Reduce the Size of Print Ads
If you still find value in print ads and plan on continuing to buy print space we recommend that you reduce the average size of your ad layouts.  You can convey the same message and information while allowing yourself to buy additional print ads in other publications or to use the money for an alternative source of advertising.

Employ Untraditional Marketing Tactics

There are plenty of ways to go about marketing in ways that people have never considered before.  A new trend that many companies are beginning to notice is the power possessed in these wildly popular social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter.  Consider a social media marketing campaign; the only cost is your time.

Don’t Advertise Like Big Businesses

Your small business simply cannot afford to advertise in the same manner that traditional big businesses do.  The enormous ad campaigns that big businesses conduct are geared at building brand awareness to help bolster future sales.  This type of advertising is inefficient for your typical small business; you must focus your advertising money on making sales now!  Considering how most people search online for services offered by small businesses, the best way to reach these people is through a search engine optimized website.

Leverage Your Customers

Many companies have begun to build out preferred customer programs that are geared at leveraging existing customers into a sort of sales and marketing resource while offering them exclusive benefits.  There are a number of ways to structure this and while it takes some time to manage and a bit of money to get started it can eventually grow into its own lead generation channel.

Cross-Promote with Other Small Businesses

Get in touch with some non-competing businesses that serve the same target market as your small business. Offer to publicize their product or service to their customers in return for the same.  As well consider the possibility of packaging or bundling the two services together; some partnerships that have done this have been extremely successful.

Do you have other suggestions small businesses can use to improve their marketing? Please share your advice in the comments on this post.

The costs are nil, aside from the time you decide to devote to the campaign.  This can have major implications for small businesses because if you can effectively generate sales from the campaign you are doing so at zero cost.

Currently there are 300,000 small businesses actively participating in some form of social media marketing.  Only a handful of these companies are focused on using professional social networking sites such as LinkedIn while others utilize platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and/or MySpace.

There are a lot of reasons companies start marketing through social media, for starters these channels provide a great way for building an audience of potential buyers quickly.

More often than not these companies claimed to be using the social media channels in order to answer customer questions, reference materials for educational purposes and participate in company level networking.  Once someone creates a widely adoptable model to sell directly via social media, then we will see many more companies begin to sell directly through social media.

Here are a few recommendations that should put you at a good starting point for your social media marketing campaign.

• Get a LinkedIn account. LinkedIn is the most professional of all the social media networking interfaces and is becoming widely used by many professionals in many different fields.  Simply start connecting to your customers and suppliers to build your network as wide as possible.  Eventually create a company group in order to post company news and other important updates/information.

• Create a business profile on Facebook. Initially utilize Facebook like LinkedIn; as another way of publishing company news and information and growing a network of “Friends.”

• Get Creative. Start brainstorming some ways to creatively illustrate how your business adds value to your customers (this can be just about anything, from diagramming to a video).

These three steps will give you a good base from which to launch an effective social media campaign; building the networks out first is crucial to ensure that you have maximum exposure.

Even though Bing is not completely live yet, Web surfers can still test the interface to get acquainted with it.  Unlike Google’s ultra-simplistic homepage, Bing’s homepage changes each day, with a new background of some picturesque location. There are a number of trivia questions regarding the location of the background integrated directly into the background.  These trivia questions redirect the person reading them to the various Bing applications such as, Maps, Videos, Images and News; a sort of devious advertisement of Bing’s search features.  As for the layout, Bing is very user-friendly, boasting a suggested search list on the left-hand side as well as a recent search history displayed right there on the homepage.

After playing around for a bit I decided to search five terms in both Bing and Google to see how similar the search results were.  The first search was “auto repair Atlanta” which yielded about a 75% overlap in like search results.  Second was “skiing in Colorado” which yielded the exact same first result and again each search engine had about 7 of the other 9 results in common with one another.  The third term I searched for was “steakhouses in Boston.”  The two search engines had 8 of 10 local listings in common with each other.  These three search queries all have a common thread; they are local searches.  Bing appears to be as effective for local search as Google.

