Online Marketing for Small Business Owners

Marketing your local business online comes down to the foundation that you build in order to boost your marketing efforts. Most people get SEO firms just showing up and ramming $1,000 a month fees & services in their face without much worry about the unique situation of your business and the goals of your company.

Don’t get me wrong the service and fees of SEO services and internet marketing consultants are indeed worth their weight in gold if you get results and a decent return on investment. The problem is many businesses can market their local business effectively online just by having a solid foundation with a couple of key things in place first.

If you are in a competitive industry I recommend that you do go further and hire a local internet marketing consultant or SEO firm to help boost your marketing efforts to get the results you need.

So how does a local business use the internet to get more customers?

It all starts with building a foundation for the online presence of your business. You can do this yourself or hire someone to do it faster with less hassle.

So what is this foundation and how about those 4 easy steps? I wrote a more detailed short book version that you can download from Amazon here  Marketing Your Business Online in 4 Easy Steps but let’s discuss the overall basis of the book.

The foundation is built on knowing where your customers are searching for you online. The search engines (Google in particular) is where the majority of people begin looking for local services & products.

This foundation will vary according to your industry, for instance if you own a lawnmower/landscaping company then Craigslist is a place for your business to have an active presence on. If you are a plastic surgeon who is only after high end customers then Craigslist is probably not the place to put much time and effort in.

Part of your foundation is having a presence where your ACTIVE customers are, whether it’s google, craigslist, facebook or ebay. Now there are 4 active keys or steps that apply to every industry and they are important in regard to how effective your internet marketing will be for your local business.

These 4 steps will help make a solid foundation so the online presence of your business is standing on solid ground. We want to build our business on concrete and not quick sand. This foundation is Panda & penguin proof, and any other zoo animal or forest creature that google comes up with proof as well.

Let us Zoom in on the search engines and see what they are serving up to their searchers who are looking for local businesses, and then we operate our online marketing through that lens.

Here are your 4 steps to building a solid foundation for your local business using the internet.

1. Google Places – Claim your places page right now if you haven’t already. This is critical to any local business in any local industry/niche. Google places is the high life of a local search and are displayed at the top of their search results. It is important to have this exposure for your business. Start your places page here => Place page.
2. Call To Action- Simple enough, you must have a call to action on your website, marketing pieces, and advertisements in order to get those interested in your service to reach the desired outcome (which is doing business with you). A call to action can be “call now” or “fill out this form”, or even “buy now”. You can’t assume that people know what to do when they come to your site, and the attention span of most visitors is split seconds and they are gone and off to the next business. Have your desired CTA displayed prominent for your visitors to see or you will lose business and waste a bunch of time and resources.
3. Local Directories- simply registering your business with a few local directories adds credibility to your business and citations that are needed to help boost your google places page. Directories lead potential customers to your website or business. To name a few big directories, check out Yahoo Local, Bing Local Listing, Yelp.com (mobile phone search traffic). The more the better and there are dozens of local directories.
4. Press Releases- Get the word out about your business, if you don’t no one else will. Press releases are news worthy, like using TV and newspapers,  and are often on the front page of google within hours. Prweb.com is an awesome PR service, a good free PR site is Prlog.org. Press releases bring more credibilty and traffic to your site.

Doing those 4 steps, and doing step 4 on a monthly basis will keep your business buzzing online, and will add good exposure to your business . This foundation is the launch pad for the rest of your online marketing efforts including social media. We will tackle pay per click (PPC) advertising, and social media in another post.

If you would like to dig deeper into your local business foundation  then check out the full report below…

 Marketing Your Business Online in 4 Easy Steps

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