Be Seen Everywhere Online (SEO) By The People Who Not Only Need You – They’re Searching For You… even if they don’t know your name

Your business can’t grow if customers can’t find you. That is the number one issue of small business marketing – BEING FOUND.

It is not enough to simply have a website. Online marketing is not a case of “if you build it they will come”. You need to able to position yourself in front of customer’s eyes and direct targeted traffic to your website.

BUT HOW?

The easier you make it for search engines to find, read and understand what your website relates to better the results they’ll give you. The key to this is keywords.

When you search for something online you want to find what you’re looking for – otherwise you wouldn’t bother trying. So search engines like Google are in the business of connecting people to content through keywords. The keywords they search and the keywords on site.

Keywords are what link your website contents to the searches people are typing into Google.

The best idea is to invest in quality keyword research before you even begin building your website. When you know your market, what they search for, the keywords they use then you can build your content around it. You will ensure you website is search engine optimized and avoid the risk of sending it into oblivion.

No one sets out to waste money. Unfortunately a lack of knowledge has meant many very expensive and beautiful website languish unseen online.

It’s More Than Just Being Seen

I met a PI at my local coffee shop this morning. (I admit it took me a moment wracking my brains until I remembered Magnum PI – ah PI!!)

After overhearing a conversation he asked if I knew about computers – I said I did websites and online marketing. He looked crushed but we kept talking.

Anyway it turns out he had a problem taking stills from hidden camera video to incorporate into reports. It’s OK with the still camera but just not the video. My suggestion – my favorite tool snagit! After all he can watch and pause on screen, so he can take screen capture and being PC based snagit is the easiest tool I know to make that easy.

It got me thinking about the tools we use and how much we come to depend on them.

I wonder what your favorite tools are? Leave me a comment and let me know.

Some of my faves are
WordPress – can’t imagine building or maintaining a website in anything but wordpress these days.

Animoto – even just for the fun factor! So easy to take still and short video to make animated video to music (it was animoto that caught the PI’s ear)

Aweber – so simple to build a list, set up email marketing campaigns and broadcast messages.

Snagit! – although now I’ve moved to the darkside of the mac so don’t need it anymore.

There’s a whole host more but this time I thought I’d hand it over to you – tell me what your favorite tools are for anything computer related. What do you use that makes your life so much easier?

Market Reserach - Vital to Transform Dreams into Reality

What Is The Reality?

As my internet marketing mentor would say “it is easier to ride a wave than create one”

His message is simply is there an existing market for your product or service? If there is great, run with it because you have a much greater chance of success. If there isn’t think very carefully because you need to create a wave and that takes many resources.

If there is an existing market people already understand they need the product or service. if there is no existing market you need to actually convince people of the need before you can begin to sell.

Easy Market Research

Are there already magazines on the subject? If there are people are already spending money in the market. Great.

Take a quick look at Amazon for books on the subject especially dummies guides. They are a great guide about whether you have a market.

Go online and see whether there are videos and/or forums relating to your idea. This is a great indication of market existence.

Use the Google keyword tool to type in keywords related to your product or service. Google will tell you whether anyone is searching for it. If they aren’t it is not a good place to start.

Do a search online and see how many results there are. Pay careful attention to the number of sponsored links. If there are sponsored links that is good because it means advertisers can afford to and consider it worthwhile to spend money in that market.

Beware though if the page is saturated with sponsored links it may be a highly competitive market that will be hard to break into.

These very simple free checks are a good indication of whether there is an existing market you can leverage to transform your great idea into a great business. Best of all you can do it from your desk without going anywhere!

What Next

Look at the competitors in the market.

What does the competition have to offer?

Are they missing any key points?

Is there an unfulfilled gap that your idea fills?

What offers do they have, what language do they use, what emotions are they targeting? Copy details into your own little swipe file for reference later.

To check out your competition you can take advantage of SEO Quake toolbar for Firefox or Google Chrome. You can search for information on their site in Alexa.com or Compete.com.

If you are really serious you can look at Market Samurai which allows you to research keywords, check the competitiveness of the market, the commerciability of keywords, find and publish content and check your rankings when you enter the market.

I love Market Samurai and have no hesitation recommending it to even beginners because their training videos are that good that you can use it with their instruction even if you have no idea about keyword research!

