Just read an article today about marketing your business:  The Changing Face of Advertising, Purchasing in a Data Economy.  I encourage you to go there and read it for yourself. There are many small towns and cities across the United States that aren’t using Groupon or FourSquare. However, small businesses in every location can utilize text message marketing to improve business and communicate with prospects and customers.

Small Businesses:  You Need to Look at Mobile Marketing NOW

Many small businesses think that some of the newer marketing platforms are out of their reach:

• They don’t have a full time person to do social media (you don’t need a full time person)
• They think that text message marketing is out of their budget range (it is affordable to ALL businesses)
• They don’t think they know enough about ‘new marketing’ to utilize it effectively

The good news is that these three myths, as explained in the () are false.  Today, any size small business can use the same types of marketing that huge brands are using.  You may use it on a smaller scale but that’s ok.  Most likely you don’t need to reach millions of people:  hundreds or even thousands of new prospects might make a difference in your business – and you can reach those numbers.

Whatever you are doing online – and you should be doing something – you should also make sure will work on a mobile device.  People are visiting your website on their smart phones and you want to give them a good user experience.

Social Media

In terms of social media, having a Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter account (or both) is a good first step.  Today you can start either of those easier than you can a blog.  You can blog from either of those as well.  However, it is smart to eventually start your own blog that is hosted on your own hosting account.  Having all of your web presence on public spaces that could be taken down at any time may not be the best idea, but it will work to get started with an internet presence.

There is all kinds of free instruction online about how to use social media (Facebook, Twitter) on the internet.  Contact us if you want some good resources or a little help and we can point you in the right direction.

Mobile Marketing

Within the past 6 months or so, mobile marketing form small businesses has exploded.  We have seen the big brands doing text message marketing for awhile, and many small businesses felt that is was out of their price range.

Today text message marketing providers have made mobile marketing affordable to all.  YepText just lowered their prices because they have grown so much that they want to share the cost saving they have realized with their customers.

Plus YepText is one of the better quality providers because their messages get sent instantly.  You do have to beware of companies that want your business but don’t deliver on the service as effectively.

To test how Text Message Marketing works for yourself:

Text mobile1 to 41242 -  this is a test only and you are not opting in to future messages

Be sure to look at the ‘Who Can Use It‘ tab on the top to get all kind of ideas that different types of businesses can implement.

If you have any questions, contact us at info@yourwebsitemarketingservice.com.

Incoming search terms:

• zerbee com google marketing partner

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Look for internet business idea below.
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Start Internet Business

You’ve tried hard. But still can’t make a go of it? Chances are that it’s not your fault.

• You’ve been mislead and maybe even lied to!
• The common practices you followed were wrong.
• The people who taught you didn’t know any better.

No one was trying to mislead you.  It’s just that the common practices have been wrong.  And more often than not people are just plain overwhelmed when they try to start an internet based business.

There’s simply too much information available and too many directions you can go.  If you have studied multiple ways to be successful, but have not focused on any one and seriously tried to make it work, you are not alone.

That is what is common online.  A shelf full of products or folders on your computer filled with downloads or mp3 recordings.  Everything sounds good so where do you start?

Struggling to Start Internet Business?

Have you experienced this from internet marketing trainings?

• More theory than fact
• More Hype than training
• Important facts left out
• Advanced training (At extra cost) needed to succeed

There’s more to doing business on the internet than learning HOW to market online.  You actually need a product or service to sell.

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Have you found a business to partner with?  (see below)

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Some people choose to be an ‘affiliate’ of someone else’s product or service.  This saves you having to create a product or perform a service.  You simply sell them and the owner takes care of the rest.

In exchange for you selling the product or service, you are paid an affiliate fee.  So your main work is to get new people to see the offer.  There are all kinds of ways to do this and many different strategies to be more effective.

That’s one route, and for many, the easiest way to get started earning an income on the internet.

When I first came online, I had a product that I represented.  I partnered with a #1 brand to become an independent distributor – and so I had the best of both worlds.  I don’t have to create the product, or even take orders, ship product, manage inventory, or handle customer service.

