Oct

21

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

Filed Under Website Marketing 

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.

Comments

One Response to “Local Business Website Marketing Includes Email List, Blog & Linking Everything Together”

  1. Doug Sauerhaft on July 22nd, 2009 11:43 am

    I couldn’t agree more that growing your marketing email list organically is the best way to cultivate new customers.

    But what is the small or new business to do to cultivate new customers and sales while this AAA rated housefile lists is being developed? How are they to attract prospects?

    Certainly optimizing their website is important, but to do that, they need someone to develop an accurate keyword research study, otherwise they won’t know what keywords/phrases to optimize. Pay-Per-Click advertising is expensive and once again, without the right keywords…a financial black hole.

    Purchasing a targeted quality opt-in (stay far, far, away from Bulk Email)email list to reach Consumers and sending highly relevant email messages can help a business to gain traction…of course you also need to have the resource or know who to use to get your email delivered. Quality lists are not cheap, but when mailed multiple times in a carefully constructed email campaign, can and do bare fruit.

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