Planning

When you know you have a market and you know you can compete then you can start planning your business.

Anything before this is starting out in the dark.

So before you start work on a great idea – work out it’s potential to be something more. Then set about focused planning. Analyze the market in more detail considering your place in it, analyze your idea and analyze yourself.

About yourself – do you have the skills, drive and determination to make it happen. Are you committed to the project enough to withstand setbacks and trials along the way. Save yourself the time and energy deciding this before you start!

Good luck and enjoy turning your viable ideas into valued success stories

Websites Can Be A Big Job

If you have a website online you probably have realized that this is a big job, and not something the most inexperienced person can always handle. That’s okay, which is why companies and businesses are available to you for things like small business marketing, guaranteed website traffic, targeted web traffic and organic SEO. These SEO or Internet Marketing companies are there for you to use as you see fit, but it’s also a good idea to take their advice when they suggest certain packages to you, especially if you are new to Internet Marketing.

Ask an Expert

These guys have the education, knowledge, and experience to guide you in the right direction so you can start receiving traffic to your website. You have to get visits to your website. I don’t care if you are selling batteries or if you are selling cars on your website, if you don’t have visits, you won’t have sales. It’s as simple as that! Tactics like guaranteed website traffic, targeted web traffic and organic SEO are all utilized to make this happen. Not only will your website be sent to people that are interested in whatever you are selling (a product or a service), but these tactics will also make your website show up in the search engine result pages.

Be Found Online

You know those little websites you see when you search on Google or Yahoo? That is thanks to the efforts of these small business marketing companies. This is what you want and where you want to be if you have website online – on the first 1st page of the engines. If the Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimization is done correctly, your website will show up using your keywords whenever someone does a search for that keyword. So, if you do things like guaranteed website traffic, targeted web traffic and organic SEO on top of content creation, social networking and social bookmarking and your keywords are about computers, when someone does a search for your keyword, say Acer Laptops, your website will show up on the search engines.

Very nice! On top of these businesses offering all these marketing tactics some will also offer other services as well. Frankly, this is really smart on their part because people like you usually like dealing with one or two sites for their websites and companies online. When you start dealing with 5 or 6 it starts getting confusing. So, find a one-stop-shop that offers marketing, traffic and other services such as teaching you how to build a website. If you don’t want to be taught how to build a website and you think this is too time-consuming and confusing, you can also have them build the site for you.

Your website is ultimately the backbone of your web presence. It’s something that everyone sees when they click through so it’s important that it looks professional, and that everything works correctly! To know more.

Marketing online versus offline is quite different. Frankly, I prefer online small business marketing over offline simply because of the ease and the convenience. You have so many options available when you get into small business marketing tactics!

Website Traffic

First you have guaranteed website traffic. These targeted web traffic packages will send guaranteed website traffic right to your website. The traffic, depending on the place you buy the traffic from, should be targeted. Why? Well for example, if you have a website that is geared towards pets or dogs, you wouldn’t want to buy traffic that is geared towards visitors and consumers that are interested in automobiles.

Targeting Relevance

It’s irrelevant, and an irrelevant or non interested visit is just plain ridiculous. It’s a waste of time, money and resources for everyone involved. If you buy targeted web traffic, the link will be sent ONLY to people who actually want to see it. This means you will get visits from people who are genuinely interested in what you are selling.

On the other hand, you can buy untargeted traffic, but make sure you use it for general sites where the “purchase” or sale doesn’t matter. For instance, a lot of people these days have mini sites with ads on them for PPC such as AdSense. The traffic or type of traffic you send to a site like this, doesn’t matter really.

You just want people to visit the site so that they click an ad or show an impression or click a link. Organic SEO is used by NOT buying anything such as bought traffic. Instead, you would use other small business marketing tactics to get targeted web traffic.

These tactics include, but are not limited to Article Marketing, Content Creation for web content, sales pages, blogs, etc. social networking, social bookmarking, video creation, and much more! These are all used to GET people to your website for product sales, to get them to use your services, AdSense and PPC, mini sites, pay per download tactics and so on and so forth.

Spoiled for Choice

You really have a lot of choices when it comes to online or Internet Marketing. Some of the sites online that offer these marketing tactics will also offer other services as well such as web design which INSYNRG.

Some of us are technically inclined, some of us are not. For those of us that aren’t, there are people, like us, you can hire to do everything for you!