My main work is to market the product.  The difference is that this is not a product or service that is going away after a 3 or 4 week launch or sale period.  I represent products from a 56+ year old company and the products are consumable.  People run out of them and have to re-order.

I get repeat business every month and continue to find new customers.  To me, this is the most lucrative way to earn an income online or offline.  It’s a business that will pay me forever and that I can leave to my children.  You can’t say that about affiliate income.

The future of your internet business can have a much better chance for success if you have a plan.  Plans are not for everyone – but if you like systems, being organized – and knowing WHAT and WHEN to do it, keep reading.

I feel very strongly about this because, especially online, you can get very distracted when you plug into the working community here.  You will be bombarded with new information every single day.

Ebooks, webinars, workshops, software, trainings, masterminds, and quite a few other offers are going to overwhelm you – trust me, I have been there and done that.  And I still get distracted!  You will be a hundred times more successful if you make yourself FOCUS!

You will discover that the opportunities on the internet are bigger than ever.. but you can’t ‘do it all’.  You must choose somewhere to start, and stick with it until you start making money or having some success with it.  Only when you get to that point should you think about branching out.

I can’t recommend the power of FOCUS enough…

If you are starting your own business, you are the boss – and you must be disciplined to find success – unless of course you have a bottomless income source (and if that’s the case, why are you reading this anyway?!!).

I wish you every success in your online home business endeavors.

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I partnered with billionaire businessman Roger Barnett and his Social Marketing Company, Shaklee, to build my home business.  We have a new $100K in 15 months income program that is unlike any other company in the world offers.  And we are a 56+ year old company that has been a leader in the industry and paying distributor income for over 56 years.  Plus it’s not just the money, it’s an amazing lifestyle – you don’t get it in the corporate world.  You can earn a car credit on top of your income and luxury travel all over the world.  When you evaluate all of this, with one of the most appealing options of owning a home business – time freedom with no boss but yourself to tell you when or how to work – it really is an OPPORTUNITY (that’s open to anyone)!

To learn more, visit:  Start Internet Business

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Below is the explanation that convinced me to sign up with SocialMonkee right away:

Building backlinks to your pages is an essential part of SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) for two reasons. The first reason is that it helps your pages get indexed faster, which is very important because you want the search engines to find them as soon as possible and crawl them regularly. The second reason is that it helps your pages get higher search engine rankings for the keywords of your choice. The more backlinks you have, the better. Period.

However, building backlinks can be a time-consuming, boring process. You can outsource the process to an agency and pay a lot of money… Or you can do it yourself with SocialMonkee! SocialMonkee is an instant backlink builder allowing you to build 25 unique backlinks, every day, FREE! All links are on unique C-Class IP addresses and domains. Imagine being able to create 25 unique backlinks every day, with the click of a button, FREE! Well, you can stop imagining…

So, 25 unique backlinks every day… That’s a total of 175 backlinks every week, 750 every month. If you upgrade, you will be able to build 100 uniques backlinks, 3 times a day! That’s a total of 2,100 backlinks every week, 9,000 every month! The good news is… you can get a Premium Account, FREE! All you need to do is to refer 12 members, and your account will automatically be upgraded. If you’re not really into referral marketing, you may upgrade right now for a low one-time fee.

Submitting a page to SocialMonkee via the members area takes under two minutes, but there’s an even faster way! They created a Firefox plugin that allows you to submit your page to up to 100 sites in just a few clicks, using nothing else than Firefox! If you have a Premium Account you will also get access to link reports and RSS feeds, which are great to keep track of your backlinks and get them indexed fast. Submitting your RSS feeds to RSS submitters is actually a very important step in link building.

You can join SocialMonkee now while it’s still free! And if you want to upgrade, either pay a one time cost of $47 or refer the free version to 12 people. The no-cost version will work great but the number of backlinks you can build is limited. If you have multiple websites or want to create more than 25 backlinks per day, then go ahead and upgrade.

