Oct

21

Local Business Website Marketing Includes Email List, Blog & Linking Everything Together

Filed Under Website Marketing | 1 Comment

This is the fourth in a series of posts about marketing a local business website. We have discussed the importance of a website that is user friendly, including being able to load quickly and be easy to navigate. We have talked about keywords and the importance of doing keyword research to determine appropriate words that are associated with how people search when they are looking for your product or service and are ready to buy. Traffic to the website was the next topic of discussion and we confirmed that there are many components to generating traffic.

There is still more that the website can do for your business. We should discuss the power of building an email list of the visitors that come to your website. These are prospects that may not be ready or willing to buy from you yet, but they could become a customer down the road. If you don’t ask for their email address so that you can keep in touch, they might not ever return to the website.

The opportunity to build a list that you can communicate with ongoing can not be underestimated. How do you ask for the visitor to give you his or her email? The most effective way is to offer something of value, possibly a report or ebook or some kind of valuable information they will find useful. Usually there is a box or section of the website, near the top but definitely above the fold (in the visible part of the page before you have to scroll down to read more), where you place an opt-in box with what you have to offer the prospect.

Once you have the email address, you can continue to send email for as long as the prospect is willing. Prospects opt out if they don’t want to hear from you. As long as you keep your communication interesting or of value to them, they should stick around and start to know, like, and trust you.

Another marketing technique is a blog. If a business does not have a blog, it should implement one. There are many creative ways to maintain a blog. Blogs build on the efforts of having your prospect or customer get to know and trust the business, offers a way to be interactive, gives current information, and can be entertaining. Blogs can bring more traffic to the website as well. The social marketing that the business is doing can be integrated with the blog through the use of plug-ins or connections that automatically get posted on the blog to provide constant and current content.

There is a great deal of power in linking all of the work that we do, to market our website, together so that it is all connected and pointing back to the main website for the business. This builds a strong foundation that helps the website rise to the top of the local or niche search results. Linking is very powerful in helping your business website become an authority in your industry.

Internet marketing is a science. There are systems and strategies and research and development that need to be consistently provided for the website to achieve and maintain success in a competitive environment. It would be a challenge for a local business owner to attempt all of the tasks involved to market a website, and it is hard to find and keep local internet marketers to do the work.

To learn more about partnering with a service to market a website, visit Local Business Website Marketing.

Oct

4

What is Social Media?

Filed Under Social Networking | 18 Comments


What is Social Media or What is Social Marketing are questions that many home business owners or small business owners are asking. Whether you have a home business, based on the internet, or a local small business, you have to admit that advertising is changing. When someone is looking for what you have, do you want their search to result in finding you?

While yellow page ads in a physical phone book may have been effective in the past, it is not the way of the future. Many people access information online now, and as we move forward most people will do so. We look up locations and phone numbers online and may use the yellow pages website to do so. But we are looking for more information and even ways to interact online.

Business websites are growing by leaps and bounds. The purpose of a company’s website can be one of several. There are sites that are targeted for retail sales. Some brands like to focus on customer service, and still others host sites where they encourage customers, clients, or users to participate. These interactive sites can utilize the social media tools and services that are in abundance on the internet today.

At the very least, a business must have a website presence. From there, the task is to get traffic to that website. There are targeted ways to do that and include social media marketing.

The way a potential visitor will find a business website is to search for words that are associated with the product or service that the company represents. Taking the time to do some keyword research is valuable in terms of a website’s success in getting traffic that can convert to customer.

Once the keywords are determined they can be used in many ways to attract people to the business online. Keywords can be utilized in social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and across many smaller social sites, to find people with the same interests. Blog posts and articles that are written to provide information of value, or entertainment, can be written using the keywords. Social media sites can vote on or forward the content so that word spreads virally.

The power of social media to distribute content all over the internet, all over the world, is a powerful new way of attracting customers to your business. We have the ability to share our information in a way that is still new and is the way of the future.

The world of internet marketing is complex, and ever changing. In the four years that I have been marketing online, there have been tools, services, and practices that have come and gone in a relatively short time span. It can be hard to keep up with it when your main focus is operating your business, providing the service or delivering the product that sustains the business.

Home businesses and small businesses are hiring social media positions to manage their online presence. It is that important to have a website that is plugged in to the social potential of the internet. If you don’t want to hire an employee, you can partner with us for search engine optimization and social media, social marketing, and social networking for your website. The next time someone is searching for what your business can provide, will he or she find your website?