Thursday, March 3, 2011

Techniques to Increase Your Business’s Profits


 
Whether you have suffered a downturn in your business, have never built it to the level you are aiming for or if you are just starting out, your goal needs to be using online marketing strategies to increase your profits. There are four basic ways to improve profits:
  1. Increase customers
    1. Increase traffic to increase customers
    2. Add to product offerings to make them more compelling
    3. Use PPC, SEO, local business results, article marketing, etc.
  2. Increase number of transactions per customer
    1. Build mailing list
    2. Increase customer communications through autoresponders, newsletters, broadcast messages
    3. Offer them upsell opportunities—pitch something seasonal
    4. Send out reminders for services and specials
  3. Increase the average dollar amount per transaction
    1. Offer bundle packages and upgrades, strong reasons to purchase

  4. Decrease costs, finding free traffic, lowering cost per click
    1. Increasing conversions, decreases costs.
    2. Offer a bonus, change a headline, offer a free consultation.
    3. Even converting from 1% to 2% is a 100% improvement and cuts costs for buying traffic in half—pure profit!
By putting an online marketing plan in place and following through with it, you can achieve all of these goals. You can easily improve your profits through the strategic use of online marketing techniques that will increase customers, increase the number of transactions per customer, increase the average dollar amount per transaction and decrease costs while finding free traffic which leads to a lower cost per click.
Take the time today to investigate if your website is doing all it can to attract new clients for you. If not, get started putting the simple online marketing plan into place on your own or with the help of a professional.
Get started now on your online marketing plan to rescue your business. Good luck!



Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Online Marketing for Local Business Conclusion







Your online marketing strategy is based on getting more potential customers to your site and converting them into paying customers. It really is that simple. Through using a wide variety of techniques you can pinpoint those customers and make sure that they find your business when they search online for products or services that you provide. When they find your website a variety of other online marketing tools will be waiting to convert them to buying customers.

In order to do this effectively, most of your focus will be on two major aspects of your marketing plan: using keywords in all online content and creating as many links as possible to your website. The more backlinks you have, the better your site will place in search engine results and the more people will find your website. The more effectively you use keywords, the more search engine friendly your content is and therefore more likely to be ranked.

The more visitors you get to your website will result in more new customers for you. New customers mean an increase in sales and profit just like we said when we talked about the potential for exponential growth with online marketing for your business.


Techniques to Increase Your Business’s Profits 

Whether you have suffered a downturn in your business, have never built it to the level you are aiming for or if you are just starting out, your goal needs to be using online marketing strategies to increase your profits. There are four basic ways to improve profits:
  1. Increase customers
    1. Increase traffic to increase customers
    2. Add to product offerings to make them more compelling
    3. Use PPC, SEO, local business results, article marketing, etc.
  2. Increase number of transactions per customer
    1. Build mailing list
    2. Increase customer communications through autoresponders, newsletters, broadcast messages
    3. Offer them upsell opportunities—pitch something seasonal
    4. Send out reminders for services and specials
  3. Increase the average dollar amount per transaction
    1. Offer bundle packages and upgrades, strong reasons to purchase

  4. Decrease costs, finding free traffic, lowering cost per click
    1. Increasing conversions, decreases costs.
    2. Offer a bonus, change a headline, offer a free consultation.
    3. Even converting from 1% to 2% is a 100% improvement and cuts costs for buying traffic in half—pure profit!
By putting an online marketing plan in place and following through with it, you can achieve all of these goals. You can easily improve your profits through the strategic use of online marketing techniques that will increase customers, increase the number of transactions per customer, increase the average dollar amount per transaction and decrease costs while finding free traffic which leads to a lower cost per click.
Take the time today to investigate if your website is doing all it can to attract new clients for you. If not, get started putting the simple online marketing plan into place on your own or with the help of a professional.
Get started now on your online marketing plan to rescue your business. Good luck!


Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Outsourcing: The Answer to Easy Implementation




Online marketing like any marketing is multi-faceted and requires a great amount of work and a hefty learning curve for those who have never done it before. Today’s marketing requires a lot more maintenance than previously. Even just monitoring your Web 2.0 applications that should be checked daily can eat up precious time in your schedule.