SocialMonkee for building backlinks to your site
content Every Day to 25 social
bookmarking sites, all on unique
C class IPs... FREE." />

Incoming search terms:

• facebook twitter flickr

Just before Valentine’s Day, 2011, the JC Penney story, known as The Farmer Update, became public in the New York Times, and Overstock.com had a similar slap by Google. It appears that both companies were utilizing marketing strategies that Google does not like.

JC Penney was using content farms to create lots of content and massive numbers of website pages to link back to them. This is not the kind of new and original content that Google likes. And Overstock.com was using college students and people with access to .edu links to increase the links to their website. Google does consider .edu links to be valuable but not when obtained in this spammy way.

Google likes natural content – that individuals produce and post. It also likes comments that people make when they provide a link to go with that comment to be natural and unique – and posted individually.

We are still in the infant stages of using the internet to market our businesses. The same as we use best practices offline, it’s important to use them online. You may get away with some things for awhile, but when you depend on a search engine like Google to send traffic to your website, you should be aware that they can take it away if they don’t like how you have obtained it.

Some other news: Matt Cutts, spokesman for Google, recently gave us some insights to other things Google is concerned about. He said that going forward Google searchers are more likely to see sites that wrote the original content (rather than a site scraped or copied from original content) as top results on search queries. He also said that their spam engineers who had previously been pulled for other projects are back to working on the task of keeping Google search results valuable and relevant – a hint that more slaps may be in the works.

Another specific mention that Matt made concerns the value of having a domain name that is the exact match for your main keyword. An example would be horseridingtips.com. Recently Google has been rewarding website owners with almost immediate top rankings if the keyword was in their domain titles. There are people abusing this strategy and creating large numbers of poor quality websites. Many of the sites built on these domain names are put up quickly and do not contain much content or value. Google is changing that. While it won’t hurt quality sites, it’s not going to help internet marketers that are putting up these websites in order to quickly monetize them and not provide good information to the reader.

There is one last issue to note (in case you haven’t already noticed). When you go to Google and enter a search query, you will see more of local and social media sites listed as results. These includes listings for local businesses and anything from real time Twitter tweets, to Facebook pages, to blogs or bookmarking sites. Google is paying more attention to your business website’s social value. They want to see if people are interacting with you, or basically – liking your website. So, having social presence is a way Google can measure what people are looking for in a search engine result; and it provides more value to you in terms of getting more Google traffic if you have some social power.

It can be hard keeping up with ‘everything marketing on the internet’. That’s because a lot of it is new and also because things change so rapidly. It is beneficial to be connected to a service that will track internet marketing news and strategies for you, or at the very least pick a good blog to follow that posts ‘everything internet marketing.’

Takeaway: If you want to count on getting more traffic to your website (and more leads and customers) from Google, focus on some of the things Google likes:

• A blog where you post regular content that is good quality (you get 55% more traffic if you have a blog on your website)
• Social power – join at least a few social media websites AND be active on them
• Variety – write press releases, post a video or image, get some quality links to your website – Google likes to see you are doing a mixture of work on your website

Hope you got something of value from this email. If so, please pay it forward to someone you know who can benefit.

If you have spent too much money on your website and/or internet marketing, and aren’t getting new business daily, you (or your website service) may have ignored some basic components along with effective promotion:

* set up your local search page to rank at the top in your local area
* have your website mobile ready
* if you have a website, promote it in simple but effective ways to attract new people (if you don’t have a website you can still use your Google Places page and ongoing strategies with it)

Gone are (or should be) the days of spending thousands of dollars on a website and ignoring the marketing.

Today you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars for search engine optimization or buying ads.

But you do have to promote on the internet.

Your website is one of thousands in your local area (more than that if you are located in a metropolitan area) and millions across the internet.

How are people going to find YOUR BUSINESS website?

“If you promote it, they will come”

It’s a simple statement and very true.

And it can start with one simple Google Places (local) page. Yours is sitting online waiting for you to verify as the business owner.

If you have done that, have you optimized it so that your listing will show at the top of a Google search so that new people calling you daily?

Our opening question was about mobile readiness – the second component of the list above. If you have a website, open it on your mobile device and check if the appearance is mobile ready.

If it reads easy without all the extra white space and having to navigate around to see the print, you are set.

