Group Buying – Connect with new customers through programs that offer multiple buyers collective purchasing deals. There are many popular group buying sites available to use. But be prepared to offer your products at significant discounts. While you can set the number of buyers required to sell at certain levels, if you don’t sell anything the site could remove you as a vendor.
Category: Internet Marketing
Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #5
Geotargeting – Geotargeting simply means advertising to prospects in specific locations – which could be very useful, for example, if you sell dresses only in Dallas. One way to get started is to create a listing on Google Places. Geo targeting in internet marketing is the method of determining the geographic physical location of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on their location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP or other criteria. The example of the dress shop in Dallas can be extended further to other retailers such as car dealers who only want shoppers from their area to see their web pages.
Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #4
Display Ads – You’ve probably seen the dancing aliens; that’s a display or banner ad. Do-it-yorself display ad builders, including Google Adwords display ad builder can help design your ad. You can also distribute your display ad via ad networks and ad management systems. While some would deride the dancing aliens saying its similar to the dancing cigarette pack from the 50’s, it still attracts attention.
Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #3
Contextual Ads – Contextual advertising takes display ads to the next level, by placing them on sites related to your offerings; for example, if you sell sporting goods, your ad may perform better on sports-related sites. Services are available that automatically distribute ads to sites based on the content of those sites.
Things to Keep in Mind When Doing Keyword Research to Attract Customers
Many people can create a long list of the top keywords manually But the question is: are these the right keywords for your business? You have to choose carefully the terms you are going to use to attract customers and to describe your business to them so they buy. Remember, you only have one shot at this, best to get it right the first time.
Keywords are those words that you want to use in your content that your targeted market uses to find you in a Google search. You want to choose the terms which rank well but have a low competitor rate in the search engines because these are the terms that buyers use. General terms attract tire kickers, specific targeted terms attract buyers.
Many small businesses cannot compete in the world of high competition general search terms for a variety of reasons including being new to the Internet, little time to develop needed content to create links back to their website to name a few. Thus, it is very important to do your research carefully so that the keywords you choose to use in your website and other web content will actually produce the desired result.
You can come up with a list of possible words to use using a number of free keyword suggestion tools available on the internet. You can choose to use one keyword or multiple word keywords and you can get traffic from these words, but these are the expensive highly competitive keywords that will require much time and work to produce results.
Long tail keyword phrases are those terms I spoke of earlier which can effectively target your buying customers. Research will show you that prospects will likely type in these multiple word phrases giving you more and better chances of getting quality ready to buy customers to your site. These people have spent time looking for you and are interested in what you do.
The question is: Are you ready to tell them why you and not the other guy?
There are 4 things you need to do that will make your keyword research more:
- First: Find out the needs of your prospective customers. This information will make your online marketing campaign successful.
- Know what you’re about. Define your company, its products/services and find those keywords that are suitable to your mission.
- From your list of keyword phrases select those that you think are the most fitting and effective words. Only then will your targeting efforts become more specific.
- Consider your competition when doing your keyword research competition. Your ability to compete will also depend on what keywords you used in comparison to your competitors.
Keep in mind that driving traffic to your website using SEO keyword research is only part of the process. Getting traffic to your website is only part of the battle. Upon arriving you have to convince. More on that later.
Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #2
Search Advertising – Search advertising is a way to place online advertising near search engine listings. With Google Adwords you can deliver your message at the moment someone is searching for the type of product or service you offer. By choosing keywords that relate as closely as possible to your offerings you receive the most likely prospects interested in your offering. With PPC ads, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. The neat thing is that your organic listing doesn’t have to appear on page one, but your ad can.
Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #1
Local listings and classifieds – Create your business listing on as many relevant business directory sites, like Merchant Circle or CitySearch to ensure that consumers searching for nearby businesses find yours. Some listings allow you to promote offers such as sales and new products. Customers who review these sites are usually locals looking for a good deal. Customer review sites are basically local directories similar to Yelp that allow your customers to express their opinions on your products/services.
