NC Internet Marketing Blog

Actually, it’s probably closer to 1% of your advertising that works, at the most. Your newspaper ad, radio commercial or direct mail piece might reach 100,000 people and if you’re really lucky, it gets you a hundred customers… but you’d only know that if you actually had a way to accurately track the results.

It still amazes me how many business owners spend tens of thousands of dollars on advertising without even trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t.  

Most simply rely on asking their customers “So how did you hear about us?” and just make a mental note of which response they get the most instead of actually keeping track of the responses in a spreadsheet or notebook. Of course this also assumes that you can actually get your employees to ask the question on a regular basis and that your customers actually remember how they first learned about you. Fat chance!

There’s really no excuse for it since there are lots of cheap and simple ways to track your offline advertising including coupons, special offer codes, specific website addresses and trackable phone lines or extensions. Yet most of the business owners I meet don’t utilize them or track them properly.

The good news is, on the Internet, EVERYTHING is trackable and testable. You can precisely determine:

Honestly, the amount of data you can capture and analyze is overwhelming. Luckily there are only a few that are critical to monitor on a regular basis.

Adding this tracking functionality to your website is really simple too. All you typically need to do is copy and paste a small snippet of javascript code to the bottom of each page on your website.

The cheapest way to start tracking these statistics on your website is to use Google Analytics since it’s completely Free and is one of the best website analytics tools on the market. You can get a free account thru your existing Adwords administration interface or by going to http://www.google.com/analytics if you are not yet an Adwords advertiser.

Once you create your account you simply enter your domain name and Google will give you the code to paste into your website pages. Check back in 24 hours and as long as your website has gotten some visitors, you’ll be able to see your stats.

We actually have our own analytics tool that we use for our clients that is a lot easier to use than Google Analytics and provides more information in an easier to understand format. We also provide trackable phone numbers that you can use both online and offline to track your response from specific advertisements.  If you’re interested in either of these services just email us at tracking@gearedlocal.com

Getting as much qualified traffic to your website is definitely one of the most important factors to your online success but in the same way that just having a website doesn’t do you any good if no one can find it, having a website that doesn’t generate new leads or customers doesn’t do you any good no matter how much traffic it gets. (unless your business model is to get paid when people leave)

Therefore, the other thing you want to make sure you do is to test different variations of your landing pages so you can determine which combination of elements generate the highest number of leads or sales.

Google’s Free website optimizer and the landing page software we mentioned earlier (http://www.landingpagetool.com)  both allow you to test any combination of content to find out what leads to the most conversions. You will get a detailed report which shows you exactly which combination of elements worked best.

The elements you should test are:

Testing is crucial to your success. You should always be testing everything you do. You never know which tiny change can have a dramatic effect on your results. So before you start spending a lot of money to promote  your site, you should really make sure that the page you send them to is converting as good as possible. Note: You can still buy traffic to test your page, just keep it throttled down at first.

Technorati Tags: analytics, coupon advertising, new media marketing, newspaper advertising, radio advertising, small business marketing, split testing, website optimization, yellow page advertising

One of the major keys to dominating your competition is to have as many listings as possible on a search engine result page.

For example, if you do a search on Google for my main keyword phrase: nc internet marketing you’ll likely find that out of the 9.5 MILLION results found, at least 5 of the Top 20 results are either my main company website (Cybermedia Marketing) or other business profile pages about my business. The top 2 are for my main website, and 3 are on other local website directories.

Having this many results for your core keywords creates a position of authority that is very difficult for your competitors to match:

1)      It positions you as the expert in your market and the most logical choice. If you own 25%-50% of the top 20 listings for your given keywords while your competitors only have one listing (if any) you’re surely going to dominate.

2)      It forces your competitors to have to spend money on Google Adwords in order to show up on Page 1 of the search results at all. That is, if they’re even smart enough to know what Google Adwords is – which we’ll cover in Secret Tactic #5.
(Note: you’ll see my paid ad listed as well which I buy just to dominate the page even further, but I obviously don’t have to.)

3)      The more websites you have ranked on the search engines and the more links you have pointing to your main website, the more likely it is people will find you elsewhere on the Internet as well.
This is why the internet is called the World Wide Web and that’s exactly how you should look at it from a marketing standpoint. You want as big a WEB of sites as you can create capturing visitors and leading them to your main website. Just like the image on the cover of this book.

There are too many different business profile websites to list here but we’ll give you one of our favorites that almost always gets a Page 1 organic ranking if setup properly…

MerchantCircle.com – Merchant Circle is a great website to list your business on not only for the direct traffic the site gets but also for the love that Google seems to give it’s business profile pages.

You’ll notice that it’s my 4^th ranking in the image above and it even beats out the long established local business portal Citysearch.

MerchantCircle also has some great social networking features that allow you to meet other business owners in your area and nationwide. This creates a great opportunity to find and develop relationships with new potential business partners, vendors, and customers.

One word of caution though… a lot of these local business portals make their money be selling you ads, enhanced listings, or by offering to manage your search engine advertising for you on the major search engines.

We’ve typically found the enhanced listings to be of little value and the ads usually don’t get a whole lot of clicks. And you certainly don’t want them managing your paid search campaigns. Paid search is best left to experts who are paid based on their performance and know how to manage your campaign correctly in order to generate actual leads, not just clicks.

Technorati Tags: local search marketing, local seo, search engine optimiztion, small business marketing, small business seo, website promotion

The very first thing you need to do if you own a local offline business is to claim your Google Local Business listing.

If you haven’t already noticed, whenever you do a search on Google for a particular type of business AND a city name, you will often get what is known in the industry as the “Google Maps 10 Pack”.

What’s important to understand here is that these local business listings almost always appear at the top of the page, above the normal listings so they are more likely to get clicked. They are also much easier to get because they don’t rely on the same algorithm that’s used for the organic search results shown above, which are determined primarily by the number and quality of inbound links to your website.

In order to power these new map results, Google has licensed data from lots of 3^rd party business data providers such as yellow page companies and other aggregators like Acxiom and Localeze. So if you’ve advertised in the yellow pages or have a local business phone number thru the phone company, chances are you’re already in their database and may even be listed already.

However, sometimes this 3^rd party data is inaccurate and it’s almost certainly incomplete. Also, until you “claim” your business listing, Google doesn’t give it the importance it deserves because the data has not actually been verified by the business owner.

Luckily, claiming your Google local business listing is Free and easy to do:

1)      Visit the Google Local Business Center.

2)      If you already have a Google Account, sign in with your email and password otherwise create a free Google account.

3)      Follow the instructions to create a listing.

Please remember these points when creating your Google Local Business Listing:

·         Make sure your information is consistent across the Internet. You want to use the same business name, address, and most importantly phone number throughout the Internet.

·         The street address you enter will be shown in the Google Maps search results. If you work from home or have a physical street address you don’t want to display, I suggest getting a mail box at a UPS Store (Note: You want a real street address not a PO Box from the post office)

·         Once you’ve submitted your business information, you’ll need to verify the listing before it goes live. You can verify using a touch-tone phone, SMS, or a PIN that will be sent via regular mail to your business address. Once the listing is verified, your information will normally appear in the search results in about 48-72 hours.

·         Be sure to add as much information about your business as you can and use as many of your keywords from Secret #1 in your business description, products, services and coupons as you can.

·         Upload your logo and other images about your business.

You can (and should) create similar local listings on Yahoo! Local and MSN (Windows Live Local)  as well.

Technorati Tags: google local, local business profiles, local search, local search marketing, local seo, msn local, small business marketing, yahoo local

Technorati Tags: local search engine marketing, nc internet marketing, small business marketing