If not, it’s an easy fix to get mobile ready. And it’s worth that fix since smart phone ownership is increasing daily.

Last, your website. If you don’t already have a website, a simple wordpress blog can be set up to look like a website – or a blog – according to your needs. And you can spend a couple hundred dollars to have it made (not thousands) – or do it yourself.

Business owners need to understand: you don’t have to spend lots of money on building the website. What you need is to promote the website.

There are many ways to do that, and it can start with any very easy ways that deliver quick results.

Today, there are different marketing tasks and strategies to do for your business. Don’t let the new-ness or lack of understanding of web marketing prevent you from keeping up with your competition.

Embrace the changes because they can deliver awesome results in terms of new prospects to talk with and lifetime customers.

Not sure if you are a football fan but I would like to ask if you watched the mega-expensive Super Bowl ads?  It seems like I am not alone when I say I was not impressed – for the most part.

Some were confusing.  Some were not quite entertaining.  Most did not utilize the power of their high-priced time slot.

Is your business utilizing its power – in terms of the tools and services you now have available to market your business?

Are you making sure that your business is the one being found when people are searching for your product or service – on the internet where most people look for their information now?

One last thing today – here is a good article to read about Google Places, and how local and mobile marketing can help you grow your business.

Google -be sure to watch the short video at the end of the article

They used data found in local areas to list the business name, address, and phone number if it was available. Next, in the spirit of Google and all of its knowledge and capabilities, it opened the doors to pull information into these pages from all over the internet.

This is why if you go to your own business’s Google Places Page, you may see that it has not been owner verified and yet it may have images of your business, references from other websites where you are mentioned or have a link back to your website, and even customer reviews. Some business owners are shocked to find there are negative reviews listed on their Google Places page that hasn’t yet been claimed.

Google uses these Places pages to list businesses in local areas. This is so that when someone goes to Google and searches for a dentist in Pittsburgh, PA they will get a list of dentists to review. If you are a Pittsburgh dentist, you want to be at the top of the Google results.

Another thing that Google did just recently is to integrate local search results with the organic listings along the left side of a Google search results page. These are the more trusted results that 70-90% of searchers click on. The paid ads on the right side of the page are clicked far less. This is very good news because in the past it has taken a lot of hard work (and sometimes a great deal of money) to get top organic listings.

Google is thinking more local today. A big part of the reason for that is smart phones and how many people use them and want local search results. Immediate results that help them in their present location.

The Google pages that get verified AND OPTIMIZED are going to be the listings that get the top rankings.

It is easy to verify your listing. In fact, you can do it in a few minutes. The optimizing part takes more time and many business owners outsource this to services that do this kind of work daily and will get results fast. It involves adding images and videos to your listing, a coupon if applicable to the business, placement in the right categories, an optimized description listing, citations (these are mentions of your website on local sites and other relevant – targeted – sites all over the internet), and customer reviews.

For most local business owners, their day consists of running their business. They may do certain kinds of advertising or marketing ongoing, in order to bring in new customers. But the internet is still very new for these purposes. Finding a reliable service to help you with this work and help you get new prospects calling you and new customers established is a Win-Win opportunity today.

Phone books and local newspapers are not being used the way they were in the past. People access the search engines on their computers and their smart phones to look for business information. Google is the primary search engine used. Google Places is very new and that is why most of the pages have not been verified. That will change soon and businesses will be in competition with each other, in their local area, to be placed at the top when people look for them.

You can get started now by taking the time to verify your Google Places page and taking the steps you need to optimize it.

To verify your Google Places listing on your own, you will need a gmail email account. These are free to get. Just Google free gmail account or if you can’t figure it out, email me and I can send you an invitation. Next, while signed into your gmail account, open another browser and go to google.com. Google the name and location of your business and when you see the search results, they will look like one of the options below.

If your business shows up on a regular Google search page with location markers (red images with letters inside), as shown in the first image, simply click on the ‘Place page’ link – an example is on the bottom right of the first image below. It will take you to your Google Places listing and at the top you will see ‘Business Owner?’ if it has not been verified. Click to verify.

