Monday, March 7, 2011

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
  • Autoresponders, 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.

Autoresponders 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. Autoresponders 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. 



Friday, March 4, 2011

Audio Marketing



By doing audio marketing you can more easily capture the attention of visitors to a site and get them involved in the content you are delivering. In fact, every business owner should incorporate audio marketing both onsite and offsite into their marketing plan. It is much more memorable than text and keeps visitors on a website longer than they would stay otherwise, because audio is more of a personable approach.

You can use audio to:
-          introduce your products or services
-          present the owner of the business
-          give consumer tips
-          give instructions
-          present testimonials
-          repurpose radio commercials
-          read blog posts or expert articles and
-          give a call to action.

In fact audio testimonials are a much more effective way of building trust with potential clients.

Offsite audio can be used to drive traffic to your website and to help with the personal branding of your business. It helps the owner appear to be a true expert in the field. Offsite audio also provides backlinks to your site and counts as content to help your site’s ranking in the search engines.

Opt to put offsite audio on podcasts, online radio shows or other forms of distribution. You might also want to record a message with expert tips and link it back to your site, to promote yourself as an expert.

Create a title starting with your chosen keyword phrase when you submit your audio to different sites. Use the same keyword in the segment description. You can also drive traffic to your audio content with backlinks using various online marketing techniques. There are many tools that will help you facilitate the use of audio in your online marketing. 



http://www.localonlinemktg.com/ 

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/