I’ve created the following video to help small business owners and entrepreneurs who are looking to get traffic to their website. In the video I’ve outlined 10 simple steps you can do right now in order to drive local prospects to your storefront. If you are not using the Internet to attract new business, then you’re missing out on a BIG opportunity:

There are a lot of resources available online that will help your website to show up when people search for local services on Google and Yahoo!. With most people now looking for local services online, creating an online presence is far more effective than a print listing, and it will only cost you a fraction of what you would spend on traditional advertising.

Resource 1: Register a domain name here.

Resource 2: Get a good hosting plan with 24/7 support, 99.9% uptime, website templates, and one-click setup here from JustHost for just $3.45/month.

Resource 3: Claim Your Local Business Listing at the 3 major search engines:

The Easy Way:

GetListed.org

Universal Business Listing

The Manual Way:

Yahoo! Local

Google Local Business Center

Bing Local

Resource 4: Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Resource 5: Install WordPress in a ‘blog’ directory of your website. You can get WordPress for free here.

Resource 6: Track website visits with Google Analytics.

Resource 7: Track all calls from your website to your business to measure the conversion of visitors to customers. You can use a virtual phone system like RingCentral.

Resource 8: Use Aweber to create an automated e-mail marketing system in an easy to use interface. The service is just $19.95 / month and makes e-mail distribution list management and marketing easy. Other alternatives include Infusionsoft and iContact

Should you need help setting this up, feel free to give us a call at 1-888-249-0213.

If you haven’t already registered a domain name then you have an excellent opportunity to consider choosing one that is optimized for your geographic area and the type of service you provide. So instead of “www.JoePlumbing.com” you may want to register your domain name as “www.OrlandoPlumber.com”.

Although there is the pride and marketability factor of having your business name in your web address, you will not be optimized for search. In order to enjoy the best of both worlds, I advise clients to host their website on the more generic domain name that is optimized for local search (e.g., www.OrlandoPlumber.com) and then we also register the vanity domain address (e.g., www.JoePlumbing.com) and redirect it to the generic domain name.

The videos below explain this concept in a little more detail and dive into the importance of having optimized domain names.

Hopefully this second video has sparked some ideas for you. If the keyword you are targeting is already taken (e.g., www.OrlandoPlumbing.com) then perhaps you can register something similar that contains those keywords (e.g., www.BestOrlandoPlumbing.com). In general you want to stay away from domains that have more than one hyphen, and you want to register a domain with a “.com” extension in order to optimize your SEO.

Another tactic that I feel is useful is registering multiple domains within your market as a defense against SEO from your competitors. If you own all or most of the keyword optimized domains in your market, you’ll be that much more competitive in the SEO game.

You can register domain names here for as little as $6.64

Referral business in many ways IS down right now. Some of the older more ‘passive’ ways for many entrepreneurs to generate sales in ANY business is no longer consistent. And in many cases, like his, it has all but gone away. (At least for now due to the current economy.)

But with so much opportunity all around us, it’s usually just about getting PROACTIVE and making offers and making things happen.

And that’s exactly what I told Bill do.

I told him he needed to be proactive and call his customers and offer specials on certain items. Stop by some of the locations (many of them restaurants or doctors’ offices) and bring some corals and fish and tell them, “I think this would look really great in your tank, would you like to buy it?”

I also instructed him to be more active in ASKING his customers for referrals and inquiring about other aquarium needs.

Now he was already doing ’some’ of this, but just not a lot. That wasn’t his main focus. Like many entrepreneurs he was content with the referral business he was already getting and the revenue that was coming in from his “old ways.”

He agreed to give it a shot and less than a week later I got an excited call from him telling me that things were looking up very, very quickly.

From the very moment he ’stepped up his game’ and got more proactive about making offers and taking action to produce more ACTIVITY in his business, the money started rolling in again. And now he’s actually in a position to really GROW things bigger than they ever were.

And it’s all because he got more active in MAKING OFFERS.

Hey all,



I just wanted to share what I thought is an excellent video on how to create a blog (personal or business) that will absolutely get you high traffic without you having to spend hours promoting it. This video is well worth the watch and you’ll learn a lot, especially if you are having trouble gaining traction with your blog:

In today’s video Ramit shares how he started email marketing, how often he sends emails to his customers, what he puts in his emails and how many autoresponders he’s sending.


Should you need a tool to implement your e-mail marketing we recommend Aweber, Infusionsoft, or iContact. These all provide very robust features that will make e-mail marketing extremely easy for you, especially if you are scared of technology!

In the video below Ramit shares how to use e-mail to grow a community, nurture your subscribers, measure success within your e-mail campaigns, value feedback, and handle the volume of incoming email once you reach critical mass.



Should you need a tool to implement your e-mail marketing we recommend Aweber, Infusionsoft, or iContact. These all provide very robust features that will make e-mail marketing extremely easy for you, especially if you are scared of technology!

Mari Smith has created a wonderful guide on how to promote your business or “solo-preneur” venture on Facebook.  This is hands down one of the best and simplest ways for you to get started promoting you busienss and services on Facebook.  I know everyone is trying to figure out how to work Facebook and Twitter for their business.  Considering Mari has over 5,000 friends on Facebook, I’m sure you can trust what she has to say on the matter.  Check out the video below:

Reset!

Sometimes you have to knock it down and start all over.  Welcome to the Rainmaker Blog version 2.0.   The last blog was really a temporary solution, and did not have a number of key elements that I knew should have been in there.  Expect to see a much more polished blog and some fantastic content.  Stay tuned!