Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing lets you get other businesses to drive prospects to your website. Some affiliates may allow you to set up a store on their domains, such as companion shopping sites.
Tag: small business
Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #8
Social Networking Sites – Cultivate new business through social networking sites where members share stories and recommend products and services.
Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #7
Mobile Marketing – Many smartphones and mobile devices provide web browsing, GPS, cameras and video capabilities. This means you can develop creative promotions with text messages and location-based social networks.
Using the Internet to Grow Your Business – #6
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.
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.