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.

There are a lot of tools on the market to help you make edits to your own web pages. The problem is has always been that they are both expensive and difficult to learn.

Editing and creating new pages from scratch or from a template just got a whole lot easier… and less expensive. KompoZer is an Open Source (free) WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) HTML and web page editor. If you can use Word®, you can use KompoZer.

And to make using KompoZer even easier, there is a complete video tutorial series that will take you from total newbie to expert in a few, short, entertaining lessons. The Konquer KompoZer Video Series is now available and you can view a sample video from the series here.

KompoZer is available for Linux, Mac and Windows systems. We use KompoZer on an almost daily basis here at BobStovall.com and highly recommend it.

You can download KompoZer for FREE here

More info on the Konquer KompoZer Video Series here

If you were alerted to this post by email, you can thank the Subscribe2 WordPress Plugin. And it could make a big difference in your bottom line.

Let’s look at a few of the ways using the Subscribe2 plugin on your WordPress blog could help you attract more business. And that’s what you’re looking for isn’t it? More business even in this tougher environment?

Don’t have a blog? No problem – read on…

All of this assumes that you have a mailing list of customers email addresses or that you will start one as soon as you see the incredible power of email marketing. And we are NOT talking SPAM here… we are talking about contacting customers you already have – BUYERS – who just need to be reminded that you are there and who will be thrilled to hear from you.

If you are a restaurant, you could be using Subscribe2 to automatically send your daily specials to your list of customers. Restaurant marketers who have implemented this have seen their revenues increase steadily over time.

If you are a deli or sandwich shop, you could be sending a menu with daily specials, your phone and fax numbers and reminders that your deliver (if you deliver).

If you are a Realtor®, you could be sending updates every time you list or sell a property and remind them that, with prices down, now is the time to buy. A Realtor® in the Midwest used this system to sell 84 properties in 8 months, even in this slow market.

If you are a flower shop, you could use this system to remind your customers of sales or upcoming holidays and offer them a gift or a discount for buying from you.

If you are a retailer, you could notify your customers that you are having a sale or celebration, offer a discount to those bringing in the email, or tell them about new product lines or special events.

If you sell cars, offer special discounts or hold special events and let all of your customers know about it.

These are just a few suggestions for a few types of businesses. The point is that you can send special offers to proven buyers for an incredibly small investment instead of shotgunning with an expensive newspaper ad.

You do need to have a WordPress blog to take advantage of this opportunity to bring in thousands of dollars of business. The good news is that this is a very inexpensive add-on to your current website, or it can be your entire website if you don’t currently have one.

We DO have one secret that can more than double the effectiveness of this strategy at no additional cost.

Call us today to get started – 859.854.3243

Some things are so obvious we don’t even see them right in front of us – we don’t see the forest for the trees. The reason why is that we are too close to the thing at hand. An example:

The other day, I had a person who was interested in doing business with my company ask me if we accepted credit cards for payment.

“Well, of course we do,” I answered.

“Well, it doesn’t say so on your website.” Oops! I tell my clients every day that it is important to put everything you do on your website. Every product you sell, every service you render, every way a customer order, every method of payment, etc., etc.

But I simply forgot to put credit card logos back on my own websites during our last makeover. Well, there was another one of those “do-it-right-this-second” jobs that pop up and throw our neatly planned schedules into disarray.

Here is a screen capture of the sidebar from OrangeCat.net before and after we added the credit card logos.

So, I spent some time getting it done, but the logos are now on the websites. But in thinking about this, I realized that it proved two very useful advantages of marketing online.

1. Mistakes can be corrected quickly
If I had left some essential information out of a yellow pages ad, I’d be stuck with it for a year. If it was an ad in a newspaper, it could greatly diminish the value of that ad and correcting it would require the expense of a whole new ad.

2. Mistakes can be corrected inexpensively
If I made a mistake on a printed piece, I’d have the expense of correcting the copy and the expense of re-printing. With online information, I still have the expense of correcting it, but there is no re-printing bill.

When times are tough, as they are now, you have to squeeze every ounce of performance out of every marketing dollar. Now is the time to begin to master online marketing and reduce your expenditures while building your business.

Call us today to get started – 859.854.3243

You can’t dominate your market without a strategy.

When you start planning your marketing strategy, there are some basic questions that you need to answer before you proceed. The same is true of online marketing.

So many would-be Internet marketers overlook these because they fail to see the power of the web to promote their business, product, service – or themselves for that matter.

But not honestly and fully answering these four questions will keep you from reaching the full success potential of your marketing campaign.

The four questions are:

1. Where am I now?
2. Where do I want to be and when?
3. How do I get there?
4. How do I know if I’m getting there?

Why are these important?

1. Where am I now?
Before you can decide where you want to go, you need to determine where you are. In other words, your can’t get there from here unless you know where here is. Here is your starting point. An accurate appraisal of where you are know will begin to clarify what you need to do in order to move on. It’s the “You are here” X on the map.

2. Where do I want to be and when?
Next you need to know where it is you want to go and when you want to get there. When you leave on vacation, you know your destination and have a pretty good idea what time you should arrive. And when you set goals in your business or your life, you need to have the same information available. Know where your want to go and when you will get there helps bolster your confidence in the outcome. It also helps those who will work with you to get you there have a clear picture of how to proceed.

3. How do I get there?
Once you know the starting point and the ending point, you can plan the journey. Nothing will go exactly as planned, but those who have a solid plan will meet with fewer obstacles and they ones they DO encounter will have less of a detrimental effect on their journey. The “how” needs to be carefully thought out because once you start down the road, you want to take as few detours as possible.

4. How do I know if I’m getting there?
The plan needs to have mileposts that let you know if you are on track and on schedule. A goal with no mileposts is not a goal at all – it is a wish. Having no markers on your road, how would you know if you were making any progress at all – or possibly be going in the wrong direction?

If your goal is to Dominate Your Local Market using the Internet as an efficient and cost-effective tool that will cary you into the future, we can help you answer these four questions.

And please remember that the more detailed the answers to the questions and the sooner you answer them, the closer you are to achieving the goal. Call us today – 859.854.3243

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