My Buy Essay

Posts Tagged ‘design’

Now more then ever profitable opportunities exist to promote your local business on the Internet. Through search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, email marketing and local listings, you can connect with a willing audience. Your customers are turning to the Internet to find local products and services. If your competitors have an online presence and you don’t, guess who gets to take home the prize

Below are several crucial techniques for promoting your business regionally:

Local Listings

Even if you do not have a web site you can still promote your local business online. For example, you can list you business and contact information with the local search engines of Yahoo and Google. It takes an hour at the most to get a free listing on the two most popular search engines. Your listing will include an interactive map that can direct customers right to your front door.

Another important resource that accepts free listings is Verizon’s Superpages.com, as does the local version of AOL.

And don’t overlook regional and industry specific directories. Many accept free listings, or charge a nominal fee. Once again, for most a web site is not a prerequisite.

Pay Per Click Advertising

If you do have a web site, than you need to promote your local business through Pay Per Click on both Google and Yahoo. With Pay Per Advertising you bid on keyword terms that your potential customers would use in a search. An example is “Tacoma Wedding Photographer.” The cost per click depends on how competitive the term is. You only pay if a prospect clicks on your text ad and goes to your site. This is referred to as performance advertising, where you only pay if the ad performs.

The appeal of PPC is you can get it going within an hour. You set the budget, you determine what keywords are relevant, and you determine your price per click. You can also turn it on or off in an instance. The general consensus is that PPC generates a higher return on your investment over traditional offline advertising.

Search Engine Optimization – Free Traffic

For those that like a challenge there is search engine optimization. SEO is the ability to optimize your web site for high search ranking. If you can optimize your site properly, you can benefit from an endless stream of free, targeted search engine traffic. It takes time and effort, but the results can take your business to a whole new level.

If you are selling nationally SEO can be cutthroat. For a local business it can be relatively easy to rank for terms that relate to your business and location. (ex. Richmond Wedding Photographer)

Local Email Marketing

Another tremendous marketing tool is email. For virtually nothing you can communicate with both prospects and your existing customers. Email is an excellent method to convert prospects to customers. It can also significantly increase the lifetime value of your existing customers by simply alerting them to upcoming sales and promotions.

Knowing the power of email communication, I find it hard to believe how few use it to promote their local business. Now listen up, start collecting your customer’s email addresses today. I can guarantee they will respond favorably to joining your list. We all like to be informed on bargains and special offers.

The future of your local business will depend on the Internet. It is estimated 25% of searches online are local in nature. The Internet is the perfect resource for finding local products and services, which is why your customers are searching online. Now is the time to get your business positioned to reap the rewards.

If you work on your own, this article is for you. Whether you provide services or have your own store, you know you need to make yourself known by potential customers. The great question is how to do it. You probably don’t have tons of money to invest in publicity. Besides, not all forms of publicity are the right choice for all businesses. The right publicity for you depends on the characteristics of your business. In this article we will explore how you can take advantage of the web to draw customers to your business.

The first thing you need to get is your own website. This can be a simple website, just telling visitors what you do and allowing them to contact you, either by email, phone or by filling in a form. It is important that your site has a nice design according to your occupation, because it will provide the first impression users will have of your business. You may contact a web designer to develop your site. If you do it yourself, pay attention to the styles, colors and layout you use. Some hints:

• neat pages look better than over crowded ones

• use colors to highlight phrases or areas you want users to pay special attention to

• the site navigation (menus) must be easy to understand and use by all users

• keep in mind that people use different browsers, and if possible, view your site with two or three browsers to check how it looks.

• design your site to be search engine friendly. You will need search engines to direct traffic to your site, so you need them to be able to index it.

Once you have your website, it becomes the Internet branch of your business. That’s the beginning of your Internet presence. Now you need to register it in search engines and directories so users can find it. You will find global directories like DMOZ (.dmoz.org) and there may be also industry-specific directories where you can register your business. Search for directories in the major search engines and register your site in as many directories as you can. Inclusion in some search engines and directories is paid, it’s then up to you to decide whether it will be a good idea or not to pay for it. It depends on your business, on whether your market is highly competitive or not, and of course it depends on whether you can afford it or not.