The Smartphone Intelligence survey of the first quarter 2010 is a warning to local business. Local business needs to get online and be smartphone friendly.

Smartphone Local Search – A Powerful Lead Generator for Business

Smartphone shopping really does put consumers in easy reach - if you have a smartphone friendly web presence that is

Social Media and Gaming

The other smartphone user behaviors identified by the survey were the use of social media and gaming. Social Media is relevant to business.

Not surprisingly a growing proportion of smartphone users post and read Twitter (33%) and Facebook (14%) from their phone. Interestingly only 5% become fans of a company’s Facebook Fan Page on a smartphone.

The Take Home Message

Make it easy for smartphone users to find you from their handsets. Again the message is don’t underestimate the power of Google with people most aware of Google Mobile (66%), followed by Citysearch (30%), Mobile Yellow Pages (29%), and Yelp (17%) as their search app. options.

Compete, a Kantar Media company, quarterly Smartphone Intelligence survey provides behavioral and survey-based insights into how consumers are using iPhones, BlackBerrys, Android devices and other smartphones.

This week began with a story that can only be described as bitter tweet. A celebrity in Australia has taken to a gossip columnist on Twitter. This is not the first time that a celebrity has tweeted controversial, negative, angry or personal tweets.

Social Media

To tweet or not to tweet. Instant access to broadcast thoughts brings opportunity and risk

Social Media Issues For Business

Every day there appears to be a new call for business to not only be online but participating in social networks. Where there are benefits there are also risks. Happy customers tweeting about how great you are is a great ego boost. An unhappy customer venting with vehemence is a nightmare snowball that can create an avalanche of complaint.

For every fan page you can have an equal and opposite hate page. You don’t have the same censorship or control of your message.

What about employees? An employee tweeting about a great day in their fantastic workplace can be great employer PR. When one starts to rant online about the terrible day, or break privacy laws, hinting about famous clients, or stupid things people have said they can potentially land your business in very hot water.

Social media filters have exacerbated this in some workplaces where employees use their own technology in their breaks and consider their updates to be personal without regard to the organisation.

What would happen if we ever had to apply honestly filters to likes on facebook pages. Take a look at many business pages or organisation fan pages. Scan the people liking and see how many appear, reappear, work there, or worse manage their marketing. Almost like the people running the page think we are too stupid to notice the artificial and contrived nature of the likes and responses.

Be Prepared

Much of business is not prepared for what they will find or what they will do when they find it!

I remember searching information on social media in business.

I found a page on the use of social networks for small business run by a large computer firm. I clicked through to their social media presence to find several pages of customer complaint about service and response. These included statements from people who were no longer resellers because of these issues. The big problem there was nothing from or for the company even trying to address, solve, stem the tide. They only seemed to be showing evidence of the customer service their customers were complaining about.

Have a plan – know what is out there – be prepared to participate even if it’s negative or hard.

Action Plan

Develop a social media policy and a social media plan. Take into account the opportunities and risks. Remember their have been prosecutions from social media so you need to be prepared and apprised of the law.

Establish a point of contact. No matter what happens make sure there is a person or board who manage positive campaigns and also emergencies should any arise.

Know the law, the risks and obligations of using social media in your strategy. It will be interesting to watch whether social media risks lead to social media insurance policy clauses.

The important thing to remember is that life can turn in an instant to become bitter tweet.

Need help with your social media marketing? You can get help here

Many people these days have small businesses online. They work right from home, they have their laptop, home office, and all their business “gear” right in their home office. This is what I do. I love it. I get to literally work wherever I want, as long as I have a laptop and an Internet Connection – or even just my iphone.

Sadly, however, even though a lot of people do have businesses online, many fail. The main reason? They are not educated in or have no knowledge about small business marketing.

First and foremost, it doesn’t matter how awesome your product is or how much money you spent on the site design. If you aren’t incorporating small business marketing ideas, no one will ever come to your website. If no one comes to your website, there is a big chance (unless it’s a fluke sale), that you will not make one red cent from your business.

How could you? It’s almost like planning a party, making all the food, but not inviting anyone or sending out invitations. You might have that one fluke visitor that shows up out of the blue.

Not for the party, just for a visit.

