In fact, small businesses striving to build a strong local marketing strategy can dramatically boost their business with a few simple tweaks to their email list.

Let’s take a look at how to embrace local marketing and capitalize from your email list.

Segmentation

Most email list management services provide segmentation features.

This means you can sort your email list by demographic information and send different email messages to different lists.

For example, does your community host a Fourth of July or Labor Day festival?

You can send an email to people in your community that highlights the festivities and offers a special promotion.

If you’ll be attending the festivities, you can take it a step further and tell people where you’ll be hanging out and invite them to stop and say hi.

There are a number of ways to reach your local subscribers.

Don’t be afraid to get creative with it.

You can highlight local news and even local trends and personalities.

Partnerships

Connect with local business owners that offer complimentary products or services.

Consider partnering to help expand your local reach and build your email list.

For example, you might swap guest blog posts.

You could also create a packaged deal that offers a discount to customers.

For example, if you’re a personal trainer you might partner with a local dietician to provide a complete health and fitness package to local customers.

Use your email lists to announce the partnership and promote it with a forward to a friend option.

You’ll grow your list and your bottom line.

Change Your Opt-In Offer

If you have a general opt-in offer on your website and you’re trying to boost your local awareness and profits, consider making it more specific to your community.

For example, a personal trainer might use a general report on how to get fit on a budget as their opt-in offer.

By adding a few local keywords and tweaking the report to make it specific to their community, they can build their local email list.

If the trainer lived in Atlanta, Georgia, the local marketing report might then be titled, “How to get fit on a budget in Atlanta, Georgia.”

They could then create a niche PPC campaign to promote the report and use it to build their local email list.

If you have an existing online business and you want to attract more local traffic and prospects, take a look at your email list.

Focus on segmenting that list and send local subscribers information that is unique to your community.

Additionally, employ a few tactics to build your local email subscriber base.

More and more, people are looking to buy from business owners in their community.

Email provides a fantastic way to connect with your local prospects, build awareness, and ultimately increase your bottom line.

Need help building an email list? Then contact our office for help!

A PR stunt, when done correctly, can cause your brand, your website and your products to spread virally.

Of all the different kinds of viral traffic you can try to get, viral PR is one of the toughest.

Instead of just convincing people to “share” a piece of content, you need to create a stunt so compelling that a journalist will actually pick it up and print it in a physical newspaper.

If you can achieve that, then your viral PR stunt was a success.

Naturally if you create a stunt good enough to get press attention, you’ll also get a ton of shares, likes and blogger mentions.

How do you create a viral PR stunt that grabs media attention?

Make People Say “What?”

When people hear about your idea, their first reaction should be “what?”

In other words, their heads turn, they stop in their tracks and have to re-read that headline just to make sure they heard it right.

It needs to be outside the box. So far outside the box, in fact, that it’s never been done before.

Take the “Peanut Protest” for example. Mark McGowan, in protest for his student debt, pushed a peanut for two weeks from his school to the Prime Minister.

He used just his nose the whole time to push the peanut as he pushed it down the sidewalk.

He asked the Prime Minister to take the peanut in lieu of his debt.

He got a ton of press coverage for this stunt and camera crews followed him everywhere.

One big reason for it was that it was just so outside the box.

It Has Several Iterations

The best PR stunts are ones that have several iterations.

In other words, it shouldn’t end after the first news cycle.

Instead, journalists and bloggers should be able to talk about it again and again and again.

You can do this by making the event an annual event.

You can also do it by stretching an event out.

Taking the “Peanut Protest” example, Mark McGowan got a solid two weeks of coverage instead of just one news story because of how long the challenge took.

Link It To Your Business

It’s hard to come up with a PR stunt that grabs attention.

It’s even harder to come up with one that links well with your business.

Your goal isn’t just to do something off the wall that gets people to write about it.

Your goal should be to generate a lot of buzz and press for your business.

If you own a cake shop, perhaps dress up as a giant edible cake.

If you run a car dealership, sell a car for $1 in some sort of contest and link the viral PR stunt to your business somehow.

Before you launch ask your friends and family how outside the box the idea sounds.

If they think it sounds absolutely nuts, you’re on the right track.

