The Benefits of Internet Marketing

Marketing on the Internet is much cheaper than traditional advertising methods and there is more flexibility with it. Your ads will reach a much bigger audience and will stay visible much longer than offline marketing. Also, if you need to make changes to your advertising, you can do so easily through your online campaigns with no additional cost.

Internet marketing gives you 24 hour visibility versus locking your doors up at a certain time each night. Customers can still access your products around the clock and even make purchases while you sleep.

Online marketing enables you to expand your business virtually all over the globe if you wanted to. Local brick and mortar store fronts restrict who you can market to. Unless you are looking to add a new business in each location you would like to market to, it is wise and more cost effective to utilize Internet marketing instead. You will still have your local customers; however, you can also target a much more global market as well.

Different Internet Marketing Methods

The good thing about online marketing is there are countless ways to get the word out on your small business. One of the most important methods you should be utilizing is search engine optimization. This method can be done through using relevant keywords, content, tags and descriptions on your web pages and gaining quality back links so that your website can get indexed high in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Your objective would be to get your website ranking in the first 10 results in these search engines.

Another vital Internet marketing strategy you should be using is through publishing your own ezine or email newsletter. Ezines are a great way to build up a huge list of targeted prospects for your business so you can communicate and advertise to them later on down the road. It has been said that a prospect needs to be exposed to your product several times before they make a buying decision. Email newsletters and ezines use tools such as auto responders that automatically send out a series of follow up emails to your prospects in specific intervals which keep the lines of communication and follow up going. This increases sales and builds trust with your prospects.

Other forms of Internet marketing that help to grow your small business is through social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube, pay per click campaigns through Google AdWords, keyword rich blogs filled with product information and article marketing. All of these methods help to optimize and build quality back links to your small business website to help you rank high in the search engines.

Internet marketing gives a small business the advantage over simple local marketing. It brands the business, exposes it to a larger audience and increases profits exponentially. Small business owners from all over are beginning to include this type of marketing into their overall advertising campaigns.

The so called “dot com” boom that took place in the late 1990s changed the face of business for ever. Yes, many online companies went bust soon after their meteoric rise to fame. But there were so many millions of new start-up companies, that a new global market was created, the likes of which had never been seen before. Although many online businesses did fail, some of them spectacularly, for every story of failure, there were 100 stories of success.

The new worldwide market place, often referred to affectionately as “the global village”, has continued to expand at a huge rate of knots, and today, online businesses can sell their products and services to clients in all four corners of the world, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year. The online marketplace never sleeps.

The important thing for any business owner is knowing how to tap into this huge potential, and the method that most successful business owners employ is internet marketing advertising. Internet marketing covers a whole range of advertising methodologies, including, but not limited to:

* AdWords – a program operated by Google and open to anyone to join.
* Advertisements called Banner ads that appear on many websites and articles.
* Those sometime annoying Pop ups
* Contracted out marketing, better known as Affiliate marketing.
* Simple online classified advertisements, like newspaper adds, but shown online.
* Advertising to targeted potential client through email marketing
* Utilization of popular keywords through pay per click advertising
* And the much spoken about search engine optimization

Depending on the nature of your business, and the target audience you are trying to reach, you will select the methodology that is capable of getting the best results for you; but most people tend to construct an internet marketing advertising campaign utilizing a number of different methodologies.

You will find a great deal of information freely available on the World Wide Web, telling you the benefits, and the downside (if any), of all of these different online marketing techniques. They all come with differing price tags, from low cost, to substantial sums of money; but whatever you do, make sure you fully understand all of the options open to you before laying out any of your hard earned cash. It is all too easy to jump in with both feet and waste an awful lot of money on advertising that does not give you any return; so tread carefully.

A lot of website owners actually hire specialist online marketing advertising experts. They can be quite reasonably priced, and because they are au-fait with all of the different methodologies, and what works best for the different styles of businesses and products, their advice can guarantee you results and can avoid wasting a lot of your money over a try your luck, trial and error approach.

One form of internet marketing advertising that is either altogether free, or quite cheap, is article writing. As far as search engines are concerned, content is king. So having plenty of original, informative articles around, on your website, or on social networking websites, or online directories, can reap real benefits and send lots of traffic your way. If you can write the article yourself so much the better, it is free. It costs only your time. But if you are not a good writer, you can hire online writers for approximately $5 – $6 per 500 word article. Check it out. This is a great way of internet marketing and is one of the cheapest too.

In order for any online business to be successful, internet marketing advertising is the key, so do a little research and see what the best and most cost effective methodologies are for your business.

Social media is the 800 lb gorilla in the room, but all aspects of online marketing are important, and the more pieces of the puzzle you use for your business, the more business you’ll be capturing. Many people believe that just having a website is enough, but is just having a building enough…even if its in the middle of a dark alley in a city where no one lives?