Now see, if you had promoted the party, you would without a doubt have as many people as you wanted at the party. Think common sense! Small business marketing includes an array of services.

You can do these yourself, but as with most other services out there, they exist to make your life easier. So, why not make your life easier? You can let someone else concentrate on the marketing, and you can take care of more important things.

Small business marketing includes four major aspects.

First, you must consider the traffic. While I wouldn’t suggest anyone to count on JUST buying targeted web traffic, it is a good place to start. The site you buy the targeted web traffic should have some kind of a policy for guaranteed website traffic. This means if you don’t receive the traffic you bought, they will make that wrong a right, in whatever way they can.

Targeted traffic is used to increase sales. Send a group of people that don’t like dogs, to a website that sells dog leashes, and its sort of a lost cause for you and an annoyance for them. Targeted web traffic allows you to buy relevant traffic for your industry.

Second, you must consider the search engine optimization. You have to nurture and feed your website. One of the ways is with optimization or search engine optimization. This will allow you to optimize your website for the best results and placement on search engine pages.

Definitely an essential part of having a website online and getting people to your website.

This will also allow you to rank for specific keywords relating to your website.

Third off, you need website presence. A way to let your visitors see your professionalism.

You have a business-like design, the site is user-friendly with navigation menus, all the links work correctly, etc. This all has to do with website design and coding. However, if you are like the other 89% of people online, chances are you have no idea how to build a website.

No problem! We can help by teaching you how to build a website or better yet, build one for you.

Lastly, you need to consider Networking. This is pretty easy, but again, if you don’t have the time and you want someone else to do it for you, there are providers, like us, that offer Social Networking services. These providers will “promote” your services or products on all the popular social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook, Myspace, etc.

These four tactics are essential to your survival online. Do them, do them daily or weekly, and I can almost guarantee you will become more successful online!

If you own a website, whether it be an e-commerce store front or a brand representation of your company, you absolutely need to have a few different marketing aspects in play. First off, it’s important that you get targeted web traffic.

That is targeted people coming to your website that are truly interested in whatever you are selling. For example, if you are a Real Estate company and you want prospective clients coming to your website to find Real Estate properties, then you would want real estate buying targeted web traffic.

You can also get untargeted traffic, but what’s the point?!? Getting people to your site that really aren’t interested is a big waste of time and money. Make sure when you are looking at buying targeted web traffic that the site offers some kind of a guaranteed website traffic policy. And make sure it’s real people going to your website, not just bots.

When someone can make an offer on guaranteed website traffic you know they are legit. If perhaps you don’t receive the traffic you paid for, they will either make good on the offer or offer your money back.

Next, you need to consider organic SEO. A lot of people are really confused about how to optimize their websites and what organic SEO is. If you are one of those people, its okay. This is the reason there are so many sites online that will do organic SEO for you.

This service is going to allow them to optimize your company and your website for the search engines. This will result in better placement on the search engines, which is of the utmost importance! By the way, these sites that offer organic SEO, will also offer other small business marketing tactics and services for your website.

For example, I am not a website designer. I can build them, do some coding, but for the most part, I need help making them beautiful. Since I know site design is important for a business and I know that my web design abilities are not enough for most business websites, I work with designers that know how to build a website.

You need traffic, you need optimization, you need marketing and you without a doubt need a nice site design that is user-friendly, so when people come to your website you look more professional!

I hear so much emphasis on getting to page 1. There are people obsessed with page 1 of Google. I understand it, as a newbie internet marketer I went through this. It is easy to get trapped by the excitement of the challenge.

BUT is growing your business about getting to page 1? Will page one bring new customers, return customers or make you more sales?

Not always. It depends what you are on page 1 for! I know of companies proud as punch to be in the number one spot. Further investigation sometimes shows this is solely for their business name. Unfortunately not many people are actually searching for that online.

There are so many keywords that will not increase sales. There are plenty of keywords that don’t even get searched.

I know myself there are times I am just searching for knowledge. I don’t want to buy anything I am just researching a topic. In that instance you could place as many ads in front of me as you wanted and I wouldn’t buy.

You can relate to this right?

Then there are the times you are desperately searching for a product or service. Most of us search for different types of words when we are seeking to buy.

Page 1 really only matters if you have targeted the right buying keywords for your market – otherwise it can just be about the ego of getting there not the success of making sales.