It’s All About Time


By outsourcing your online local marketing, you can make sure that your online marketing is done by those who are skilled in the field. You can conserve your own time to spend on the tasks in your company that rely on you. In addition the implementation of your marketing changes that are necessary to effect a change in your sales will get done much more quickly than if you had to learn how to do it and then do it yourself.

Most business owners are spending 80+ hours weekly in their business, doing the things that are necessary to be successful. These people are masters of their domains and know what they are doing in their field of expertise. However, taking extraordinary amounts of time to learn and master Internet marketing does not always make sense. What does make sense is for them to continue doing the things they know how to do well and let a master in Internet marketing take care of that side of things for them. That is time and resources well spent.

Time is a crucial factor when you think about marketing your business. With the help of a professional Internet marketer, your business could easily rank #1 in Google searches for local keywords in only 1 week. If you were to do it yourself, where would you be in the process of implementing your online marketing plan? Would you still be learning, procrastinating or would you actually have things done? Do you have the time to devote to this?

Internet marketers can take care of things such as:

  • Site design
  • Landing pages for PPC campaigns
  • Video creation (slide show style)
  • Video marketing
  • Article marketing
  • Directory submissions
  • SEO
  • Backlink generation
  • PPC campaign management
  • Social Networking setup
  • Email marketing setup
  • General marketing consultant

In each of these categories there are so many more tasks that must be mastered before implementing them effectively on your website. By hiring a professional, all aspects can be taken care of quickly and easily.

Site design: This can be much more than just creating a site from scratch. Internet marketers can also do any of the following:
  • Site cleanup
  • Meta tag cleanup
  • Total redesign
  • Set up contact forms
  • Add audio
  • Add video

Landing pages for PPC: Internet marketers can help you set up a landing page that:
  • Has proper keyword density
  • Has an opt-in or capture page for collecting emails to be used later

Content creation: There is a wide range of services an Internet marketer can handle:
  • Website content
  • Blog writing
  • Article writing
  • Email messages
  • Free giveaway reports
  • Capture page writing
  • Press release writing

Video creation: This can be done in the form of slide show or even live action. Here they can create videos for:
  • Your website
  • Capture pages
  • Off-site properties
  • Video marketing
Video Marketing: Just what it sounds like, this is marketing with video. This can be done by:
  • Submitting to video sharing sites
  • Repurpose for multiple keywords and submit to other sites
  • Submit to external blogs

http://www.localonlinemktg.com/

Friday, February 25, 2011

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 autoresponder?
-          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. 

Prior to Putting Your Online Marketing Plan in Place








Before you begin putting your new online marketing plan in place, you should analyze what exactly you have done to date in terms of your website and online marketing and therefore what is most pressing. You cannot achieve everything at once, so by being thorough about it, you can effectively spot where best to begin. Evaluate your current status so you get a clear up-to-date picture of where you are starting from, where you want to go and what must be done to get there.

Analyze Your Overall Online Marketing Plan


Ask yourself the following questions about your current online marketing:
  • How do you market your company?
  • How do you promote your web presence already?
  • Do you use Pay-Per-Click ads?
  • How much do you spend on those ads? Are they working?
  • How many unique visitors does your site get per month?
  • What type of training does your sales team undergo?
  • Why do you want to put an online marketing plan in place?
  • What is the value of your average sale?
  • Are you capable of exponential growth?
  • What percentage of your revenues comes from leads generated by the Internet?
  • How many sales / leads do you get per month from your website?
  • What traffic techniques do you currently use to drive traffic to your website?
  • How much are you currently spending each month to get that traffic?
  • What is the average revenue per sale?
  • What is the average profit per sale?
  • On average, how often does a customer buy from you?
  • Approximately how many current customers do you have?
  • Approximately how many customers have ever bought from you?
  • Do you periodically touch base with them? If so how often? How?
At the end of these questions, you should have a good report card on the overall health of your Internet marketing plan as it now is for your business. The answers to the above questions will let you know if it is working or not. It also starts to uncover some of the potential for growth that your business has!