As a business owner you should start out by making sure that your website is not optmized for the business name, but the services that you provide. This way you’ll be getting traffic to your website for people looking for your services, not your business by name. If they were searching for your name, they weren’t new in the first place, they had to have heard of you from somewhere else first. The way that you gain more shares of the marketplace is by being noticed by those looking for your products or services that didn’t at first consider you.

Yes a flashy and nice website will help you to make sales, but if it isn’t properly optimized, and social media aspects are not integrated into the site, you won’t be getting very far. Chances are you’ll be spending thousands on a website that will bring you no business. You would have been better off buying a nice painting for your office, it might help you to close sales once you get people in the door, but it won’t help you get more people in the door. Get it?

We offer a free consultation, because we understand the complexity and confusion that comes along with trying to first get started online. Whether you just want to dip your toe in the water, or know how you rate against your competitors, or compile a full scale online marketing campaign, the consultation is where it all starts. We want to know your goals, and provide solutions for you to meet those goals, and there is nobody else out there that has the educations and experience like us. You’ve got nothing to lose, but if you don’t ever take that first step…you could lose your business to your competitors.

Interruption marketing is based off of interrupting potential customers into listening to a companies marketing messages. If you are sitting and watching television, you don’t sit there to see the commercials. These commercials are interrupting your television experience, and trying to get you to pay attention, but you aren’t interested in shopping for a car right now, or looking for a personal injury lawyer. They hope that SOMEONE is listening and might need what they are offering, but the conversion rates for this are despicable, usually way less than 1% conversion rates. This is the old way of marketing, and is a shot gun blast of your dollars just being sprayed among an audience of hundreds of thousands.

There is a place for interruption marketing however, and sometimes it is just necessary. With this type of marketing you don’t do it just for the sake of a high conversion rate, a lot of times if the campaigns are continually ran over a period of time it will help your company brand itself. The more times that people see your marketing messages on television, the more you will be recognized, and the higher the chance is that later on when they actually do need those services, they will think of you.

People see over 10,000 marketing messages per day. Our subconscious mind has learned to block them out. We don’t even see most of them anymore, its just like breathing. We have been exposed to continuous marketing that we never asked for, and don’t want to see, and out human anatomy is helping us to stop seeing them. Is this the type of marketing that you want to do? And then there was permission marketing…

Permission marketing is marketing that is being actively asked for at the exact moment, and delivered to the customer at that exact moment. As opposed to shotgun blast TV or Radio commercials, permission marketing is only delivered to those people that are actively asking for it RIGHT THAT SECOND. Do you think the conversion rates are higher than the others? Exponentially higher!

It works like this. You go to google, and you type in “House Painter Alexandria VA”. You are now giving any house painter in alexandria va the PERMISSION to market to you. You WANT to see different painters in alexandria va. You are going to purchase, and you want it now. This is a whole new ball game, giving small businesses the ability to market their business ONLY to those that are actively looking for them. No waste. Permission marketing is much more accepted by the customer, and they are actually HAPPY to see your advertisements and marketing. They want to know about you, and what you can do for them, and they have their credit card in their hand ready to go!

If you’d like to know more about Permission marketing and how you can use it for your business, product, or service, just leave a comment below. We love to educate, and we love the opportunity to share out knowledge with small businesses and marketing managers to help them to grow.

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As the owner of the top Internet Marketing Agency in Northern VA, I know the importance of a strategic plan for your marketing. Many small businesses start marketing like a shotgun blast, hoping for a flood of new business that will last forever with one yellow pages ad.

Come on now, we know this just isn’t the way that the world works. You need to ensure that you have a well built sales funnel, getting new prospects built into the top, warming them up throughout the middle, and closing them at the bottom…automatically.

Sound far fetched? This is the age we live in, and technology and the Internet have revolutionized the way small business should be marketing. Its not the economy that you should blame, its your marketing. Just like the locomotive was replaced by the car, old forms of advertising are dead, and if you don’t change with the times you’re doomed.

If your clueless, Google has a plethora of information on every aspect, but something this can be overwhelming. Think about outsourcing these efforts to professionals who know what they are doing.

Think it might be too expensive? You’re not thinking like a business owner. What is the lifetime value of a customer to you. Is it $100, $1000, $10000? These are the numbers you need to be looking at, then run your marketing campaign strictly based on the numbers. If you find a form of marketing that brings in more money than you spent, you’ve got a winner. Wouldn’t you like to put out a dollar and get two back. This is marketing, and this needs to be your mindset.

There have been earthquakes in this area, but never as big as this, but I don’t think its the end. I think its the beginning. Changes are happening all over the world, and its all about mindset, it can mean the glass is half empty or half full, and whatever you put into your mind is the truth.