In order to fully gauge Bing’s search capability, I performed a couple of more generalized searches.  The first general search was for “airline deals.”  The first search result was the same, Orbitz.com, but that was the only one that the two search engines had in common.  I then searched for “mortgage refinancing” which generated one like search result, GMAC.com.  With these varied search results it became clear that Bing’s search algorithm was fundamentally different from Google’s.

Even Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak praised Bing after anticipating a lousy release, “I mainly wanted to see if it was lousy off the bat, but it seemed very nice.”  (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=4045)  The main point that Wozniak makes, and that many other early adopters have made, is that it will take at least a month before the online community forms an opinion on effective Bing is compared to Google.

Consumers now use the Internet more than any other source when it comes to searching for local businesses. In fact, a recent Nielsen study found that 82% of consumers use the Internet to search for local services – more than any other source.

This is big news for your small business, since it means consumers are looking for the goods and services you provide in search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com. The big question is, “Will they find you?” If you’re still pouring all your marketing energy into phone book, newspaper or billboard advertising, you may not be reaching consumers where they’re looking. A small shift in resources to the Web could significantly increase business for your location, and help you reach more interested buyers.

Consumers have changed the way they search for your business. According to the Nielsen research, consumers are using the Yellow Pages less and the Internet more than just two years ago. If you’re not familiar with how the Web reaches your customer, try to do a search for your business in your local market; you’ll most likely find that your competition shows up in those searches. They are probably getting a lot of the customers who went to the Web looking for you. If you’re not spending at least a small percentage of your marketing budget to fix this problem, your competitors will continue to get your customers.

There are many different providers of services to help you optimize your website for search engines. If you don’t have a website, companies like Radius Online provide you with one for free, when you sign up for on of our local search engine optimization programs.

Starting your local online marketing program today will make a significant impact on your sales and profits in 2009. Feel free to contact us if you’d like to learn more about how to reach customers that are already looking for you at 1-866-575-8057 or sales @ radiusonline.com.

• Unless it’s a national chain, the baker may only sell to customers in the local area. Even if they dominated search results, they’d attract a lot of interest from customers they can’t serve.
• The competition for one-word (or even three-word) search terms is tremendous. Your chances of getting on the first page are very low, unless you’re in an obscure market or have a ton of budget to throw at expert search engine optimization.
• Customers rarely use short search terms anymore. For example, a recent Hitwise report shows that longer search queries (those averaging five or more words) increased 10% in January, compared to a year ago. During the same time period, short search terms (one to four words) decreased 2%. Consumers are using longer (and more geographically focused keywords) to find what they’re looking for.
• Customers are searching locally. It’s estimated that more than 86% of all Web searches are now local. Many of these consumers are searching for a local vendor to make a purchase offline. Why optimize your site for broad generic terms when customers are looking for long, descriptive terms?

Combine Long Search Terms With Your Location

One approach that works great for small businesses serving local customers is to target longer search terms with a geographic reference – for example, “cupcake bakery in atlanta georgia” rather than “cupcake bakery specialists.” While the bakery in this example may bake much more than cupcakes, they can target specific terms one at a time to attract traffic across different interests. You should generally have a different section of your site that talks about each of your unique product or service offerings individually.

Another example would be in the auto repair industry, where we current manage local search for more than 1,500 customers. We help customers optimize their websites for local searches across their most profitable jobs. Rather than optimize a site for “atlanta auto repair”, we might focus in on “atlanta transmission repair” or a specific make or model related repair.

The key with these tactics is not to use one laser-focused tactic, but rather hundreds (or more). While there may only be 3-4 unique searches per month in your local area for a highly-targeted term, multiplying that across 1,000 search terms can generate significant traffic for your site.

Want to learn more about local search engine optimization for your small business? Please visit http://www.radiusonline.com.