If your business does not come up on a regular Google search page, click on ‘Maps’ at the top and look for your business in the maps area. You may have to scroll through a few pages. What you will be looking for is the link next the A & B listings in this second image – the ‘more info’ link. It will take you to your Google Places page and you can look for that same link there that says ‘Business Owner?’. Click to verify your business.

Google is going to ask you to fill in certain business information, choose categories, and write a description. It will also suggest that you upload images and videos. This is part of optimizing your Google Places page. Next are the coupons, citations, and reviews I mentioned previously. The more work you do, the better you will rank. Even if you were surprised (and happy) to see your business listing at the top, once businesses start to verify and optimize their listing, you may not keep your top spot if you don’t do the same.

One last thing I wanted to point out. In the second image, under the dentist that is listed as B in the location marker, shows 52 reviews. When I clicked on the Places page, it had not been verified and yet Google pulled in 52 reviews from around the internet. Unfortunately, many of these (at least at the top – I didn’t take the time to scroll through them all – are negative. This happens more than you might think and it’s a shame but people tend to take more time to write the negative than to sing your praises. You have to ASK for the good reviews!

Until you claim your listing, and optimize it, you aren’t addressing what’s being shown about you. You aren’t taking the opportunity to tell the good things about your business and letting prospects and customers get to know, like and trust you.

Feel free to share this information with friends or clients you have that may be small business or local business owners.

If you would like to read more about Google Places and internet marketing for local businesses, or you have additional questions, visit http://YourWebSiteMarketingService.com. There is a Contact form on the website.

If you use your keywords too many times it’s not going to look natural and search engines can ‘see’ this. If you don’t take the time to do keyword research – for your market – how are you going to get any visitors from the search engines?

One goal should be to get the pages on your website listed for your keywords on the first page of all the major search engines. If you do your research and find the right keyword phrases, this will bring targeted visitors to your site.

Even with many paid keyword research tools available, you can get the best start in you keyword research with Google’s keyword tool (to find it, simply Google: Google keyword tool). Type in a broad term for your market and look at the results that are returned. You can also use local area name in the search.

You can sort the results by the number of searches a month. Note that some keywords have a great number of monthly searches. You should realize that many of these terms are already being highly marketed and it will be hard to get a top ranking in the search engines with so much competition.

You can go to the Google search page and type in these terms to see how many pages are returned. If there are more than 100,000 results, it will take a long time to beat out the top sites. To get top results fairly quickly (within a couple of weeks), you need to use keyword terms that have less than 30,000 – 50,000 pages listed on the results page. That will depend on what kind of content you are going to use. Videos will help you get top rankings even if there are 50,000 results.

Press releases, using your keywords, can get you on the first page within a day if your keyword term does not have a lot of competition. However, press releases won’t always hold a top position. You either have to keep writing them, or market the press release url.

Back at the Google keyword research tool, what you want to do is look over the keywords list that you have. Take the keywords that are appropriate for your website and plug them individually back into the tool. This will give you even more results, including terms that do not have as much competition from other marketers.

This is an essential step for marketing your website on the internet. Even if your website is already built, you can do this research and then add the keyword terms that you find to your website – in a natural way. You can use a main keyword phrase on the home page and secondary keywords on other pages within your website.

If your website is a blog, use the secondary keywords as the names of your categories. And use secondary keywords as part of the titles in new blog posts.

If you don’t determine what the targeted keywords – that people use when they search in Google and other search engines – are.. it is going to be hard to get the right people to visit your website.

On the other hand, when you find keywords that have significant amounts of monthly searches AND are not hard to rank for in the search engines – these are called the ‘money keywords’ for your website and you will attract a lot of new visitors – prospects – to your business.

Next post: additional strategies to use with your keywords to increase visitors from other places online.

What are some ways that local businesses can accomplish this right away? Let’s look at a few of the most popular options.

First, keep in mind that people are online looking for business information now more than ever. While the internet is still very young, it has completely transformed the way we search for information – from a business phone number all the way to in-depth information about a product.