That takes me to a favorite quote of mine, “Whether you think you can, or you can’t, either way you are right”, Henry Ford. We use these natural disasters and weather mysteries as a way to strike fear and make excuses, where is your mind at?

It’s the same thing in business. As a business owner, your most important asset is your mind. Do you think you can, or you can’t? Either way you’ll be right. Business is not all up, sometimes its down, but you’ve got to keep your long term focus.

Don’t let day to day things such as news and doom and gloom distract you from the goals you’ve set for yourself and your life. They are put here to test you, to make sure you really want it. I don’t know about you, but it’ll take more than an earthquake in DC to keep me from meeting my goals. I suggest you get your mind right.

Let me talk a little bit about how SEO works before I go into what I think is best to spend your valuable time on.

SEO works like this. The search engines don’t see how pretty how website is, or how ugly it is for that matter. It doesn’t care about what pictures you have on your site (for the most part) or any of the other fancy things that you’ve done to it to get it to look nice. The only thing that Google and other search engines see is the code of your site.

SEO is broken down into 2 parts. On-Page optimization and off-page optimization. In the old days, on-page optimization held a lot of weight, and it was easy to manipulate your page in a certain way and achieve great rankings with it. You could just stuff your keywords on the page or hide them in the background of the site and then you’d be ranking. Yea…that doesn’t work anymore. In fact it will get your site penalized or even banned from the search engines. On-page optimization, or the things that you do to your site to help the rankings, has much less weight that it used to, but it is still important.

On-page optimization helps the search engines to see what category your site belongs on. A big mistake I see people make is that they title their page the business name, not the business category. Now you are in a category all of your own, and the only thing that the search engines know you for is the name of your business. If you think about this for a second, this is dead wrong. The only people that will find your site will be those that already know you by name, which means they are not new business prospects. That’s a waste.  Instead title your page the business category so that Google knows that you’re a plumber, or a carpenter, or a dentist. Like I said, this is only a small part of the battle.

Off-page optimization is how the search engines really factor who you are, and where you should rank within the search engines. Basically it works like this, first they look at your site and see what category you belong in. Then it looks to see how many links your site has pointing to it to see where in that category it belongs. Essentially, the more links you have, the higher you will rank. The search engines count these links as votes, and the more votes you have the better.

The reason for this is that if sites out there are willing to link to your site, and they are talking about what you and your business does, this looks pretty good in Google’s eyes. Its no different than referrals in the offline world, the more people that are talking about your business the better, its no different here.

Now…SEO is a highly evolutionary process, and at this point, its not about just building simple links and blog posts anymore. Every day it is becoming more and more important to be putting out high quality content on a regular basis to get noticed. That’s why here at Dominant Approach we use online video to get attention for our clients. It does 2 things. First, the videos and other high quality content that we generate are popular by themselves, and drive traffic to your website. However, these pieces of content also link back to your site, taking care of your off-page optimization, or link building. The more videos and content you make, the more you dominate. Same concept as traditional SEO, but with our own twist that helps you to totally dominate your competition.

To learn how to start using the power of online video and SEO, download our free guide. You’ll learn everything you need to know about getting started, from equipment, to framing, to lighting, to uploading for maximum exposure. We’re in the business of putting out high quality content too, and this is just something that we’ve put together for you to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and start to see how the Internet can help you to generate endless leads for your small business.

As always, if you felt that this information was helpful, click the like button below. If you have any questions or want to discuss any of the topics that was written about today, just leave a comment below. To your success.

I want to talk about the 1 thing that people are doing wrong when marketing on Facebook, and how they could cut their advertisements in half just by making this one change, and they could raise their ROI for every dollar they spend by a very large percentage.

Many people that run ads on Facebook try to run them so that when the ad is clicked, it will take that person to their website. This is traditionally how PPC marketing would work, so it make sense that people are doing it this way, but by doing this, they are leaving SO MUCH MONEY on the table. Instead they should be making a Facebook fan page, and then marketing that page. This way when people click the simple “like” button below the ad, they will become a fan of your page and you retain that person for as long as they stay your fan (and as long as you are providing good high quality content they’ll never leave). Also, Facebook rewards you for keeping the traffic on their site, so they actually cut the cost of your clicks by half in most cases.

Think about the power of that. Before you were paying double to have someone click on your ad, and the only decision they had was to buy now, or leave your website.

Now when they click on your ad and become your fan, you can continue to market to them over and over and over again, and you paid half the price. Not only that, every time someone becomes your fan, their ENTIRE FRIEND BASE see’s that they liked your fan page, and if anyone in their friends list is interested in what you are offering, they’ll become a fan also. This is why marketing on Facebook is SO POWERFUL.

If you want more information on how to use Facebook or any other form of social media, we’d be happy to sit down with you and give you some tips on how to take advantage of the power of the Internet. Without it…you’ll be left in the dust, but with it, you’ll totally dominate your competition.

