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Everything Else

Is Your Small Business Using Online Local Marketing?

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By Allan Joseph

As a small business owner, if you do not take advantage of the Internet, then you are missing a huge opportunity to promoting your products and services. Using online local Internet marketing tactics can transform your small business marketing into BIG business marketing.

Nearly 50% of businesses have taken that first essential step to getting online: building a web site. That’s great but, unfortunately, just having that small piece of real estate on the web isn’t enough. It’s a start, so let’s build on that by reviewing some basic things to do with the web site first. The appearance and the content of your web site should be simple and valuable. Whoever visits your site should find it attractive and should be able to clearly understand your company’s benefits. Try having enough information on the site to answer the most frequent questions that your prospective customer might have. Even more, have information on the site that explains what they SHOULD know, but don’t know to ask about. Again, just putting up a site on the Internet isn’t going to be enough to bring more business, but make sure it is done right.

The key to using your web site to drive more traffic to your business, with phone calls, online purchases, or in-store visits, is capture the attention of people searching for your goods and services online. The number of people using search engines, such as Google, to find local businesses like yours is skyrocketing. Recent studies show that many more people are searching the web for local products and services than picking up the “handy” yellow page book. Google and its rivals have figured that out and they are investing heavily to designing their search engines to cater to that audience. Therefore, you need to do THREE THINGS right now to benefit from that trend.

1) First, construct your web site to conform with what the search engines want to show their users. Specifically, find out what the online searchers are typing into the search box and write your web site’s content to accommodate. That is often referred to in the Internet marketing community as on-page search engine optimization (or SEO).

2) Second, promote your web site in as many places as possible (online and offline). “As many places as possible” includes, but is not limited to, these activities: finding web pages online where a link to your web site can be placed; adding your business information to online local directories; adding your business information to social media sites; creating content in the form of articles, videos, images, reports, etc. and posting it on a variety of online content sharing web sites; and others! With a little creativity, you will find that there are more opportunities to reference your business and link back to your web site than you’ll ever be able to do.

3) Third, manage your reputation online. If you do nothing else, you should be monitoring what people online are saying about you, your business, your competitors, your suppliers, and even your customers (if you’re B2B). Many tools exist to monitor these conversations.

If you want to attract more customers, then take advantage of the Internet by making it easy for people to find your business when they are looking for it. Nowadays, people are using the Internet as their primary source for researching local businesses. If you understand that and implement these three steps, you will be in a great position to attract that audience. If not, your competitors will.

If you are a small business owner that understands the value of the Internet as described in this article, then you’re ready to take action.

Click this link to find out more about affordable local online marketing.

Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/

Branding

Have You Branded Yourself?

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by Barb Ross

Have you branded yourself? No, I am not referring to how the farmers brand their livestock. That would hurt. My skin in not that tough.

I am referring to, if someone googles your name, do you get lots of sites showing up, or are you a missing link?

Google Barb Ross and see what you get? It’s not a lot of stuff, but I was pleasantly surprised at the results.

To brand yourself, you need to always use the same name. Don’t make up a different nickname for each site you join. Try to keep it the same. If that’s not always possible, then try and keep your second name the same when you need to use it.

Then add a picture of yourself. Put your pictures on all the adds you use that allows it. Make up your own splash pages so you can have your picture showing.

Eventually people are going to see your picture and your name and say, “Wow!!! I have seen him/her somewhere else. I remember a site I joined that they were promoting that I really liked.”

People have to gain a trust in you and therefore will trust what you promote.

Make a blog about you. Put your picture on it. Talk about your family, your hobbies, let them know you are human. Not some robot just shooting out ads about any old site.

You can put some of your favorites on your blog. Just don’t fill it up with lots of business sites. It will loose it’s meaning of being about you.

Think about how it is when you are seeing sites. How do you feel when you start seeing the same person over and over again. Do they gain your interest?

Online marketing is a tricky business. We never really get to know the real person behind the ad. By branding yourself, you have given them some information on yourself that maybe others aren’t.

Barb Ross

About the Author

I am busy with quite a few different things these days. Getting so well known on the internet that people are asking for my help. I have found a forum that has really helped me get the word out and make money doing surveys at the same time. For more helpful hints, visit my blog.

Website Marketing

How to Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

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by Reginald Liggins

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined as the process of adjusting web sites and pages to gain higher placement in search engine results. However, ranking in itself does not guarantee profits, you need the search engine to send targeted prospective visitors to your website for that.. So why are the Search Engines so vital? Well, there are more than 162 million registered websites on the web. There are basically three ways that people can arrive at your site: using search engines, clicking on a link from another website, or by knowing your URL (uniform resource locator) and typing that in web browser. Almost half of all internet users use search engines on a typical day online. A site that does not appear on the first page of search results might as well be invisible. If your site is invisible, you will not get any visitors, nor make any sales.

There are three search engines that you need to be concerned about: Google accounts for about 62% of all searches, Yahoo about 21%, MSN (Bing) about 9%. That said, you would be wise to ignore any messages promising submission to hundreds or thousands of search engines. As you can see the big 3 account for over 90 percent of all searches. Likewise, you shouldn’t give any credence to any ads promising a #1 search engine rankings, because no legitimate company can promise you that. It has been said, that in offline marketing, there is no elevator to success, everyone must take the stairs. The same is true in online marketing. In order to achieve any significant success online, you will have to invest some time, or money, or both. But you will definitely invest something. Despite all of the promises to the contrary, there is no free lunch on the internet.

There are a couple of things you can do to gain higher placement in the search engines. One thing you can do is construct a search engine friendly site that allows the search engine to spider or crawl it easily. This includes having a search-engine friendly URLs constructed with different keywords on different pages. You can also create linkable footers on every page. Also creating a site index will make crawling the site easier for the search engines. But what is really going to matter to search engines is the content of your site.

Specifically, the search engines are concerned about relevancy, link popularity, and unique original content. Google, for one, pays a lot of attention to site relevance in its search results. Relevance is about making your site a useful resource for information instead of “keyword stuffing” and other tricks. So if someone entered a certain search phrase and landed on your site, would they be satisfied with what they found? So relevance tells us if your site does a good job meeting the user’s information needs. Sometimes how relevant a site is can be determined by its link popularity. That is the number of associated sites linking in to your website. And of course, one of the things that’s gonna affect your link popularity is the presence of unique, original content. Because of all of the competition on the web, you should be creating content for your site on a regular basis, some even say daily. If your site is not being updated, the search engines will assume that there is nothing new on your site, so why send somebody there?

There are quite a number of content marketing strategies, like article and video marketing, that you can employ. Likewise, there are severalInbound Link Campaigns that you can use to raise your link popularity. Still you will see a lot of short-cuts out there, like automatic content generators and others. Because people are always looking to beat the system, search engines like Google often change the rules. Sometimes, if Google feels like you are trying to cheat, or if your site lacks relevance they may reduce your Page Rank or take other punitive actions against you and your site. But if you just buckle down and do the work, create unique and relevant content on a consistent basis; then your relationship with the search engines should be a rewarding one.

About the Author

I hope that you enjoyed reading “How to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings“.

Reginald Liggins is an internet marketing trainer and coach. The automated marketing system that Reginald uses to explode his business opportunities as well as generate multiple income streams can be found at “MyLeadSystemPro”

Reginald can be reached at reggie@superbodymagic.com