Billboards
Passing by a big billboard along the roadside I noticed how simple it was…It simply said that the company name and that it’s burger was number 1 on the market. It made me instantly aware that billboards exist only to reinforce brand recognition and is mostly for well known brands. If your product/company is new the last place you should be spending your marketing dollars is on a billboard. Billboards use the scatter gun approach in which they hope to hit something, in this case drivers going by, that would be interested in what they’re selling. Reinforcing brand is perfect for larger well known products such as Coca Cola, but not so for the newest widget on the market.
About Dad
I’ve been thinking about my dad here lately. He passed away when he was 62. Died in his sleep. When I go I hope I do the same. It seems a rather pleasant way to die. Go to sleep and never wake up again.
Mom died after 3 days of suffering a debilitating stroke. She and Richard Nixon got the same type of stroke on the same day. They tried to save his life, mom just suffered. She did a lot of babbling in mostly incoherent mish mash of words. A lot of names, some I knew, most I didn’t.
On the 3rd day the doctors felt she was real close to passing and they asked us if we wanted to perform any life saving procedures. Mom had written out a DNR and a living will. She had given my little sister, Judy, power of attorney should she become incapacitated. You know, even with that DNR and the living will stating that no heroic measures were to be taken, the doctors still asked her what they wanted us to do. Judy then asked me to decide. I went with her wishes. Mom really hated Richard Nixon.
Anyway, back to dad. I think that when he died he really didn’t need to go. I mean, his health was bad, but not bad enough for that to be the reason he died. I think he made a conscious decision that he no longer wished to be a burden on his family. For him, he could no longer be the man of the house. He could no longer provide for his family. He was no longer of use and couldn’t do what was expected of him as a man, a father and a husband.
You see, he came from a world where the roles were defined. There was no gray area, even though he was surrounded by it. As a man, a father, a husband, he was expected to do his duty. He was the provider of the family. You just did it, no questions asked.
At the time of his death he had been on oxygen for 6 years, unable to work and provide for his family. He was getting social security and I think he got a small pension.For him, he had become what he apparently dreaded the most: a burden on his children.
We kids didn’t mind taking care of him. After all, he had raised us kids. Powdered our butts, picked us up when we fell, disciplined us…well, ok, he didn’t. But that is a story for another day. But he never saw it that way. And so he went peacefully.
My dad delivered newspapers from the time he was 13 years old up to his retirement at 56.
Well, time for bed. From time to time I will muse some more on thoughts about my dad.
Basics on Blogging
Made the following presentation to the 3×2 Networking Group this morning on the basics of blogging.
Many customers, friends and family ask me all the time for advice on how to get started in blogging. While I could go on and on about everything one could do to successfully blog, it could prove to be overwhelming. So to make it easy, I will start out with some basic information and add to it from time to time.
- Decide what you’re going to blog about. Keep in mind that there are literally 100s of millions of bloggers worldwide. If you’re going to attract the right readers you best know what you’re talking about and be passionate about it.
- To host or not to host – You need to decide if you’re going to sign for a freebie blogging site such as blogspot or blogger.com or if you want to set up an independent blog on a web server where you pay for the hosting services. I pay to have this blog hosted. It cost around $6-$7/year. With a freebie site you have to be prepared for two things: one, you don’t own your domain name. Your domain becomes something like this “blogtitle.blogger.com”. Should you decide at some point you want to strike out on your own, you will lose all the content you spent perhaps years building up. And you have to let your audience know where you went. Second, you have to put up with their ads. Frre doesn’t really mean free.
- Host your own – Offers more flexibility because you “own” the turf. You can monetize the site (topic for another time), your content is your own and your audience stays with you (so long as your good). It costs money, but its money well spent.
The best software when hosting your own blog is WordPress in my humble opinion. The hosting company I use set up my site with the software already installed. When inside the admin part of the site I can set my theme and a variety of other configurations. I will discuss these at a future blog post.
Watch for more tips and tricks to help you get started. Mike and I also conduct seminars through the Illinois Small Business Development Center at McHenry County College.