Get social, let me know what you think about Facebook marketing. Have you done it? Have you done other forms of PPC and failed? What have your results been, leave a comment.

Also if this post was helpful, just click the like button down below, share the wealth.

They use groupons, or other one time marketing offers, but don’t get the concept of building out a solid marketing funnel. The days of shotgun blast marketing are dead or dying, and the ROI for these types of things are atrocious. You must target your main audience with every piece of marketing that you put out there, getting the most bang for every buck that you spend.

Lets start with the top of the sales funnel. What types of things can you do to get more prospects into that funnel via the Internet?

First of all, before I start let me get something out of the way. If you’re not using the Internet to grow your business, you’re going to go bankrupt. There are few exceptions to this rule. If you are not using the Internet to get new customers, you are obviously not paying attention. Think about it, what do you do when you are looking for a local lawyer, plumber, pizza man…you are going straight to the almighty Google and typing in “Plumber” and then the city. Go ahead and try it yourself, see how your business ranks, and then tell me if your website is more than just a novelty item that you show to your friends. Go to Google, and type in the business name, then the area that you service, eg. Plumber Arlington VA.  If you’re not coming up, you’re leaving TONS of money on the table.  Here are a few things you can do right now to start to take advantage of the power of the Internet for your small business.

Google Maps – Google Maps is one of the best resources for getting new customers to find you. It it the first thing that people will see in the search engines when they search for products or services. Did you know that almost 40% of all searches on the Internet are done with intent to do business with a local company? Google Maps is a huge way to get in front of your prospects and on top of your competitors. Its easy, just go to http://www.google.com/localbusinesscenter and sign up right now. It’s free, and pretty easy. There are many “SEO” companies out there that charge a monthly fee of $200 or more for this, so go ahead and take advantage of it yourself for free.

Google Webmaster Tools – Google webmaster tools lets you submit your website to Google, and will give you recommendations of what things you can do to get higher rankings on your site. There are some awesome insights tools on Google Webmaster Tools, and you’ll be able to see a lot of what’s going on in your site, and it will even raise your rankings within the search engines a bit if you sign up and register your site. Don’t expect to be dominating the search engines with this alone.

I’ll add more to this post tomorrow, including how to use Video quick and easy to dominate the search engines, how to use social media to attract new customers month after month and also the top things you must avoid when looking for an SEO company to do it for you!

This perception often causes a great deal of confusion and can lead to ‘Analysis Paralysis’ as people spend months analyzing keywords looking for the perfect opportunity. As a result they never follow through to create a complete and profitable business.

Last week, a group of us were discussing this problem and came to the conclusion that the reason this misconception is still so prevalent is that in the past, focusing on quantity versus quality DID actually work.

In the early days of Internet marketing, if you placed a large number of related keywords on a page or included them in Meta and Alt tags you could often get rankings that led to traffic.

Similarly, in the early days of Google Adwords, it was possible to load your account with thousands of keywords and generate a steady stream of traffic to your site.

However, while this may have been the case in 2003, it is very important to realize that THINGS HAVE CHANGED.

The old approach was a ‘shotgun strategy’ in which you targeted a large number of keywords, took a shot and hoped for the best.

With the continuous improvements in search engine algorithms and the development of quality metrics such as Google’s Quality score, this approach is no longer effective.

The mantra of “The more keywords the better” is a thing of the past.

The alternative to the old shotgun strategy is a new ‘laser like’ approach in which you explore your market carefully and then zero in on a small subset of specific keywords.

old keyword strategy versus new keyword strategy

To understand why this laser focused approach is so important we need to examine something we call the ‘Iceberg Principle’.

According to the Iceberg Principle, finding a good keyword is just the tip of the Iceberg.

In order to transform a keyword into a genuine asset for your business, you need to undertake a range of tasks that most people unfortunately never get around to.

These tasks include:

On-page optimisation

Off-page optimisation

Obtaining high quality backlinks

Writing articles

Conducting targeted PPC campaigns

Etc.

The truth is that every one of these activities requires time and effort. Clearly, if you are trying to target thousands of keywords, following through on these activities becomes virtually impossible.

So, instead of generating lists containing thousands of semantically related keywords, here is the laser focused strategy that we recommend in today’s SEO environment.

To get started, use Market Samurai to generate a sample of keywords in your niche and then continually refine and filter these keywords until you find 5-10 keywords that have the following characteristics:

(1) They are highly relevant to your niche

(2) They have reasonable levels of traffic eg. 100 visitors per day

(3) They have acceptable levels of competition eg. Less than 30000 competing web pages

(4) They have low strength of competition ie. The top 10 sites in Google are not well optimized

Once you have identified and selected your target keywords, redirect your focus to the on-page and off-page SEO tasks necessary to transform your keywords into genuine traffic-generating assets for your business.