People use their phone book and the newspaper (if they still get one delivered to their home) less and less. They go to Google and other search engines and look for the information they seek. Website Marketing Services have statistics that show people will search online 80% of the time before they buy a product. Local results are seen right away and small businesses want to be on the first page, and at the top of the Google list.

Ok.. back to some great ways to get traffic to your website.

1- Start a blog that can be updated often. A company’s main website is usually built either to sell product or provide information about the company and/or the products. It is built and then stays the same. A blog will have new posts and the opportunity to use those posts as a way to rank in the search engines so that people searching there will find the blog, and eventually the website right at the top of searches for important key word terms.

2- Use Social Media. Get accounts in the most popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr (if you want to use pictures for marketing) and Youtube (if you plan to use video to market). Find a couple of industry related sites as well. Use social bookmarking sites.

3- Give something of value away for free on your main website and have an opt-in box to build a list of people and email addresses so that you can continue to communicate with them. If you don’t do this, chances are many visitors who find your website won’t return.

4- Have a customer newsletter and offer it to the new list of prospects you are building as well. Include information of value and consider making it personable with company news, pictures, guest columns by staff. You can have a trivia question or post a poll for information gathering purposes. Be creative.

5- Local business listing was mentioned earlier and it should not be underestimated that there will be a huge ROI if you take the time to optimize your local listing.

6- Article marketing is similar to blog posting only you post the content in article directories. This can bring direct visitors to your site but is also used to build your site’s popularity and search engine rankings.

7- Press release submissions are a great way to market a website because they can give quick exposure to a business and help get new customers. Anytime there is news to share, a press release should be written. You can get creative and look for ways to make news.

Keyword terms or phrases are most important in overall website marketing. There are benefits in terms of the search engines and also with social media marketing. People search keywords in social sites to find information and for buying decisions.

Website promotion can be overwhelming and even frustrating to a small business owner who is busy running his company every day. Website Marketing Services exist to help this process so that a win-win goal is accomplished where the small business owner is growing a business with the expertise the service provides.

Social Media for Business has exploded onto the Washington small business website marketing scene, as well as in cities and towns all across the United States; and with it an abundance of hesitation and confusion. Using a Social Media Marketing Guide has been recommended to provide structure and a plan to achieve success.

YourWebSiteMarketingService.com has announced the immediate release of their Social Media Marketing Guide as a shortcut for Washington businesses to participate in the Social Media world, and have the opportunity to cut through the confusion and information overload that they are currently experiencing.

Vicki Zerbee, Small Business Website Marketing and Social Media Specialist with YourWebSiteMarketingService.com states, “With the number of social media websites available on the internet today, the strategic ways that each are used, and the fact that social media marketing is very different from traditional offline marketing, it is no wonder that small businesses do not know where to start with this new marketing platform. We are taking the guesswork out for them.”

Businesses understand that they need to have a website presence. With consumers going to the internet to find out information about products, services, and local businesses, more than they go to the phone book or newspaper, all businesses must be online. Once they get their website up and running, the majority of small businesses struggle to market it.

“We have found that businesses who have a social media strategy or a plan can realize remarkable results,” Zerbee commented. She went on to say, “And for a limited time we are including our 5 Point Checklist for companies to verify they have their website structured correctly to market it online. Small business owners are shocked to find that websites they spent thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to have made are actually hurting them in terms of advertising on the internet.”

Small business owners are confused about how to participate in Social Media most effectively. Can they do it in-house? How much time does it take? What social websites work best and how do you use each individual site? What is the difference between blogs, bookmarking sites, networking sites, etc.? What if they desire to outsource the work? The list of questions is endless.

Zerbee concludes, “There is a definite need for a Social Media Marketing Guide that will help small businesses, and solo entrepreneurs as well, to participate in this new Social Media world and to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. There is a lot of information on the internet, but it is scattered and hard to put together into a workable plan without months or even years of studying how to use Social Media. We created this guide as a shortcut to get started right away.”

To learn more about the Social Media Marketing Guide, and for a limited time how to get a Five Point Check List that will help most small businesses improve their internet marketing results almost immediately, at no extra cost, visit http://www.YourWebSiteMarketingService.com.
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