Hiring an SEO consultant is tricky business because on the one hand, getting ranked well in the search engines is one of the highest ROI investments you could possibly make.

And on the other hand, the halls of business are littered with people who’ve paid thousands to SEO consultants with nothing to show for it!

So how do you pick an SEO consultant and make sure that every penny you spend results in more traffic and more sales?

Here are a few of the most important things to consider.

#1: What Results Have They Gotten In The Past?

This is perhaps the most important gauge. Do they have references from other clients who are willing to vouch for them?

Perhaps they have samples from past clients where they can show you screen shots of where they first started out and where they ended up by the time they finished their work with the client.

Try to get a sense for what kind of real experience the consultant has.

# 2: Where Does Their Personal Or Company Site Rank?

If you’re hiring someone to help you with your rankings, you probably want to make sure that their own rankings are in order.

Ask them what kind of keyword(s) they’re trying to rank for and then do a Google search and see where they come up.

Are they up to par?

Note that while this factor can help a determination, it shouldn’t be your only or your main factor.

Many great SEO consultants just don’t spend that much time on their site because they’re so busy working with clients.

# 3:  What Kind Of Tactics Do They Use?

How do they achieve the rankings they promise?

Try to get them to walk you through as much detail as possible.

The most important thing here is to determine whether or not they’re using black-hat tactics.

Black-hat tactics are shortcuts to gain backlinks that could end up undermining your website in the future.

Try to work only with companies that use white-hat, above board tactics.

That’ll set your website up with solid fundamentals from the ground up.

# 4: Their Pricing Structure

Finally, price.

If at all possible, try to work with an SEO consultant whose results are somehow tied to their performance.

Usually this is done with a part up-front payment, with the majority of the payment due upon delivery of the results.

For example, for a low to moderate competition keyword, you might pay $1,000 up front and pay an additional $10,000 if you got #1, $6,000 if you got #2 and so on.

This puts the onus to deliver squarely on the SEO consultant, instead of you having to bear the brunt of the risk by paying up front.

Some SEO consultants, such as our firm, simply do not work with this type of pricing schedule, and instead focus more on long term organic SEO practices.

But let me tell you upfront – many SEO firms do.

If you find an SEO consultant who has a strong portfolio, who’s ranked well them selves, and who uses legitimate tactics, who charges a competitive contingency-based rate, then there’s a good chance that you’ve found a great consultant to work with!

What’s been your experience working with SEO consultants?

According to news sites and reports, more than 4.6 billion people have mobile devices.

Part of that may be due to the fact that some people have more than one mobile device or cell phone.

Still, that’s a large number. As a business owner this number may get those creative juices flowing.

You start thinking, “How can I use this technology to grow my business?”

There are actually many ways you can reach your potential customers through smartphones and other mobile devices.

# 1: Social Networking

Social networking isn’t just for the laptop or desktop computer anymore.

You can connect with your prospects whether you’re out and about or they are.

In fact, consider creating interactions where you encourage your prospects to connect with you from their mobile devices.

Ask them to upload photos or to post status updates when they’re out.

# 2: Group Texting

Instead of, or in addition to, asking people to subscribe to your email list, ask them to sign up to receive text messages.

You then have their permission to connect via text.

Consider your audience and the type of message subscription service you can create.

For example, if you’re a personal coach you might send motivational or inspirational quotes to your subscribers each morning.

# 3: Make Your Website Mobile Ready

Have you ever noticed that some websites look terrible on your smartphone and others look excellent?

This is because of the technology they’re using.

You can make a few small changes and have a mobile ready website or blog.

Once it’s ready to go promote it. Ask people to view your site on their mobile device and share their experience.

# 4: Blog

You can record video posts from your mobile device and instantly post on your blog and/or YouTube.

You can also write blog posts using a blogging application for your smartphone.

# 5: Games And Downloads

Consider offering mobile technology to your prospects.

You can create an application or a game that they can download for free.

Ringtones are one type of download. However, you can also offer documents and videos.

In addition to the many ways you can reach your audience through mobile devices and smartphones, there are ways you can monetize the experience too – for example by using AdSense for Mobile.

As the technology continues to grow and improve, there’s no doubt that more opportunities to market via mobile devices will continue too!