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Archive for the ‘Local Search Marketing’ Category

Yelp.com is all over the place these days. They have a community in just about every major city in the country, especially the west coast. It started at San Francisco, which is undoubtedly the hub for Internet-related innovation. It must be a fun life out there in SFO for people that are Internet savvy. So what’s so great about this site? Here’s some statistics on the site that we dug up from a few different sites.

Traffic

As you can see, there are in the same league as top sites such as digg.com and del.icio.us, which are huge social bookmarking sites. The difference though is that people visit social bookmarking sites more for fun than for real information. On the other hand, Yelp is a reviews site that people go to look for information on businesses and things to do in places. If you are a small business, you should be worrying about getting yourself placed on local search results and sites such as Yelp.com should be on your agenda for cheap marketing tactics.

Here’s more statistics about this site:

Those are some amazing numbers that most sites can only dream of. And the best part? The owners of the site don’t spend a dime on marketing the site (alright, may be that’s an exaggeration,  but you get it). All content on the site is user generated. And as you know, content is king in the Internet world. So guess what that means? The site will grow exponentially as more users take to it and the value keeps going up, all thanks to the great site features that its visitors love.

The lesson learned from this is not anything new, but a reinforcement of the idea that building a community is THE best way to make a website successful. Create a a community around your site using features such as blogs, forums, polls, rewards programs, give-aways, Reviews, Etc. Find creative ways to engage your visitors to interact and add content to your site. And that process can be fun too. It’s an amazing feeling to see a community grow, just like it is to see your business grow. And more often than not, the former can lead to the latter as well.

Don’t wait. Local search and online marketing can be your competitive edge.

Ever wondered how to attain higher local search engine rankings? Here are a few SEO tips to strengthen organic search engine placement. Although the competition can be fierce from local businesses, local search engine optimization is far less convoluted by comparison to national search engine placement.

Creating a truly effective marketing campaign online takes a lot of work that consumes a great deal of time for small business owner. Simply having a website will be suitable to many, but this is hardly relevant if it is poorly designed, hard to use, or bland. The process starts with having a website but never truly ends. Maintaining the site, targeting an audience, tracking statistics of visitors and other factors has to be employed to grow your business in the information age.

What matters is that your website has organic visibility across multiple search engines when searches are conducted for your most prized keywords and key phrases. Ranking above the fold, the top 10 positions for your most relevant keywords is important, particularly locally which can facilitate calls or walk in traffic. Local optimization services should be tailored to meet the requirements of all major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN to achieve search engine visibility.

Local Internet marketing is a cost-effective advertising method for your online business. Local search results through local marketing campaigns can yield qualified loyal repeat local business for a fraction of the cost of television, print or radio advertising. If you haven’t considered local search engine optimization as a viable alternative, your business could be missing dozens of calls, emails or leads every day. Local search marketing can secure organic rankings top 10 for your website for keywords related to your city or state.

Local SEO is one of the most effective forms of internet marketing and online advertising. Optimizing your site for local terms such as your city, state, surrounding county or suburbs not only produces a steady flow of regional business for your company, but brings more revenue into your community.

The more qualified visitors that frequent your site, the more likely you are to sell your product or services. However, all traffic is not created equal. Although a number of regional websites are available for local marketing such as craigslist.org, Topix, the Yellow Pages, Google, Yahoo just to name a few, unless there is a common thread that unifies your marketing message, the optimal keywords used for positioning and offer you are promoting, you may as well be shouting your offer from rooftops to random passerby’s.

The long-term effectiveness of online advertising is more complex and requires a bigger time investment than most choose to accept. Setting up a campaign is the easiest part, but because it’s so easy, everyone does it. Reviewing, tracking, testing and changing require not only proper setup and analysis, but also regular follow-up modifications. All of this becomes a fairly technical undertaking, but because it is hard, not many are willing to dedicate the extra effort even if it means sacrificing income and future clients.

To be honest, if you value your time and money, you probably want to find an expert to help you with all the fine-tuning and analysis. By working with an expert, you’ll virtually guarantee that your resources will be used with high-efficiency and will attain results that you could do on your own after a great deal of frustration and many hours later. Once you have an effective website and strong online marketing campaign, you won’t have to chase customers; the customers will come to you.