In a survey published by JupiterResearch last year, they found that just 36% of online small businesses – that is, businesses with fewer than 100 employees and an Internet connection – have a website. Said another way, 64% of small businesses don’t have a website. Even of those 36% that do have a website, we estimate less than a third of them fully-levarage online marketing to drive traffic and sales to their business.

Who has a website and who doesn’t should not be your justification for getting one, but you should consider the competitive advantage having a website would deliver for your business. Think of it as a sign for your busines online. When people walk by your business on the Web, they do so through search engines. They are looking for your business online.If you don’t have a website, you don’t have a sign, and therefore don’t exist.

Are People Really Using the Internet to Find Us?

If you don’t believe that you need a website, consider the following numbers for a couple of minutes:

• 94 million adults use the Internet every day
• 64% access search sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask each day
• 86% use search engines to conduct local searchs (looking for goods and services in their local area)
• 43% are seeking a local merchant to buy something offline

There are most likely thousands of people searching for the goods and services you offer – in your local area – every single month. If you have a website, your chances of capturing some of that action are much better. Of course, having a website is not the end all, be all. You should optimize your website so that search engines can better help people find you online (more on that in a later post – for now, you have to have a website).

How many people are searching for the goods and services you offer each day? If you don’t have a website – or some other form of online marketing – you’ll most likely never know.

Okay, So You Need a Website… Now What?

Let’s assume that you follow us. You agree that it’s time for you to finally get a website… where do you start? Here are some unbiased suggestions for you to get your website up and running.

• Friends and Family – as a small business, you probably have little budget to throw at a website. For this reason, you should look to find somebody you know that can do the website for you on the cheap for your first endeavor. There’s a good chance that one of your relatives, neighbors or customers knows how to develop a website. This could be an affordable path to choose, so in fairness, it’s an option we’ll suggest. There are some pitfalls to going this route, since cheaper options may not be able to produce a professional, custom design that you’ll be happy with, or be able to opimize your website so it will come up in searches on Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask.

• Hire a Website Development Firm – if you can afford to spend $5,000 or more on website design and development, by all means, hire an expert. You should be able to find many small to medium sized Web development firms in your area that will build you a professional website for as little as $5,000. Many will quote prices north of $10,000. If you can afford it, you may want to evaluate this option. Again, keep in mind that this won’t include search engine marketing as part of the deal. These services are typically additional, and can start at $5,000 for an initial optimization of your site.

• Do-It-Yourself – if you’re computer-savvy, you may want to start with a do-it-yourself website option. Many Web hosting companies offer template website options for a few hundred dollars per month. If given the choice of not having a website, versus having a do-it-yourself website, we would suggest the latter. Many of our customers have used template websites for years and are happy with the look and feel of their site. Unfortunately, many of these options aren’t search engine friendly – if they are, they don’t provide tools to make it easy for you to automate your search engine marketing. If you are interested in the do-it-yourself option, The Wall Street Journal recently did a story called “How to Create a Successful Web Site For Nothing (or Almost Nothing).” While we obviously don’t agree with this approach, maybe you will.

• Do-It-For-Me – a final (ok, maybe a little biased) option we’ll suggest is a do-it-for-me option. Service providers like Radius Online provide you with a professionally designed and developed small business website, along with initial and ongoing search engine optimization services. In the case of Radius’ programs, we offer options starting at $129 per month. Our solution also includes content management and other features than enable you to control the photos, text and functionality of your site, without needing to know how to code HTML.

But enough of the self-promotion. Any of these options can be good starting points for getting your small business website up and running. The most important thing is to get your small business website up and running quickly, from there, we’ll get into marketing your website so you can grow your business.

(Sources: JupiterResearch, The Kelsey Group, The Wall Street Journal)

Duct Tape Marketing’s Small Business Marketing Blog

Duct Tape Marketing’s Small Business Marketing Blog is one of the best places to keep up with small business marketing strategies and tactics. John Jantsch, an award winning author, speaker and small business marketing expert, provides all the information you will need to keep your marketing fresh, exciting and effective.

Websites like Entrepreneur.com can help you learn how to market your small business.

