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In today’s show, I talk about some social media and mobile statistics, share tons of Google+ and Twitter updates, and point you to some cool new resources.
The point of this show is to provide short, actionable news bites to keep you up to date in the ever changing IM world.
Show Links:
Is it any surprise that Cyber Monday outperformed Black Friday? If you use the Internet, you know that the majority of today’s shoppers prefer the Internet and respond to businesses that have an Internet presence. The best news is that local businesses can establish a presence on the Web. Then, the business can direct their message to a targeted and local marketplace. For local businesses, effective Internet marketing strategies can level the playing field.
Your online presence is important. For every business that wants to attract new consumers, make special offers or display products or services, local online marketing is the most effective marketing tool in the branding war chest.
Some businesses mistakenly think the Internet marketing is for national enterprises. In fact, Internet marketing of a local business is ideal. Big players like Google, Bing and Yahoo are in the game and are waiting to help.
Bing realized that local businesses need a venue to promote their business to the surrounding area. Earlier this year, Bing launched its stellar Bing Business Portal, a popular marketing program for local businesses. Google and Yahoo have similar programs to target specific localities.
You may have noticed that the printed word is moving from newspapers to the Internet. Local newspapers were always regarded as the popular venue for local advertising. That has changed.
While the circulation of local newspapers may be down, their online presence is vast. Many of us actually prefer to visit the online newspaper. Many consumers even download the daily paper to their Kindle. This is a market that no business can afford to ignore.
One of the great advantages of Internet marketing is that the local business can reconfigure a special offering as often as desired. This flexibility does not exist in any other area of marketing.
In these tight economical times, businesses must get maximum exposure at minimal cost. Targeted online marketing can drive business to the business website or to the brick and mortar location. Your local business can be submitted to hundreds of local search engines. The more the merrier.
Internet marketing will increase your visibility, have those phones ringing with new customers and treat your customers to easily accessed information about goods and services. If you have a website or a blog, the next step should be to list you business and URL with the big Search Engines.
While you are registering spend a few minutes discovering their platforms for local businesses. You will be surprised. In a way, listing your business with these search engines is like listing it in the Yellow pages at a mere fraction of the cost.
In posting content to your site, make sure the content is Search Engine Optimized (SEO). This will help gain recognition and elevate you local business to the top of the local business directory.
Once the business is listed, it is time to market your business and your website. SEO is a valuable resource that can drive customers to your business. Without this effort, your website can sit out there in never-never-land for eternity. Your SEO marketing efforts will be rewarded.
The best practice is to design an Internet marketing strategy that targets the demographic persona of your typical customer. For local businesses, demographics, including location, are extremely important.
Once your market has been developed, the big search engines can offer your business real, viable solutions.
One popular way to establish an online presence for local consumers is to advertise with local online newspapers. Of course you will want to include a link to your site or contact information for the business. Remember, that consumers who read the online newspaper generally use the Internet for purchases, research and a host of other functions. The point being that to be a serious business in the local marketplace, you need a strong local online presence.
If a local business has a site that is inactive and is not supported by local business online marketing, you will only attract customers who know about your site. Your goal is to get a larger share of the local market. To accomplish that, a strong, localized Internet marketing program is the ticket that will encourage new local traffic to your site and to your facility.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
In the first ever episode of Internet Marketing Clips, I cover some important guidelines on Klout, tons of social media news, some interesting online marketing statistics from 2011, and more!
The point of this show is to provide short, actionable news bites to keep you up to date in the ever changing IM world.
Show Notes and Links:
RescueTime Holiday Special- 50% discount on your first year of RescueTime. RescueTime is a seriously awesome productivity software that tracks how you’re spending time on your computer (Win, OSX, Lin) and online, and gives you customizable reports on where you’re wasting time and what you should do more of. Click here for the 50% discount (valid until 1/6/12)
Klout Guide to Understanding Klout: http://klout.com/understand/score (I discuss this more on the show.)
- AdAge Social Media Mistakes of 2011
- eMarketer “Mobile vs. Print” statistic
- MarketingLand article on Microsoft’s So.cl
- MarketingLand email conversions article
- SEO by the Sea’s “Important SEO Patents” series
- Pat Flynn (SmartPassiveIncome Blog)’s electronic whiteboard video guide
TypicalResults: http://typicalresults.org
That’s all for this episode! See you guys in a week with some more Internet Marketing Clips.
Whether you’re looking to start an exclusively or primarily online business, or to bring an existing offline business onto the net, there are some things you need to get started.
shamandalie on Yahoo! Answers brought up this question recently, asking what she would need to start a small online business selling clothing. While several of the answers she got contained good information (along with some questionable self-promotion), none of the answers touched on some true essentials for getting started online, like a domain name and hosting. I won’t take those for granted, however. Here’s my complete list of necessary supplies and/or preliminary steps.
First off, on the technical side, you need a place to host your website, a domain name to point at your website, and some way to manage it.
For website hosting, I recommend HostGator. Website hosting gives you server space to upload your website to, and then displays it to visitors when they visit your domain name. HostGator has been my hosting provider of choice for several years now. I never have problems with downtime, and their servers are very flexible, allowing me to run a variety of platforms for blogging, eCommerce, and SEO without running into limitations, even on their lowest level shared accounts.
