Dec

15

Blogging and Social Media Essential for Local Business Websites

Filed Under Website Marketing | 3 Comments

Blogging and Social Media have come a long way.

Blogs evolved from the concept of an online journal. When first conceived, they were used mainly by people to keep personal notes, post pictures and ideas. Blogs were seen as something housewives and artists used to create online presence. This is no longer the case. Now, almost every business, either online of offline, needs a blog.

Social Media was much the same way. Viewed at first as a tool for students to connect, Facebok is now successfully used for online business marketing. Other social media sites are catching up fast. Sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and flickr are becoming business essentials.

So what can a blog and social media do for your local business website?

People like to feel they know the people they are doing business with. They like to feel they can trust the business. They like to know the business is community oriented and involved. For a traditional business this concept is sometimes hard to convey. A blog on a business website, and integrating social media, can inform customers of current news or offers, educate, and entertain visitors.

Community events, charities and even small events hosted by the business such as celebrations, birthday parties, and classes, can be advertised. Pictures can be posted, including those of customers enjoying the events. If the business participates at a community event, such as a cleanup for example, post the event with pictures. Blogs and social media are a way for your customer to get to know the business and what you do in the community.

Blogs will bring traffic to your website. While your business may be a traditional local business without online sales, it is still important to bring traffic to your site because your customers are online even if they aren’t buying a product or service from you online. Traffic means people who are interested in stopping by the physical store are stopping by your website to see what you are all about. Blogs that are updated frequently will help improve search engine ranking and will increase your traffic and potential client base.

Blogs and social media give you a real time connection to your customers, more so than your website does. They should be kept current, updated on a frequent basis. A customer can go to your blog or Facebook page and see what is going on now. Where your website may be static and offer great information, the blog and social media is where they get current communication from your business.

Four years ago, in a BusinessWeek article for May 2, 2005, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_18/b3931001_mz001.htm, it states there are 9 million blogs with 40,000 new blogs each day. These numbers have grown significantly since then.

More and more businesses are reaching their customers through their blogs. Facebook, a social website that loves pictures, has more than 120 million users log on every day. Twitter, the micro blog that likes video links, is fast approaching with over 3 million “tweets” being sent a day. Can your local business really afford to miss using these valuable tools?

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.

Jul

20

Local Business Website Marketing Needs Traffic to the Website

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The last two posts discussed how a local business website needs to be user friendly, be optimized for local search results, and be targeting the proper keywords. One of the most important requirements for a website to have, if you want to create business from the website, is traffic. There are different ways to get traffic to your site.

You can invite visitors to your website via all forms of advertising such as placing the website address on your business card, in your newspaper or billboard advertising, on all literature that goes out from the business, by word of mouth, and other creative ways. The other side of traffic is people finding your website on their own. Most of the time that happens when they use a search engine like Google to search for information about the product or service that you represent.

Within that context there are several places where a prospect can find you. There are ads that appear at the top and along the right hand side of a search page. These are paid ads, such as Google Adwords, where you pay to place your advertisement, and you bid for position. Of course it is most desirable to be one of the top 3 ads since they are clicked on the most.

Next are what is called organic search results. These are the results that appear on the left side under the paid ads at the top. Some people only click on these results since they know that these are not paid ads. These are results that Google, and other search engines, have determined provide valuable information and are legitimate websites for the product or service.

It is very beneficial to get a top rank in the organic search results. To be on the first page means that you are one of the top 10 search results, sometimes out of millions of results. You will get traffic to your website if your website is rewarded with these top search engine rankings, provided you are using the right keywords on your website that are being searched by people.

The way that you help your website become a top ranked site is to show the search engines that it has value. This is all part of search engine optimization and there are many strategies associated with building your website to a quality piece of real estate online. Articles, videos, podcasts, directory listings, backlinks from blogs, forums, news sites, education sites, and other top ranked websites, can all be created to provide links that point to your website and raise its value.

Social media and social marketing can be used to send traffic to your website. Many internet marketers will be too forward in presenting their business within social networks. It is more effective to provide help or information in the social arena that will in turn create trust and people becoming interested in visiting your website. There are an abundance of social sites, and they can be combined to send massive amounts of traffic to your website if done correctly. It is best to create a plan and be consistent and active with that plan.

There are many strategies involved in increasing rank within organic search results, and driving traffic to a business website by using all of the internet marketing tools and services that are currently available. The online marketing world is ever evolving and it is important to keep current with new programs, services, or techniques. It can eat up a lot of a business owner’s time if he or she is trying to market the website online in addition to running the business. It can be very beneficial to turn at least a portion of the internet marketing over to a service that can provide consistent work in getting tasks completed on a daily basis.

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

Jun

18

Local Business Website Marketing, Including Social Marketing, Service Announced

Filed Under Website Marketing | 3 Comments

People are searching for your business in a new way today. Previously, they might have gone to the phone book or to the local newspaper. Now, they go to their computer and search for information. If your local or online business website is not getting the traffic or sales that you want, there is a new service available to rectify that. You need to appear at the top of the search results when people try to find you.

Social Marketing is only one aspect of internet marketing and the whole package is often quite foreign to the average business owner. With the majority of his or her time spent running the business, and internet marketing fairly new to most businesses, there exists a gap in the knowledge and implementation of website marketing.

There is the choice to hire a full time or even part time employee, though that is not always in the company budget and it is hard to find a social marketer and manage the position. Individual work can be outsourced on a per-piece basis but it takes time to find reputable workers and it is an ongoing task.

We have created a solution, for the local business who needs to optimize their website and apply various internet marketing methods on a consistent basis, in the form of contract work that will be performed throughout the month to build your website to an authority website that ranks at the top of search results for your local area (national results as well if that applies).

You are provided with online marketing, including social marketing, for your website. Some of the internet marketing that we will do for you includes: blogging, active on web 2.0 sites, content syndication, web page optimization, local search results, national search results (if desired), article marketing, video, audio, ppc, online ads, search directory listings, link building, and more, keeping current in a medium that changes quickly.

We offer a 3 month trial period during which you can evaluate the services and results you are getting, and we can determine if you are the type of client that we want to work with on a long term basis.

The value of a new client in your business will be key to the benefits you get from our service. For example, taking into consideration our $1,000 monthly fee, if a sale to a new client results in $1,000 in income for you, it takes only one new sale per month to pay our fee. If you make $500 per sale, two sales and you break even. On the other hand, if you get 10 or 20, or more, sales each month, you will be very happy and ready to upgrade our services to really grow your business.

Below is a press release that you can access to learn more. There is also a link to our page where you can get connected with us so that we can answer your questions and go from there. We have seen automated programs that offer similar services, and even invested in them for research purposes as we were developing this service. We found them to be very low quality, and produced no results for us. The worst part was that there was nobody to communicate with behind the automation. That is the reason that we do not have an order & pay button on our sites. We bill you only after we establish communication and assure you that it will continue throughout our services.

Here is a current local website marketing press release. Visit our service page to get connected with us: Local Business Marketing.