Entrepreneur’s Marketing Website

Entrepreneur.com is the online component of Entrepreneur magazine. The magazine’s website has a special small business marketing section that provides an extensive range of articles on topics ranging from online marketing and branding, to website development and social media.

Seth Godin’s Blog

If you’ve never heard of Seth Godin, you probably haven’t read much about marketing in the past decade. Godin probably writes the most popular marketing blog in the world – popularity driven by a long string of best-selling books, including The Dip, Meatball Sundae, Purple Cow, Free Prize Inside and Permission Marketing. We highly recommend you read Seth’s blog, but you should alse read his books – they’re great.Chris Brogan’s Blog

We posted a question in LinkedIn Answers to see what other people in our network think the best small business blogs and websites are. While many people mentioned the sites we’ve suggested above, several suggested we read Chris Brogan’s blog. We hadn’t heard of him before, but after reading a couple of his posts, we certainly think he’s worthty to be on this list. Chris is an expert on social media and social networks – and the information presented in his posts can be put to use immediately to help you grow your business (and your personal brand) online. You may also want to follow Chris Brogan on Twitter. He’s an active (power) user with more than 19,000 followers.

Small Business Resources Cafe

For general small business advice, on topics ranging from “How to Incorporate Your Small Business” to “How to Use Social Media to Market Your Small Business,” you can find it at Small Business Resources Cafe. This was another suggestion from the folks that responded to our LinkedIn Answers poll.

StartupNation

StartupNation’s tagline is “by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs,” and that’s exactly what you’ll get at their website. There is a dedicated section of the website for marketing your small business – geared towards small businesses in the startup phase. StartupNation also has active forums where you can discuss small business marketing topics – you can find answers to many of your questions there.

Mainstream Media Small Business Coverage

We read the small business coverage on USAToday, BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal each day. As professional journalists, these outlets often get the scoop in advance of other sections. If you want the latest and greatest stories affecting small business – along with a healthy dose of regular small business marketing advice, we would suggest you maintain a healthy diet of these outlets.

About.com: Marketing

About.com has a dedicated “Marketing Basics for Small Business” section of their website where you can find practical, tactical advice on everything from creating a marketing plan to writing a press release. The information on About.com is very well organized and will most likely help you find the information you are looking for.

Alltop

Finally, if this list leaves you wanting more in the way of small business news, you should venture over to Alltop’s small business news section. Alltop is an aggregator of RSS feeds from many different websites around the web, and promises to present you with “all the top news” on any given subject. It’s a great place to one-stop-shop for information for and about small businesses. You’ll find many of the websites and blogs on this list, as well as many others you’ve never heard of. While you’re at it, you may want to check out Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki’s blog – it’s been a valuable source of information over the years for our startup.

What are some of your favorite small business marketing websites and blogs? Comment below and let us know.

This is one of the most common questions we hear from people that call Radius Online for the first time. People want to know how to drive traffic to their websites. While a search engine optimization (SEO) expert can do all the work for you, there are a couple of things you can probably do on your own to optimize your site for search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

These simple tips can help you get your website listed on search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.

First off, search engine optimization is really about how search engines see and organize the content on your small business website – along with every other website on the Internet. The suggestions below are simple things you can do to improve how search engines view your web pages – most likely helping to improve the traffic you drive to your small business website.

Use Relevant Content on Each Page

The most important thing in SEO is to provide relevant content for the terms you want to optimize around. If you’re trying to optimize a page for vanilla ice cream, the focus of your page should not be about how to make a banana split. The closer your content is to the terms people are searching for, the more likely search engines will display your pages prominently. Don’t just repeat a bunch of keywords on the page – this is considered spam. You’ll have much more luck if you genuinely try to provide relevant information on the subject you’re trying to optimize for. Provide valuable information and you will be rewarded.

Of course, you should be consistent in the words you use to describe your topic, since search engines do look at keyword density on each page (the number of times a term is mentioned). So rather than using “Vanilla Ice Cream” and “Ice Cream” across your site, you should just stick to the former if you’re trying to optimize around that one flavor.