The big news this weekend seems to be the insider news leak about the possible launch of Google Android on Tmobile handset in September. This source reported a nice story about Google Android.

OK, now, why is that important to you? Here’s why:

1. 3G is just getting to become a huge phenomenon in the US. This is the new generation wireless communication protocol that will make sharing videos and large data files much easier. This has the potential to explode cell phone usage for Internet access. The iPhone already started this trend in a big way earlier this year. Google Android will make it bigger. Other countries in Asia (Japan) and Europe are already into this stuff and US lags behind. But we have the largest volume of consumers and the most amount of online spending and Internet users. If 3G takes off in the US, things can change for marketing firms very quickly.

2. Today, the big change seems to be people moving from using the Yellow Pages to using http://maps.google.com to find businesses. This shift was quite big. People had to learn the use of computers and know the ways of the Internet. Even then, this happened in less than a decade. People already use cell phones and when the same applications such as Google Maps and Google Android will be available on the cell phone, people will transfer much quicker to using cell phones instead of going to their PC’s as much.

3. You can stay ahead of the curve in the following ways.

A. If you have a budget for marketing that you can spend on mobile marketing, then talk to a mobile marketing firm. They can get your ads and brandname on multiple mobile applications.

B. Get yourself listed on Google Maps and other online mapping applications such as Yahoo Maps. MapQuest.com and others. These are getting used on the mobile phone in a big way already.

C. Add a “Send me an SMS” feature on your website. Encourage your website visitors to contact you via sms on your cell phone. http://smseverywhere.com/webmasters.htm. Now, this will have to be done with caution. You might have to keep a separate cell phone line for this purpose alone. I haven’t seen too many people try this but I can see it happening in the near future. Of course, 5-10 years from now, everyone will have cell phones than can handle email very well and sms will slowly become almost extinct or at least slow down in usage. Until then, this might be a good idea to grab the attention of your visitors. Who is more likely to contact you? Someone that just sees a regular contact us form on your website or someone that sees a “conctact me via sms” box and knows that you will receive his message immediately and may even respond to it in the next 30 seconds via sms to his cell phone?

There are many more ways, but I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. In marketing, as in business, staying ahead of the curve is important. Don’t do it after everyone else is doing it. Read the signs and get in early.

If you have a company with more than 20 customers and you don’t have an email list yet, you are missing out on the most powerful marketing strategy in the planet. Earlier, we wrote about 3 steps to establish your online presence and social marketing ideas for your small business. Building an email list comes even higher than anything we talked about in those articles.

Despite using email and knowing about the benefits of this technique, many business users choose to ignore it, perhaps due to the lack of time. But here’s why you need to jump into this NOW.

1. People hate spam. Everyone I know already gets more email than they can handle. And it’s only going to get worse. However, there are several niches where people still don’t get the info they need easily. You can enter their address books now and slowly and steadly, using quality articles and newsletters that you send them, build their confidence and the results (more sales) will pay off. If you wait, chances are that someone else (your competitor) will start sending them emails and then when you send yours later, yours is spam. Got the idea?

2. Building a reliable email list takes time: I know a person who has a list of 30000+ people. Every time he feels like making some money, he simply sends the list an email and talks about a cool product with an affiliate link. and there you go, a few hundred dollars almost instantly. But it took him several years to get there and he spent a lot of money trying to advertise his site via search engine optimization to get there. But it pays off now. If you start today, within a year, your list could have a couple of hundred people (at least, even if you don’t do it aggressively).

The best way to start building your list is to GIVE SOMETHING AWAY for free on your website. People love free stuff. Give away a free product sample, discount on a product on your website, a free cruise, a free informational newsletter (though that is losing its charm due to spam), even a free wallpaper or a video that you created. Trust me, people will take it. Of course, the more useful and relevant the freebie is to your visitors, the higher the signup rate usually. And in exchange, you sign them up with their Name and Email. People often always sign up thinking they will unsubscribe from your list once they have the freebie but research shows that if your freebie was good and the following emails are useful, a majority actually stay and become a loyal member of your email list.

