Dominate Your Local Market!

4. No search engine strategy

How many times have you used the Yellow Pages in the past year? Once, twice? How do you find what you need? For most people, the answer is Google, Yahoo or MSN. They turn to the search engines for just about everything.

So why are you spending big bucks on a Yellow Pages display ad instead of scaling it down and putting the savings into improving your search engine ranking? Habit? Love the phone company?

Today, every business, from multi-nationals to mom-and-pop locals need a viable and cost-effective search engine strategy.

What does that mean?

It means different things to different businesses. And that’s the beauty of online marketing. It can be tracked, tweaked, updated at any time, changed in mid-year or mid-plan. In other words, it’s flexible – and it’s cost-efficient.

A bad Yellow Pages ad is yours for the year. Change address, phone numbers or product selection and that big monthly Yellow Pages bill becomes an instant white elephant.

It all begins with an assessment of your keyword strategy. You can’t dominate every keyword in a market – and you wouldn’t want to. You just want to dominate the ones that bring you business.

There are hundreds of Search Engine Optimization companies out there. Some of them spam you with emails claiming to be abel to get you the #1 ranking in the search engines. Beware! Anyone can get the #1 ranking for their own name, but very few searches are conducted that way.

Under most circumstances, people search for WHAT they need, not who. And they search for something they need right now, which usually means instant business for the person they find.

One of our primary keywords (phrases) is “Dominate Your Local Market.” We just started promoting those keywords two months ago, competing in a National market.

Look at our results:

We have the #1, #3 and #5 position in Google. That’s the kind of results we like to see. And that’s the kind of results you need for your business.

The #1 and #5 rankings go to our services websites and #3 belongs to the blog that we use to publish articles like this – in fact it IS this blog.

How did we do that in just two months time?

The most important thing we did is decide on a set of keywords (in this case “Dominate Your Local Market!”) and use all of the standard strategies to get search engine recognition for ourselves for those keywords.

You can do this, too. It’s somewhat easier to get that kind of ranking for many local keywords and even the most competitive keywords can be massaged to give you great localized results.

The second most important thing is to get started. It takes some time to get to move up in the Search Engine’s rankings and the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll get results.

And once you get better results, you want to hold them. It’s harder to dislodge someone with top rankings, so hold on to what you’ve got and gradually work your way up.

So whether you go it alone or want us to help, get started today. This is one of the most important ingredients in your recipe to get twice the results at one quarter the cost.

3. Using free email services for business

One of the things that surprises me most in this business is how often this one is ignored. It’s a long-standing tradition, dating back to my first days in online marketing in 1991.

Back then, pretty much everyone had an email address from one of two sources, AOL or CompuServe. AOL’s email addresses were a distinct improvement over CompuServe’s, which at that time were a series of number (e.g. 71445,312@compuserve.com). AOL’s at least used real words, but could only be used inside AOL’s system.

How times have changed!

These days, the ability to have your own domain name (why you should own your own domain name) makes it simple to project a professional image while upgrading your mail service.

When a business uses an AOL, GMail, Yahoo, Hotmail or other free email account, it projects lack of professionalism. Now, don’t get me wrong. Those free email services are great for personal email, throwaway addresses and testing deliverability and readability of your outgoing emails – but they should NOT be used as your primary business email address.

If you’ve had one for years that your customers are familiar with, don’t get rid of it! Use it as your secondary email and give only the primary one at your own domain to new customers. You don;t want to lose people on either end.

Any serious business (or business person) should be using their own domain name as their email address. Let’s face it – Bob@MyBusiness.com looks a lot more professional than Bob@aol.com. You wouldn’t hand out a business card with the phone company or postal service’s info on it, would you?

One of the fears I hear expressed when this strategy is suggested it that the user won’t know how to set up their email, either on their server or on their own computer.

We set up a mail server on every client’s web server and we’ve walked many of our clients through the process of getting their email set up on their own computer. If you aren’t sure of yourself on this, please be assured that we can get you set up in no time.

Take a few minutes to read the article on getting your own name as a domain or use the name – or better yet the locale and business, e.g. danvillepizza.com – and then take action. GO to your favorite domain registrar (or OrangeCat’s domain registration page) and get it registered.

2. No email marketing strategy

This could easily have been Top 10 Online Marketing Mistake #1 – except you can’t have an email marketing strategy unless you have a website or blog – or can you?

Let’s start with the basics.

Why is it such a mistake to not have an email marketing strategy?

The answer to that question depends on whether you’d like to save up to 50% of your advertising budget and market more effectively at the same time. My feeling is that I’d rather have the money in my pocket. How about you?