Include Keywords in Your Title Tags

Title tags are at the top of your website code. They’re the words that appear on the top of your Web browser when you’re looking at the page. The title tag of your page includes the page title, description and keyword tags. Rather than calling your homepage “homepage”, use a descriptive title such as “Radius Online Local Search Engine Optimization”. If you’re optimizing your site for local search, consider using local terms – for example, “Radius Online Website Design Atlanta Georgia 30318″.

Use Keywords in Your Heading Tags

Search engines view headings as more important, since they typically set off sections of content. With this in mind, using keywords in your headings will get your keywords into content that search engines consider to be more important. As a side note, bold keywords within your body text can also have an affect on boosting the weight of your content – again, because search engines assume bold words are points of emphasis.

Use Keywords or Alt Tags on Your Photos and Images

Alt taps on your images describe what is in your image. This can be alternate text that shows when somebody can’t view the image, but also enables search engines to read the images on your website. Think of the image tag as a caption that describes the photo or image – with a healthy dose of your keywords.

Link Keywords in Your Text and Links

Rather than linking “click here” to another site, link relevant keywords to that site. For example, highlight “you can find our product catalog here” to the page with your product catalog. Most software enables you to describe the link as well – use keywords to describe the link, such as “2008 product catalog”.

Use Meta Tags in Your Page Headers

Meta tags are also located in the header of your webpage, but aren’t visible in the web browser. These behind the scenes “keywords” and “description” tags help search engines learn what your page is about. While most agree that meta tags don’t have the impact they used to in SEO, they are still an important element when optimizing your pages.

HTML and XML Sitemaps

Finally, you should have two sitemaps on your site – a HTML sitemap that makes it easy for visitors to navigate all the information on your site, and an XML sitemap that is built specificall for search engines. You can learn more about how to set these up by using Google’s Webmaster Tools (we highly suggest familiarizing yourself with these tools when you’re getting started).

Search for High-Quality Inbound Links

One of the most important factors determining the value of the content on your small business website is the number of other sites that link to your content. The logic here is that if your content is great, more people will link to it. Rather than asking people to link to you, or using link exchange programs, look to attract links from sites with a good reputation. The best way to do this is to write great content.

These are just a few small business SEO tips for you. Do you have questions about the tips we suggested? Do you need help with your SEO? Do you have other advice for successful SEO? Please email at blog @ radiusonline.com or comment on this post.

Local Search More Popular Than Phone Books

Phone books still make good booster seats around the Thanksgiving table, but they are quickly using their appeal as the best way to find a local business. According to the second annual Local Search Usage Study from TMP Directional Marketing, conducted by comScore, consumers are turning to search engines first to find local businesses. According to the study, 31% of Americans begin with search engines to find local business information, compared to 30% that start with the good old phone book.

Also of interest in the study, researchers found that while the majority of research is done online, consumers still make most of their purchases offline. This means more and more potential customers are searching for your goods and services online, so they can do business with you offline.

As far as trends to watch, the study also found that 1-in-5 consumers with Internet-enabled phones have performed a local search on their phone. You can expect these numbers to increase as more and more consumers move to Internet-enabled devices like the popular iPhone.

Local SEO is Good Complement to Store Locators

Thinking Beyond the Store Locator

It seems like every retail or franchise website has a “find a location near you” option now. You type in your location, and it spits back a list of locations sorted by their distance to you. Some smart marketers even take that a step further and enable you to click on the search results to see the location on the map. But I’m still amazed by how many people don’t take things one micro-step further – it would make such a huge difference in their local search engine optimization success. That’s what this post is about.