Next step is to generate backlinks to your site. It means to get other sites to link to your site. This helps your site get a better page rank in search engines, and also exposes your site to more people. In certain cases, link-exchange programs may be helpful. You have already created some backlinks by adding your site to the search engines and directories. Now, you have other ways to add more backlinks:

• write articles about your field of expertise and post them in article directories, including the url to your business and a brief but tempting explanation of what you do in the resource box.

• post in forums related to your field of expertise, trying to be helpful to others so people see you know what you do. Include your url in your signature. Don’t spam the forums, that won’t look good at all. Just post when you really have something useful to say.

Another way to promote your business is to offer a periodic newsletter in your website. This way you send an email including interesting and useful information to your subscribers, once a week, or once a month, for example. If they really like it, they will refer other people to it thus making your subscriber base grow.

You can also promote your business every time you send an email. Just add your url in your signature. This way, every person to whom you send an email will also have a link to your website.

There are also pay-per-click advertising programs in the web, major search engines like Google and Yahoo offer them. In these programs, you publish an ad, and search engines display it. You pay when someone clicks on the ad to be directed to your site. If you decide to use these programs, you need to experiment with them to get the best benefit with low cost.

Last, but not least: you need to add content to your site periodically, so visitors come back and search engines rank your site better. Both people and search engines like sites with useful up-to-date content.

I see this everywhere and still cannot believe that people do not get it. Content is still king on the web. The most important thing you will ever do for your website is to put in good content. Great content will get you links and your position in the search engine results will be because of the content you put into your website.

Hundreds of back links will not get you ranked well with poor content. Great content will get you good keyword positioning with or without back links, therefore, content is still the most important aspect of your website. Great design, flash, graphics, and a cool banner will not get you ranked well for your keywords and phrases. Great content will!

Let’s first look at the content in your website. Images are great with alt tags. That helps. But it is the text on the pages that, when done correctly, will help your search engine results. This text is also what will convert your customers into sales.

This text is what your customers will read or not read based on it’s quality. This same text is what the search engines will analyze when they decide how relevant your WebPages are to the search phrase you wish them to send you visitors from.

Now, let us talk about article marketing. If you know about article marketing at all, you know you will be submitting articles all over the web. The links in the author bio at the bottom return visitors to your website if they read and like the articles, you write or have written for you.

Just having your articles in thousands of article directories is not the goal of article marketing, although there are article-marketing gurus out there who think it is. The goal is for webmasters to find those articles and place them in their blogs and websites. If they use your article, their website or blog is likely related to the same topic as your website.

You are looking for these quality links. The links for just being in the article directories do not hurt you, but they do not help nearly as much as those from related websites do.

Your other hope is that thousands of people read your articles. Do you really want people to read poorly written articles and associate that poor quality with your website? Well-written articles get people to read them all the way to the bottom where your links are located. Well-written articles reflect well on your website.

If the articles are of great quality then likely your products and services must be great as well. The reverse is also true in the reader’s minds. If the articles are written poorly, then likely your products and services are of little or no value as well. It is not only about the number of keywords and phrases placed into the article folks.

With all of that being said, I still find all over the web, especially at freelancer websites, people going in and saying things like; “I need 400 articles written for SEO and I’m willing to pay $1.50 per article.” Or they say something like; “I need someone to write content for my website and I’m only willing to pay $10 per page.”

I really try to refrain from telling people they are, well . . . stupid, but I am finding it harder and harder each day when I read this stuff.

They will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have their website designed so it looks really pretty, but the text, the stuff that will actually get good search engine results and sales, they don’t want to spend any money on.

Writers that know how to write text that not only is appealing to the reader, but that is also written with the keywords and phrases in mind, are worth being paid well. The moment you start hiring better writers and paying for text that converts sales, you will begin to be successful on the web. That cheap content is not going to make you any money.

A website that is beautiful but gets no traffic and sales may as well be an ugly website. An ugly website that ranks well in the search engine and that makes sales gets more beautiful by the dollar.