There’s been a lot of discussion among online marketers about the falling effectiveness of email marketing. Most of the problem centers on the Internet marketing industry itself, where people get dozens or emails per day touting the same promotions by one of the “gurus.”

If you are on several of their mailing lists, whenever a “guru” has a product launch, you can count on being bombarded with numerous pitches by their affiliates. I’ve often sat at my keyboard with one finger on the “down” key and one on the “delete” key so I could quickly delete dozens of messages for the same product – without reading 99% of them. It’s the electronic equivalent of sorting your snail mail while standing over a waste basket.

And here’s a tip on “open rate,” one of the most overrated statistics in marketing. If I click on an email, even if I don’t read it, I have “opened” it and it gets counted. That’s like saying you “read” the newspaper lying on the seat next to – and you’re paying for that phantom reader as well.

But that is not the kind of email marketing strategy we are talking about here. We are talking about a list of confirmed subscribers – ideally customers who have bought form you before – but minimally those who have jumped through a hoop or two to get on your list.

Involuntary subscribers – those who made no conscious effort to be on your list – are about as productive as one of those legendary snail mail lists made up of addresses in the local cemetery.

But a list of current customers and those who’s like to be your customers is gold – real gold. And your cost of acquisition and retention is incredibly low. When you analyze the numbers involved, a local business without an email list is blinded to astonishing opportunity.

If you aren’t actively collecting the email addresses of all of your customers right now, every day is costing you money. We have some great strategies to turn one-time buyers into repeat customers and repeat customers into life-long clients.

No matter what your business is, it can be marketed much more effectively via email if you know what you are doing. If you don’t have a clue, it’s alright. Get with someone who does and who can guide you through it.

Let’s go through the bullet points:

1. You need to have an email list
2. Your list needs to be made up of “confirmed” subscribers if you want it to be effective
3. A small, targeted lists beats a large untargeted list hands down
4. You need to be able to incentivize your customers to both sign up and confirm the sign up
5. You need to find ways to make results “trackable” in better ways than falling back on “open rate”
6. What you do with list after collecting addresses is just as important as collecting them in the first place
7. An effective email marketing strategy could save you up to 50% of your traditional marketing expense
8. Email marketing is still the most effective type of online marketing and will be for the foreseeable future
9. Get started today

You actually don’t even need to have a website to use an effective email campaign – but it is much more effective if you do. Ask us about how you can start up a supercharged email marketing system.

Over the next three weeks, we’re going to explore the Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes made by local businesses. If you find that you’re making one or more of them, they could be holding back more than your online marketing strategy.

1. Not having a website or blog

This one may seem obvious, but stick with me for a few minutes because my intention is to go beyond the obvious and offer some new ways of looking at this.

The best solution to Mistake #1 is to have your own website or blog. And let’s take up a moment to clear up the website vs. blog confusion. A blog is a website. It just uses a software solution, such as WordPress, Moveable Type or b2evolution to organize the information on the website.

The term “blog” is short for weblog. A weblog organizes it’s content in reverse chronological order. A standard website organizes content in a hierarchical structure.

Whew! OK, so why is having a website (or blog) so darned important? It’s simple really – a website is the gateway to all aspects of Internet marketing. There are dozens of Internet marketing strategies and tactics that can drastically cut your advertising expenses while increasing your campaign’s effectiveness. And most of the best ones work for local businesses as well as or better than for businesses with national reach.

Let’s look at a few of the website options available to enable you to Dominate Your Local Market.

One-page website – a one-page website is often referred to as an online sales letter. In another variant, a one-page website can give the essential information quite effectively. Various marketing elements can be included on the page with a single call to action. The downside might be a lack of focus in the page content that might result in less effective search engine optimization.

Mini-site – A mini-site contains a few pages to organize content in a logical manner. It’s a simple but effective way to enable the developer to produce a search engine optimized website.

Full-scale website – If you have too much content for a one-page or mini-site, your site will ned to be organized with multiple pages in order to provide search engine optimized pages and effective organization for site-mapping.

Blog – We explained the mechanical make-up of a blog earlier, so now we’ll explain it’s advantages. Once a blog is properly set up, it can be added to, updated and automated to create an online marketing machine.

Search engines L-O-V-E blogs because they tend to be updated on a regular basis – so be sure to update yours (or have it updated) to gain maximum advantage. A blog can be added to a current website or built as a “stand-alone” website.

They are flexible, economical and can be easily adapted to any business. Anyone without a website – or with a static site that doesn’t rank as well as they’d like – should consider adding or moving to a blog.

Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes #2-#10 will be coming over the next two weeks. To take action now, call Orange Cat Productions at 859-544-9005.

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