of area, it is even better.
You can make yourself the master of local results by understanding how searches work. You need to understand the different keywords that are used as individuals search for businesses of your type. This will help you to employ different online marketing techniques to help you effectively get to the top of the search engine results, exactly where you want to be.
Page 1 results are what you need and ultimately what matter most because 98% of people searching choose from those page 1 results, no matter what search engine they use. In fact, you want to be in the top 3 results for your keywords in order to get potential clients to your site. If you are not in those results, you are losing out on a lot of business.
Professional online marketers can get most businesses to #1 in the search results for local keywords in Google within one week because most local keywords have very little competition and are therefore ripe for someone with knowledge to come around.
4 Point Online Domination
Start the 4 point online domination process today in order to achieve online local domination. You can be everywhere you want to be online by using:
Local Business Results
Natural Search Results
PPC Results
Content Results
Local Search Results
One of the components of online domination is being prominent in the local business results. These are the map listings that are at the top above natural search results when you search a keyword in Google, Yahoo! and MSN/Bing. You must take the initiative to get listed there. Make sure your business comes up for a variety of keyword phrases, as well as for variations on your business name.
Natural Search Results
The natural search results are those organic results that are generated by search engine searches and are listed directly below the sponsored ads and the local search results. In addition to your actual website, other things can appear in the natural search results. For this reason you need to pay attention to the use of keywords in the following, because they are all commonly found ranked in natural search results:
Articles
Off-site blogs
Press releases
Social networking profiles
Social bookmarking profiles
Pay-Per-Click Results
Sponsored results or Pay-Per-Click results are instant exposure for your business. They appear at the very top of results, as well as to the right of results. A carefully written ad can give great results in converting site visitors to customers. Be sure to make a budget for PPC ads and stick to it, because it can get out of hand. It is the fastest way to get traffic to your site and is very valuable to online marketing strategies.
Content Results
Online domination comes when your content is in the top results of a search for your keywords. For example, if someone searches for a given keyword that you have used in your online marketing strategy and among the top 5 results they get are your business website ranked number 1, one of your videos ranked number 4 and one of your press releases ranked number 5, chances are that searcher will recognize you as the online authority. This means the potential client is very likely to choose your business over another to meet its needs.