However, to get a www. web address, you need a domain name as well. That domain name is the http://www.DOMAIN.com (or .net, or .org, or .co) that will redirect visitors to your website. I would recommend getting a domain that ends in .com, .net, .org, or .co . Even though they are much cheaper, do not get a .info domain. These are devalued in search engines and will lose credibility for your site. I buy all of my domains from GoDaddy- there are plenty of great coupon codes available online that will get you any domain for a great price (like this: Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale!
). WARNING: Do not buy the email upgrades at GoDaddy- you can create email adresses with HostGator for free.
Thirdly, you need some way to build your website. I recommend WordPress to just about everybody who asks- it’s a versatile platform that runs both this blog and my main seo nj consulting website. You can get thousands of free themes/designs for WordPress, and to edit a page or post is as easy as using Microsoft Word.
Starting an ecommerce site? How will people pay you for what you’re selling? You need a payment processor. Setting up eCommerce sites and shopping carts is a whole other discussion for another time, but for now, I’d like to take a second and highly recommend PayPal as a payment processor. They’re by far the standard for sending and receiving money online, and they can handle all the credit cards and other features you need without ridiculous prices, setup fees, or transaction fees.
So when you have the technical side set up, then what? What else do you need to start your business online?
I’m only going to talk about one of the research aspects here, but it’s also the most important- keyword research. You need to be looking into how visitors will find your website. What might they be searching in Google to find your website? Sure, there are free guides and tools available online for you to do this research, but if you want to save yourself literally hours of effort and get serious, then I’d highly recommend Market Samurai. This is definitely up in the top 2 or 3 keyword research tools in the industry, and I use it for each and every single one of my online marketing clients on a regular basis. It’s extremely powerful and there’s a lot it can do. So read their website for more info.
That’s it! That’s all the essential basics that you need to get in business online. To recap, you’ll need:
- Web Hosting
- A Domain Name
- Some way to setup your website
- Payment Processor (if needed)
- Keyword Research
Practice What You Preach (and Sell)
- My facebook page, created using the same process that I make any client’s Facebook page with.
There are a few things that I think set me apart from other “internet marketers” in my area, and probably from most “internet marketers” across the nation too. They’re my guiding principles in all the work I do and all the services I offer and recommend. One of those core values is as follows:
Practice What You Preach (and sell)
What I mean by that is any service I recommend to another small business owner, any service I sell to them, has to go through my application first. Trust me- if I’m offering to do something for your website, I’ve done it for at least 1 other person before- myself. You won’t be getting subpar results because I’m flying by the seat of my pants, trying to learn how to generate the results you need as I go along.
And believe it or not, a lot of internet marketers are doing just that.
I’ve seen the training courses- products are being sold to internet wannabees promising them gigantic salaries from providing online services to offline businesses. These courses advocate that you overcharge clients by thousands of dollars, outsource all the work using pre-made templates, and generally fail to do any actual online marketing work (or even learn how to do said work). All you’re doing is following a stale, outdated, one-size-fits-all template. Guess what? Those generally turn up terrible results, if any at all. One-size-fits-all is never a good phrase to hear in business.
Here’s the second part of that principle: Don’t give yourself special treatment. When you see an online marketing firm ranking in the #1 spot on Google for a super-competitive term like “internet marketing nj”, you have to wonder- “How did they get that ranking?”. You think they just did whatever they do for their clients- build a website, do a little onpage optimization, submit to local directories, and build a few links every month? Or do you think they invested much more time and effort into their own site, going above and beyond with every single process, doing whatever it took to be ranked there? Looking at the search engine rankings of my competitors, I know for a fact that it’s the latter. No firm has the efficiency to create 25,000 or even 15,000 backlinks to their clients’ sites, and no firm would ever tackle such competitive keywords either. Why? Humans are selfish creatures. They know that for them to get clients, they should rank as high as they can for often searched terms related to internet marketing, but when it comes to working for their clients, they set their sights low and scrape by with the bare minimum.
I’m proposing a change. Here’s how Ryan Lucht Marketing will be functioning:
- All processes will be tested on my own properties/internet campaign before I sell them to clients
- The work I do for my clients will be exactly what I did for myself
- To rank my website and my blog in the search engines and promote my business, I will only use processes that I currently use for my clients. I’ll be treating myself like another client. I won’t put in extra work on my own site, and I won’t do anything that I don’t currently offer my clients.
This may not seem enormous to you, but I know it is to me, and probably to a lot of other internet marketers as well. The marketers reading this are probably saying “You’ll never be able to compete against the big names in NJ with the same tactics you’re using on clients! Your clients are in less competitive marketplaces online! You’re in the MOST competitive! You need to pull out the big guns!” While it’s true that I don’t believe in one-size-fits-all, here’s the benefit I see from operating by those 3 guidelines above:
My clients can rest assured that every technique, process, and service I’m implementing for them will not devalue their business in Google whatsoever. They can also rest assured that everything they’re paying for will actually deliver a result! If I test something and find it to devalue or not deliver a result, why would I ever have a client pay for it? I can rest assured knowing that I’m operating using good ethics and sincerely looking to deliver amazing results for my clients. Trust me, if my methodology and recommendations can rank me for the ultra-competitive new jersey seo niche, they can do wonders for your business.
To other internet marketers: Why not join me on this endeavor? Adopt these principles. Do something great for your clients. Be upstanding, trustworthy, and deliver kick-butt value. Practice what you preach (and/or sell).
