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.

Small businesses are now profiting largely from SEO content targeted to specific interested parties. SEO needs to be applied systematically, and it needs steer away from bedeviling, empty content that tricks people into landing on a specific webpage. Reputable sources have recently proven that companies that try to trick people, by falsely providing services, their success tends to be short lived as people begin to catch on.

However, there are some effective methods that can garner success, in regard to SEO practices, that can skyrocket the success of small businesses. There are campaigns that offer keyword research and optimization at low cost. As long as the small business is legitimate and provides tangible products or valuable information, in addition to the patience and money required for up-front for SEO services, then success will surely follow. There is an entire science in online optimization that focuses only on keywords, through research of previous user linked word choices, and predictions of ones to come. Another portion of SEO for small businesses relates to a summary of the page: this information needs to describe the small business, its functions, products, etc.; therefore, when relevant data is keyed into a search engine, the subsequent webpage surfaces.

Effective SEO implementation is a vital component in every small business because it adds another dimension to marketing. The webpage may be structurally perfect, and amazingly delivering beyond aesthetic expectations, yet if nobody ever sees it then it might as well not exist. Through SEO advertising, in addition to tagging, retagging etc, the efficiency of the links will be examined next: strong links produce more traffic. Upon completing the process, the small business is submitted to the monster search engines for approval. Lastly, comparisons from pre-SEO influence to post SEO treatment will be analyzed by staffing to ensure reliability.