The Click Depot Blog

Archive for the ‘Local Search Marketing’ Category

The way business works changes rapidly everyday through new advances in technology. The Internet has made business transactions easier for both producer and consumer in today’s economy. Increasing the site traffic for your website as well as informing potential customers about what your business has to offer is very important. Listing your business on map websites is very important for attracting customers who are quickly searching for a product or service by location. By listing your business on a map site customers will not only be instantly informed of it when searching but also be aware of its location. Listing your business on map website will help you spread knowledge of your business an thus boost commerce for your company.

Specialized searches in search engines are becoming a growing way for businesses to inform the customers of their services and allow priority viewing when a subject is typed into a search engine. Listing your business by location on a map website allows for local customers or even confused tourists to be aware of what business are in their area. It is a great and simple solution to Internet marketing. Internet usage is becoming more and more normal and an everyday thing for citizens and consumers. Most Americans use the Internet to find businesses and services in their area. In fact, businesses of all sizes and types can benefit from local Internet marketing to attract new customers in the area.

Targeted Internet marketing, especially for local customers is an easy and effective way to gain new business. Prioritizing your company on map websites allows you to stay ahead of the competition. It is also convenient for local consumers to be able to readily access what products and services are available nearest to them. Gaining customers through Internet marketing is one of the largest sectors for increasing sales and business. The more traffic on your company’s website chances are the more customers are going to be taking part in what your business has to offer.

Internet marketing is an easy solution to spreading knowledge of your business. But why not take it one step further with prioritized, targeted marketing that will really set your business apart from the competition. Maximizing your business’s reputation can be as simple as posting your company’s name first in local searches on map websites. Increasing the chances of your company showing up on a search will boost website traffic and overall increase amount of business done by your company. Local customers are always the most important whether your business is small, large, privately or publicly owned. Allowing for your business to show up first on searches is convenient for local customers and will also increase business transactions.

Every business wants to get their name out there to the public. Whether they spread their name via tv commercials, local advertisements in the newspaper, or through internet marketing, every industry has the same goal: to be known. There are some marketing methods, however, that are more effective than others. Putting your company through a local business submission could be the answer to successfully getting your name to everyone’s front door.

For those are not accustomed with the newfound service, a business submission is the process of submitting your company’s name and information to all the popular online sources. That may include top sites like HotFrog, CitySearch, WhitePages, Yelp, Yahoo! Local, and more. This process is advantageous to all businesses old or new. Neglected or new websites will especially benefit from this service.

A local business submission is especially important for local and niche markets. Above and beyond the normal business submitting process, a local submission is also available to business owners. This allows companies to not only be integrated in the larger span of searches, but also the city specific searches. For example, Yahoo! Local makes it possible for your local hair salon to be listed in your specific area. Many times a local business directory can be a company’s most valuable listing.

Something you want to be looking for is hiring a company that provides natural and manual submissions. Then you can be certain you are getting the quality you are looking for. Nobody likes spam, and the last thing you want is an auto-submitted service that does not take the time to take the needs of your business seriously. This can be compared to an automated phone service versus speaking to an actual customer service representative. Isn’t always better to have a human dealing with your needs and wants instead of an automated service? Remember, quality over quantity is important when it comes to all Internet marketing services.

If you are looking to get the most of your business submission, it is smart to have a top SEO company do the job. Then you can be confident you are not only receiving quantity, but you are getting the quality post your company deserves.

Whether you are just getting on your feet as a small business or you simply believe that your business could be better, it’s time for you to consider what you need to know about closed loop marketing. Closed loop marketing is getting a lot of attention right now, but unless you take a moment to consider what you can do to get the most out of it, it is one more marketing trend that might go right over your head. The more you learn about this concept however, the more that you will realize that it is perfect for the state of industry and economy that we are currently in. What is closed loop marketing and what can you do to make sure that you are using it well?

The first thing that you need to be aware of is of the idea that closed loop marketing is going to be very much a product of your customer’s responses and behavior. You are going to be taking the answers provided by the customers who have spent money on you in the past and you are going to be tailoring your business to them. Take a moment to consider what you can do when you are looking to move forward in this vein. You may feel as though it has suddenly restricted you, but the truth of the matter is that you are looking at making sure that you can keep the customers that you have and to attract more like them.

One of the biggest advantages that you have to work with when you are looking at closed loop marketing is that it is simple, straightforward and most of all, inexpensive to put up. All you need to do is to create a list of questions that you want answered about your product and to send it out among your customers. Remember that you should also consider how to reward your customers for responding to you, whether it is with a personally worded email or even a discount for further goods that they might be interested in. There is a lot of good information that you can pull from this crowd; remember that it is not about getting new, radically different clients, but getting a bigger client base that is very much like the one that you have now.

The big thing that you have to remember when you are looking at closed loop marketing is that there are many different ways to do it. Email is one major tool but it is far from the only one. Also remember that you should monitor your traffic on your sites. This is a general method to get information, but it can be a good one as well. Also remember that you should look into making sure that your customers have many ways to respond to you as you can. The more information that you get the better.

