If you are the owner of a business in the Washington DC or Northern Virginia area, be it a “conventional” one, or an online one, then internet marketing advertising is the best way to promote that business, to get your brand known worldwide, and to explode your sales.

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.

So as I’ve been quoted saying before, if Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country on the planet. Facebook is in my opinion not only the best channel for online marketing, but marketing entirely. They have more data on each user than any other place that you’ll find to market to your potential audience. What this means is that the only people that will see your ads will be those that are likely to buy. You are able to narrow down your marketing by age, by demographic, by geographic region, by educational experience, by associations, the possibilities are almost endless.

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.

There is a common misconception that in order to develop a successful online business you need to be targeting hundreds or thousands of keywords.

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.

Everyone knows what SEO is right? Search Engine Optimization, of course. But does the average small business owner understand the importance of using SEO in its advertising practices? Probably not. Owning a small business nowadays is hard enough without having to compete with larger corporations too. That is where understanding the importance of SEO in small business advertising comes in to save the day.
SEO, put simply, is the ability to have a business listing rank in the top search results of a search engine. There are many companies out there that do this while charging a fee for their services. But with many small business owners not even being able to draw their own salary during the economic crisis the world is currently in, it can be hard to justify the expense. That is unless the small business owner understands the importance of SEO in small business advertising.
Becoming a top ranked listing on the major search engines will drive new, unique, traffic to a website. The higher the ranking on a search engine, within the first page usually, will most times result in a click through, therefore driving traffic flow, and possibly new business and sales, to the site and the small business itself.
The most important reason to employ SEO services is because all of top ranked business listings on the major search engines are suing these services, whether they are large corporations or small businesses. The SEO services they employ are probably what got them in the top listings in the first place. And the small business SEO services are most likely what has kept them there as well. Small business owners need to realize that just because they own a small business that doesn’t mean that they can’t compete equally with larger ones. And by using SEO services, it gives the small business the ability and the edge to not only compete with but in some cases, actually beat out the competition.

What makes us different from an “SEO” company is the fact that we can give our clients multiple page 1 listings for multiple keywords in their local online market.

I enjoy the internet, and also solving problems that help people to grow and succeed, in turn helping me to grow. The reason I like internet marketing so much is because of its track-ability.  Any campaign may have its points of failure, and by testing and tracking and making changes, most of the time these campaigns will be profitable.

Because of the current economy, combined with the advantages of the power of the internet, many small businesses are turning to online advertising to market their business.  These businesses don’t have the time or expertise to effectively do this themselves, and this is where my company comes in.

My target customers are established small businesses, clients that have a high dollar per lead profitability. These businesses will ideally be those that are currently using traditional forms of advertising unsuccessfully, and would have the ability to grow their business up to 100% in the next 90 days.

I am an expert at evaluating the sales funnel. It is important to look at the entire marketing picture when marketing.  I’ve been trained by some of the best internet marketers in the world, all make millions from the internet every year.  Because of the techniques used to market for my clients, I am able to make them the local celebrity in their market by using the internet as a platform of mass media.