Dominate Your Local Market!

Here are a few HubPages hubs with useful information on marketing via social networks. These articles cover Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Warning: Don’t Ignore These 5 Rules of Twitter Marketing!

8 Things Every Small Business Should Know About Social Media

How To Get Followers On Twitter

Twitter: 30 Simple Ways To Supercharge Your Effectiveness On Twitter!

Facebook Groups – An Absolute Must for Web 2.0 Marketing

How To Create a Facebook Application

5 Ways to Use LinkedIn To Drive Traffic to Your Website, Blog or HubPages

Top Ten Tips For Getting the Most From LinkedIn

“Static websites are dead – or at least on life support. If you want to market online today, your visitors expect more than boring, static, unchanging content and you should, too.”

That’s what I said in a post the other day. And it prompted a question from one of my readers who asked, “Do you mean that a static website has NO value at all?” Hmmm, good question.

What I really meant was that no one should be building new static websites in today’s Web 2.0 world. And businesses that are using static websites should now be taking a look at upgrading.

It’s simply a case of giving the visitors what they want. And what they want are fresh, updated content, audio, video, interactive elements, etc. And an old tenet of marketing is “Find out what they want and give it to them.” So let’s get back to my reader’s question.

Does a static website have NO value at all? If you’ve been following my posts, you’ve observed that I’ve said several times that ANY website is better than NO website. It your website (static or dynamic) gives visitors the essential information on your business, it is worth having.

So, what’s the problem?

Google. Yes, Google. Google is both the problem and the opportunity. If you have a website that hasn’t been updated since 2002, you may hold your own in a small market where competition is limited… for a while.

But many of you may have noticed that when you search for a local product or service, even using the city in the search, you often get a bunch of out-of-town results, many of whom rank higher than local businesses for that search phrase.

That is most likely because Google (or Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine) is indexing changes and updates to those sites and not to the one that has been unchanged for the past few years, despite the fact that is meets the location criteria better.

But there’s the opportunity. Upgrade your online marketing and capture the top positions for your keywords and it will bring you more customers and more income. It’s that simple.

Again the question – are static websites dead?

If not dead they are on life support as i previously mentioned. And it’s time to call in the family because the monitor is about to “flat line”.

The whole purpose for a business to have a website is to bring in new customers and encourage old customers to visit and buy. And the best way to do that is by using a direct response approach to your marketing.

No matter what your business is selling, it can sell more of it using direct response marketing. And online is the ideal place for that.

Call Bob at Orange Cat (859-544-9005) for a free initial consultation and find out how you can bring in more customers and more business.

“Are you having enough SALES CONVERSATIONS? If you don’t have all the business or clients that you want, maybe you simply need to have more sales conversations. That was a challenge I laid down to my Marketing Mastermind group last month, and one couple jumped to action with IMMEDIATE results.”

That bit of advice came to me from Bernadette Doyle of ClientMagnets.com.

Although Bernadette was talking about direct face-to-face selling of services, I couldn’t help but think how it applies to what we do. When a local business posts an update to their blog, comments on Facebook or Twitter or sends an email update to their list, they are having a “sales conversation” with their market even if they aren’t overtly selling.

That’s because all of us like to do business with those we know, like and trust. The process of relationship building is helped along each time we do one of those things.

But to work really well, these things have to be done consistently. Tony Robbins puts it this way: “It’s not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.” It can shape our lives and it can shape our businesses.

One of the great things about marketing online is that your target audience needs to do something to respond to your message – if you are doing it right. The act of taking action means they will most likely pay closer attention to your message than they will using passive media.

So if you’re not as busy as you’d like to be, or if you’re not making as many sales as you’d like, think about what you can do to have more sales conversions, either face-to-face or using your online marketing strategy.

Start taking advantage of this strategy today and you’ll see results in no time.

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Click to visit ShortSaleCertified.com

A short time ago one of my clients, ShortSaleCertified.com in Michigan, requested that we place a small video testimonial in the sidebar of his WordPress template. We built a video from two video clips and an audio file with a slide and set it in place using the WordPress Video Widget.

It worked great, but the client wanted it to autostart on opening the page and here needed to be a poster image inserted when the video wasn’t playing. After fooling around with the coding of the plugin, we got the video to autostart, but there was a problem. Because the plugin appears on every page of the site, the video would autostart every time someone went to a new page – a surefire “visitor annoyance feature”.

How did we solve it? By inserting some conditional code into the plugin, we were able to have it autostart only on the home page and not on any others. Have a look at the website and try it out.

The point of all this is that WordPress is a very customizable Content Management System (CMS). We have never had a customer request that we couldn’t fulfill with a little custom PHP coding – at least to date.

Don’t let anyone sell you on the idea that a static website is a “set it and forget it” marketing plan. Do that and you’ll be the one who is forgotten. WordPress gives you Web 2.0 interactivity and a very flexible framework to build on. Static websites are dead – or at least on life support. If you want to market online today, your visitors expect more than boring, static, unchanging content and you should, too.