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.

In Business, and especially in the busy and competitive city of Washington DC, Internet Marketing is very important to get ahead. Many small businesses are starting to understand the importance of having a presence online but they don’t really know where to start. Should it be PPC, social media, twitter, SEO, a new website..its hard to know!

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.

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.

Over time as a consultant I can’t help but notice the common theme that small businesses all have the same problem. They don’t know how to get new clients and customers into the doors, and keep them coming.

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!

Marketing Goes Digital – By Thomas Typinski

The world of marketing is going through drastic changes.  Like almost everything else, marketing is going digital, it is providing great benefits to businesses small and large, and the way they build and maintain relationships with their customers.

Large corporations have successfully been using the power of the internet for years now, and in this recent recession, small and medium businesses are turning to the internet to create a personalized marketing message to their prospective customers.  Traditional forms of advertising have seen huge losses; yellow pages scrambling to bring their customers into their online database, and newspapers losing 2.8 billion dollars in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2009 alone.  Meanwhile advertising online is seeing steady growth, in fact, more growth this past year than ever before.

The reason for this transition is the flexibility and reliability that online marketing offers.  Businesses are able to use different forms of media; video, news, press releases, and articles online, and they are able to track their results the very next day.  This is almost impossible with other forms of marketing, providing businesses with a more targeted approach, spending their advertising dollars only on that which provides a positive return on investment, and cutting out anything that is not.

Online advertising completely changes the way that customers receive these marketing messages.  Traditional forms of advertising are based on what is called “interruption marketing”.  These are marketing messages that are compelling enough to distract viewers from what they are currently watching or reading, to pay attention to what businesses are trying to market.

Online marketing is much more targeted and focused.  This type of marketing is called “permission marketing”.  People turn to the Internet for information about a product or service, and use search engines to do so.  The searcher will only find exactly what they are looking for, and if marketed correctly, will receive marketing messages written specifically for them, precisely when they are actively looking for it.  You can imagine the difference in conversion rates by using these methods, sending the return on investment sky-high compared to the traditional shot-gun method of traditional marketing.

Another benefit to online marketing is the fact that it is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and is fully trackable throughout the entire process.  If for some reason a marketing message that you’ve posted is not successfully converting, you can simply change this message instantly, and you will be able to monitor the reactions of the viewers to know if you’re message is effective or not.  When your online marketing system is sufficiently optimized you will have a system in place that automatically brings leads into your business, or sells your product with little additional effort, creating a predictable positive return on investment every single time.

It is predicted that online marketing will see very large growth in 2010.  As more and more businesses start to realize this phenomenon, they too will be marketing their business on the Internet to capture the attention of customers actively searching for them.  As you can imagine, as more businesses enter this space, competition in these markets will become more and more saturated, and prices of advertising will go up.  As technology and innovation increase, you can also expect to see small businesses becoming local celebrities in their market just by using simple video cameras and posting to YouTube, or writing articles about their product or service, something that was literally impossible with the budgets of small local businesses.

The Internet is giving the power back to the people, allowing the customers to cut down on the chatter of untargeted marketing messages, and small businesses the chance to gain the success that they first went into business to achieve.