Archive for February, 2011
Local Marketing Strategies that Get you Traffic and Customers
Feb 24th
Local search marketing is important if you want to expand your client or customer base within a limited and specific geographic area. It could be a town, parts of a large city or a few adjacent towns. Basically, we’re talking about a small business. It may be a local contractor, dentist, cosmetic surgeon, chiropractor, lawyer, or body shop.
Here are five local search marketing tips designed to increase online exposure, website traffic and customers walking through your doors. Implementing these proven strategies will greatly enhance your web presence.
Social Media
As far as local search marketing is concerned, the use of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and Digg, are essential. You can use these sites to create interest in your small business, to stay connected with your clients and to attract more business.
Utilize social media in a productive manner, sharing information, creating a question and answer forum or informing people about changes in your company or in the profession. Social media is designed to create an interactive community that has certain interests in common.
Daily Blog
A daily blog can have a lot of positive outcomes. It can keep people coming back to your website to garner insights and information. After it’s been established for some time, it can increase your position in Google news and can help create backlinks to your site that will enhance your Google rankings.
The blog should be informative. You may use it to voice your opinion, educate or engender discussion. Although it does not have to be daily, it does help if you can offer ongoing quality content that is search engine optimized.
Free Articles
There are well over 500 free article directories that small businesses can use to post informative pieces related to their services or products. Free article directories will not take articles that are merely advertisements. The content must be useful to consumers. These directories can be very helpful in local search marketing.
The articles should be related to your business and there are various ways for you to link these articles back to your website. Like your blog, the pieces should be SEO friendly. Another useful aspect of these articles is the fact that other sites may use the content as long as they retain your contact information. Suddenly that one article in 10 directories can be on 30 other sites as it garners you hit after hit.
Reviews
Positive reviews that appear on Google Maps can be a huge help when it comes to local search marketing. Ask your clients or customers to add a review on Google. The more positive reviews you can get the better. It is important that the reviews be legitimate. Don’t make them up.
Videos
As far as local search marketing goes, short instructional videos can be very powerful in attracting new customers and in driving traffic to your site. You may post your videos on YouTube for free and link them to you site. The videos don’t need to be long-a minute or two will do. Posting three to five per month will increase your traffic and get you noticed.
Becoming a Local Resource
Local search marketing is about driving up your search engine rankings by becoming a useful resource for your community. Make sure the content you provide offers quality information and is search engine optimized. Both will go a long way in making your site popular and a magnet for qualified leads and customers.
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How to Get More Facebook Page Fans
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How to Get More Facebook Page Fans
Feb 20th
Facebook has become an important tool for doctors, professionals and other entrepreneurs to grow and market themselves. Many small businesses have now started using Facebook Fans Pages to communicate activities taking place in their business like an event, promotion, seminars, appreciation day, and other things of interest.
Although most businesses recognize that using a Facebook Fan Page can be an effective medium to reach-out to potential customers and clients, many times they don’t see the number of fans increasing as they would like. This can cause a sense of frustration. So, I thought I’d give you 7 simple and effective ways of getting more fans:
1. Email signatures: This one is the simplest method which takes only 5 minutes or so to set up, but costs nothing and is quite effective. Include details about your Facebook fan page in your email signature, and every time you send an email out your signature will remind people of your Facebook fan page.
2. Invitations to your mailing list: As a small business owner, you must already have a mailing list. Why not send an email to your list asking them to become your Facebook fan? This type of targeted mailing will help you get loads of Facebook fans from resources that you already have and can tap into easily.
3. Invite users to become Facebook fans in other emails: I applied for a Delta Sky Miles credit card recently, and was quite surprised to see that their confirmation email had a link to become their Facebook fan. At first, I was confused, but then I was impressed by their dedication to social media.
Most businesses send confirmation emails about orders, and other such emails which only serve to inform their customer that the order has been shipped or that they have been approved for a credit card or something like that. Why not take this opportunity to ask them to join your Facebook fan page?
4. Ask your Twitter followers: This one is a no-brainer as well . You already have a lot of Twitter followers who are interested in what you have to say. Isn’t it natural that you ask them to become your Facebook fan too? Tweet out about your fan page and you will see good results over time.
5. Connect your website to your Facebook fan page: It is not realistic to believe that people will look-up your brand on Facebook on their own. You need to trigger that and a good way of doing that is by connecting your website to your Facebook fan page. Put a link on the sidebar or your blog to your Facebook fan page and you will see your number of fans trickle up every day.
6. Run contests: If you were planning to run contests or a give-away, why not add a condition of becoming your fan on Facebook and boost your social media marketing while you hand out freebies? Such events are a useful platform to give a one-time boost to fan numbers.
7. Join the fun: You could do all the above and still not get enough fans if you are not active on Facebook. You need to join the conversation, tag photos, post updates, and even post exclusive content. If people don’t feel that the community is engaging and alive they will give up on it.
Hopefully you will take immediate action on these tips and give your Facebook fan page a boost in the amount of friends that are engaged in your business activities.
(This was guest post by Samuel Awosolu. He blogs mostly about internet marketing and creates tutorials on traffic generation for newbies. You can visit his website at www.traffic-is-king.com)
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Want your online marketing COMPLETELY done for you you every month? Click here for more information on how to fully automate the internet marketing and growth of your business.
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Before Buying a Business Landing Page, Read This
Feb 10th
Landing pages for small businesses seem to be gaining a great deal of momentum this year and for good reason. Most conventional websites are lacking this crucial component, hence the reason why many professionals aren’t getting new customer calls from the web like they want.
Traffic is vital for any website or online small business marketing campaign but conversion is where the magic happens. Getting a visitor to take action once they’re on your page is the primary objective in the end. You could be getting hundreds of people each day to your site, but if they don’t do anything once there, it really doesn’t matter. This is where a professional landing page comes in.
One of the major mistakes 95% of businesses make is that they don’t have a strong offer or call to action. Just having a newsletter sign-up form on the site won’t get you to capture very many leads. Since the average person only remains on a site for a few seconds, it’s imperative to show them an offer that they cannot miss.
Provide the potential new customer an offer they cannot refuse in order to acquire their email address. You might have a free report to give away on “The 5 Secrets You Must Know Before (fill in the blank).” You may also enter them into a contest to win a free (fill-in the blank) as an extra enticement. Check with your state licensing board first to see what you can and can’t offer for free.
The bottom line is that your email list is the life-blood of your online business and small business marketing.
Most doctors and professionals are not even building an email list of potential new customers effectively. This is a big problem as 99% of the people will not just come to see you after they visit your website once!
So, to recap, have an opt-in form on your site that someone cannot miss. Offer them a report or incentive in exchange for their contact info. It’s also a good idea to have a video that immediately starts-up and plays when a visitor comes to the page. Why? It’s strictly an attention grabber AND you can tell the person what to do in the video.
Business landing pages should be fairly simple, having a headline, video, and an email opt-in form. Too many websites out there have a bunch of clutter which only confuses potential new customers. The less choices the better and the more likely they’ll take the action you seek.
Doing these things I’ve suggested here will make your landing page bullet-proof and allow you to capture more leads and convert them into new customers in your office.
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Want your online marketing COMPLETELY done for you you every month? Click here for more information on how to fully automate the internet marketing and growth of your business.
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Before Marketing Your Business Blog, Read This