There are many ways to look into improving your business, but you cannot go wrong with pleasing the customers that you already have. This is a great way to get the results that you are after, so make sure that you look into more information about closed loop marketing and what it can mean for you.

Image Courtesy : http://www.patrickfetterman.com/2007_07_10_archive.html

OK, you have a hundred bucks and want to get the biggest online marketing bang. What should you do? Unfortunately, here goes the answer that you did not want to hear - it depends. And here’s why.

Depending on what site you have and who your target audience is, this answer is going to be different. So let’s say you are Joe The Plumber in Raleigh, North Carolina. And say you have a website that does not get any sales for you at present. Then, fortunately, you don’t even need $100, you just need your own time to get started.

Go to maps.google.com, maps.live.com and claim your business. Fill out as much information as possible on your profile and then send your business’s link in Google Maps to each customer that you interact with, requesting a review. You might even want to include it in your email signature. Soon, you’ll find people that search the internet for plumbers calling you. $100 can buy you this as well. Just call any good small-medium online marketing company and they can do this for you. Or just hire a college student and most of them will know how to get that done. Once you are done with that, seriously, consider revamping your website and getting a nice-looking, fast-loading, effective, simple website. That’s easier said than done, but is guaranteed to take your business to the next level. Once you have that website, call the marketing company and ask them to optimize your website for Google. You are on your way to online fame.

Now, if you are a small business that already has a useful good useful website, then the best use of $100/month is to buy a listing with YellowPages.com or even better, a few niche directory in your domain that get a lot of hits. Some other generic sites are superpages.com, infousa.com, Etc. A good way to find how many visitors these sites get is by going ot compete.com and comparing such sites. Listings in good directories are useful in 3 ways. First, people visit these sites directly to search for businesses. Secondly, these sites often have print publications and you can buy space on that as part of the overall contract. Finally, the category pages on these sites often rank well on Google and other search engines. That’s possibly the maximum that you can get from $100 in this situation.

Finally, if you are a small business that’s already popular and on Yellow pages and directories, then the best use of $100 is possibly to get a good online marketing company to optimize your website for keywords that your potential visitors are searching for. This is more like a $100-$500 per month kind of expense, but if they build a sufficient number of quality links pointing to your website, your site will rank well on Google driving targeted traffic to the site. This is an ongoing cost, but also guarantees a good healthy supply of NEW ongoing leads. If you’ve been in business you know that there is always a cost for acquiring a new customer. Doing is this way is possibly the most cost efficient if done correctly.

Hope these tips will help you take your small business to the next level.

We see websites all over the place that sell something or the other. Anything that’s available in a real world store (well, almost) and more (digital assets) are available online. If making money from Ecommerce or other ways online sounds thrilling to you, then you might have taken a few minutes to search on Google for phases such as “make money online” or “online website business” or “sell shoes online”. Try any of these searches and you’ll find thousands of websites and programs that claim that making money or selling online is the easiest thing to do. Many will even show you pictures of their checks and some will go as far as giving you a 110% money back guarantee to buy into their money-making idea. So, given all that, here’s the million dollar question - Are all of them really making money?

Our experience (and several studies, btw) show that it’s not as easy as it seems. Take Ecommerce sites for an example.

Ecommerce websites: Putting up a website with valid products might not be an easy task by itself but if you are tech-savvy or know someone who is, that part can be done. Which is why you see thousands of sites selling stuff. Are they making money? We know for a fact that many aren’t. We get approached by Online store owners that have a site that does ZERO sales after months of promotions. It truly is not easy to sell online. On the other hand, we have promoted many sites that do thousands of dollars in sales every day. What separates the profitable ones from the others is mainly 2 things.

a. Smart Online Market Research: There are several tools that help you analyze what people are searching for. Google Trends, Google Keyword Tool, Ebay Keyword Analyzers such as TeraPeak, and many more. Analyzing online consumer behavior is key to selecting a product that has a chance of succeeding.

b. Product differentiation: Choosing a product that differentiates itself from the competition is a time-tested marketing concept for success. It applies online even more so. Online, why would someone buy from maryselectronics.com when the exact same item is available, often cheaper, at amazon.com? On the other hand, if you were maryspinkelectronics.com, now you stand out and may be you’ll have an audience that is looking for your products.

c. Intelligent Marketing: Offline, location is critical. If you have a store on a busy intersection, you will probably find people stop by without any marketing. Online, there is no such thing. There are over 3 trillion web pages and yours is just one of them. Promoting your site at the right places and targeting the right keywords for search optimization are ESSENTIAL.

Keeping these three principles are likely to ensure a much better chance for success for your website or online store. Now go online and look at stores out there. How many of these do you think are doing all three? You willl be surprised - not even one out of 10. There are too many domains out there that don’t have a site on it. There are many sites that have no visitors and many visited sites that don’t make any money. It’s not an easy thing, which is why if you really think you have a good product to offer online, consult with a good online marketing company to help you sell it. Making money online is possible and thrilling, but that does not make it easy.

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.