There are some very good email list management software out there. My favorites are Aweber and Mailchimp

Any business owner knows how important marketing is. Most spend tons of money on advertising on print media, yellow pages, online yellow pages, Etc. I am amazed that this trend continues to this day. It is a fact that people that used to use Yellow Pages are rapidly beginning to use the Internet as a way of finding businesses. Unless your target audience is people aged 50+, you are likely placing your bet on the wrong cards.

Online marketing is easy, inexpensive and rapid. None of these can be said about off-line techniques. Here are five ways that you can market your business online yourself without spending a dime. And no, I am not going to tell you things that you already know, such as creating your website and adding a blog to it, and so on. Not even standard local marketing techniques such as the ones we discussed 3 ways to establish your online presence. In facrt, what I am going to tell you does not even require you to have your own website. I am talking about some creative techniques that a lot of people are not looking at right now. In a previous post about The best part, it can actually be fun to engage in these kinds of “social marketing” efforts.

Create a facebook ad page for your busienss: WAKE UP! Social networking is the fastest growing online segment. Even faster than search, faster than Google and MSN put together. Ten year old kids and Seventy-five year old grandmas alike are taking to this. So how can you benefit from it? Simple. Create a profile at http://www.facebook.com/ads. It takes 10 minutes or less and it’s drop dead easy. If you can handle email, you can handle facebook. The process of creating the account includes importing your contacts from your address book on Yahoo, Gmail, AOL or any such email account that you may be using. Once that is done, just add pictures, text, etc. to your account.

Every time you add anything to your account (a new picture, a video, additional profile info, news about your life, etc.), your friends get notified. OK, so that sounds like a great personal networking tool. I know you are thinking - Alright, but how can that benefit my business? Well, business networking starts with friends. You can also invite your customers to join your ‘friends’ list on your business profile. Each time you add something, they get a notification on their facebook account about it. This might all seem useless to you, but when you consider that over 50 million users use Facebook, this starts to make sense. Your customers will have facebook pages soon, if not already. You can appear tech-savvy and cool and at the same time connect with your customers and contacts.

The more time you spend on your facebook ad updating stuff, the more you remind your customers and contacts about your business. You will be surprised the kind of wonders a cool reminder service such as this can work. I know a local restaurant owner that tried this with myspace and his results are phenomenal. I suggested facebook because they are growing faster than myspace, have better features and actually allow businesses to create ad pages.

Don’t just leave this page - go create your ad page NOW - http://www.facebook.com/ads and add their toolbars to your website or blog.

If you have an online or offline business that has never used the Internet for marketing on a large scale, there are a lof of things you can do to start on that journey TODAY, NOW, not later, not next week. By the time you end reading this short post, you will have the knowldge to start promoting yourself online.

STEP 1: Google Local/Maps: Go to http://www.maps.google.com and search for your business in your location. If you find that your business is already listed, great; if not, create one. You simply need to log in using your google/gmail account (create one in 2 minutes if you don’t have one) and complete the entire profile. This helps in a big way. A lot of people search Google or Google Local to look for businesses and the information that you enter is what gets searched. Make sure that you enter all your information in detail and upload pictures if possible.

STEP 2: Reviews: Send email to 10-25 friends/customers and ask them to write a review on Google against your business. This will help your business rise to the top of the listings. Here you go, you have a secret from us now!

STEP 3: Local Directories: Think about what your potential customers would search on the net to find your business. For instance, for a florist in Raliegh, it would be “Raleigh Florist directory” or “Raleigh Red Roses directory” or something similar. Search for those terms and observe the results. Usually, there should be at least a few listings of sites that you can submit your business too. These are called diretory sites and are like free Yellow Pages. You can list your business there and increase your brand’s prensence on the ‘Net.

After you are done with these steps, now that your business is online, the next step is to consult with a web designer or a Raleigh Internet Marketing firm to get a simple website. You should be able to get a basic one for about $500-$700. Make sure that the website is developed to be friendly to the Search Engines. You can find more information about this at http://www.theclickdepot.com