Here are some of my suggestions for improving the local search engine optimization (local SEO) results for your retail chains or franchisees…

Suggestion One: Create a Separate, Standalone Webpage for Each Store or Franchise Location

Sure, you might be thinking this would take a lot of work or cost too much to implement this local SEO strategy, but most of you already have 90% of the work done. If you have a “search by zip code” or other “find-a-location-near-you” option on your website, just hyperlink each location to go a layer deeper. Creating a separate web page for each of your locations can be automated through a content management system. Even if you don’t have a content management system, you can create a template that can be adapted for each location – saving hours of development time and thousands of dollars. For our customers, we develop a template set that maintains their brand standards, while providing variety for users and franchisees alike. We also provide varying levels of control and customization – enabling each location to have control over some aspect of content creation at the local level.

Suggestion Two: Localize Each Location to Appeal to Local Customers

If you’re going to have a separate web page for each store or franchise location, why not put some local content on that page? Let the store manager post discounts and specials for that location. Of course, provide a map, directions, local phone number, address, hours, a picture of the location, jobs for that location, and other local goodies on each page – but also consider publishing regular updates on this page to keep your local customers happy. In our opinion, this is what great local SEO is about.

Suggestion Three: Use a Unique Local Web Address and Page Title for Each Location

Let’s say you have a bunch of pizza franchises all over the country. If you had a single page for your location in Atlanta, Georgia, you may want to call the page: yourpizzacompany/location_atlanta_georgia_30318. You get the idea. You might also want to title the page “Pizza Company Atlanta Georgia 30318″. Both of these factors can contribute to improving your local relevance to search engines.

Suggestion Four: Link Your Local Directory Listings to Each Local Page

Use your unique page URL in Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Local.com, and regional or industry directories. The more of these directories and other websites that link to your individual pages, the better your location-specific pages will perform. Your location-specific page can also be used in conjunction with your PPC advertising and can serve as a landing page. It will most-likely cost less to advertise for “Atlanta pizza company” than “pizza chains.” Using your location-specific page, in conjunction with local PPC, can greatly improve your conversion and deliver better return on investment for your PPC spend.

Suggestion Five: Get Local Customer Reviews

Post reviews from customers in your neck of the woods. Get back to knowing your neighbors and reaching out to people within a 50-mile radius of your business. Use recommendations from review sites like Yelp! and Citysearch on your local pages – linking them back to your directory listing. Consider providing comment and feedback options on your local pages, to get more people to suggest specific locations for your business.

Suggestion Six: Be Thinking About Mobile & Local

Chances are you know somebody with an iPhone, or you’ve seen people in your area with them. The iPhone is just one of many new types of mobile devices that make it easier to use the Internet from the phone. There are also features with the device that enable people to search for businesses in close proximity to them, using “location aware” features built into the phone. If I want to see all the restaurants within a mile of where I’m standing, I can do that. As more people begin to use location aware services – or just mobile search from their phone – it will drive more and more local searches. An even better reason to make sure each of your locations is optimized for local search.

But Is It All Worth It?

If you’re a well-known brand name, you’ll probably be less interested in this approach. While McDonald’s could benefit from this type of local SEO program, people know to go to the McDonald’s website to find a location near them. If you’re a small 5-6 location burger joint though, you may want to create separate pages for each of your locations – optimized for each area they are in. You’ll be surprised how many people will discover your location and want to come in.

Just as location is so important in physical stores, so to is location important on the Web. You wouldn’t open one store to serve all your customers across the U.S., which is the equivalent of having one website to serve all areas of the country. Create local sites within your system, to drive more customers to the location closest to them.

And… in case you’re wondering, it’s not as expensive as you might think. An agency specializing in local search engine optimization (yes, like Radius Online) can manage the local search for each of your locations for as little as $79 per month. If you can increase Web and foot traffic for each of your locations, your business will grow and prosper.

Closing Thoughts

You don’t have to follow all these steps to be successful with local search, but you should consider creating a separate page for each of your locations. We’ve done this for several large retail chains and seen them grow their business exponentially at the local level, which all trickles up to drive the bottom line. If you’d like to learn more about how we help companies develop and implement cost-effective local search engine optimization programs, please visit us at http://www.radiusonline.com.

Are you a retail chain or franchise system with great ideas for how to leverage local search? Post your comments below to add value to this post. Thanks for reading!