Many local businesses around the world are looking to the search engines to help find customers.

The following steps will help these businesses increase the number of visitors to their website and therefore find new customers:

1) Get listed in the Google Local Directory

Google is the biggest player in the search world. When you use Google to search something like "eye doctor New York" or "dentist Fargo" there is typically a top 10 listing of results for local businesses at the top of the page.

Having your local business listed here is the cheapest and easiest way to attract new customers. You can sign up for the Google Local Directory here: www.google.com/local/add. It only takes a few minutes and it’s quite a simple process.

If you’re a bit more web savvy, David Mihm has a very thorough post on increasing your ranking for local listings.

2) Build a great website

What is the purpose of your website?

My guess is that you want more customers to contact you – therefore you should make sure that your contact information is very prominent throughout your website.

The web design on many local websites looks like it’s from the 1990s. If you’re serious about generating clients from your website you should think about getting a new design. In some cases that 1990s look will give your website a trusting “we’ve been around a long time” vibe. This could mean that keeping your current site might not be the worst option (but it probably is!). One thing you can do is look at some of your competitor’s sites and see what they’re doing.

Building out a lot of great features and content will also help your website rank and increase the chance of people linking to your site.

One thing you could do is start a blog and then contribute lots of quality content to it. Don’t just fill the blog with self-promotional garbage either – try to write about things that your customer will be interested in. If you wouldn’t read it, why would your customer?

And don’t forget that contact information.

3) Get the word out about your website

• Tell people about your site.
• Ask friends, family, customers, and suppliers to link to your site where appropriate.
• Add insightful commentary to blogs in your field.
• Submit content to related websites.
• Join a forum related to your industry.
• Submit to some of the better directories (Business.com, DMOZ, Yahoo directory etc)

4) Hire a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist

Professionals in this field can dramatically increase the rankings of your website and bring in highly converting traffic.

A few services they can provide include:

• Adwords campaigns – Adwords are the sponsored ads on the right-hand side when you search for things in Google. SEM professionals can help you decide the best words to purchase and will implement a strategy that will yield a high return on investment (if they know what they’re doing!).
• Website ranking – If you live in small or medium sized city it is usually quite easy to rank your local business for its main search terms. Dentists in larger cities like New York might find that ranking their website is a lot harder than pulling teeth.
• Google Local ranking – As mentioned above, there are a few strategies that you can use to improve your ranking in the local search listings. Implementing these strategies can take some time but finding lifetime customers through search could be a very lucrative way of building a successful local business.

Warning: There are a lot of very poor SEM and SEO companies out there that will do nothing but take your money. At present, word of mouth is the best way to find a SEM or SEO company that will help you generate high converting traffic for your website.

I guess the same could be said of finding a great local business but sometimes word of mouth moves too slow and that’s why we need Google.

Donald Farber works in the field of Search Engine Marketing (SEM). He has worked extensively with local businesses as well as life insurance websites like LifeCover.ca.

Donald lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Targeting the RIGHT Keywords for Your SEO Campaign
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Quick List Tips For Search Engine Optimization
Amazingly HOT giveaway site worth checking out

Just like that. And a year has passed. In a blink of an eye.

So here it is. 2010 – the last year of the decade.

All I want to say is much more power to you. And may it be the best one – yet!

Jag Foo

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Happy 2007!
8 Random Facts About Me
35 Tips To A Wiser, Healthier, More Productive And Successful YOU In 2009
My Maiden Post

Many sites completely rely on a few pieces of Pillar Content to rank well and position themselves as an authority.  It’s a really simple concept but maybe something you have not taken much time to think about.

Improve on Someone Else’s Idea

The great thing about Pillar Content is you don’t have to be a genius to come up with lots of great ideas on what you should produce.  My first project in a new niche is always to read through as many of my competitor’s sites as possible.  As I go, I jot down what content they are promoting most heavily and also what pages seem to pick up the most links (whether they are gained actively or passively).

After I’ve identified several pages that attract lots of link love, I drill down and figure out what makes this content so link worthy.  Oftentimes, it comes back to either a first-mover advantage or the fact that it’s the only place certain information is easily available online.  The next step is to come up with ways to not only attract the links that they have but also improve the content substantially. 

Once you have found the content, improved it, next comes the hard part–getting people to actually link to it!  But, since you did things the smart way and built off of someone else’s already popular content, you have a lot of easy link prospects.  Contact everyone who links to the page or tool that you improved and make the case for why you’re more valuable.  It should not be terribly tough for them to see the value if you have done your job properly and this way is a lot more effective than old school link building.

You might be in an industry where there is not clear Pillar Content on your competitors site.  In that case, you will have to be the trailblazer and figure out what is going to draw in the most attention.  Below are some mainstays to get you started:

Write a Guide or Ebook

Who doesn’t love a free ebook?  I personally download and read free guides and short books all of the time.  Obviously the content needs to be accurate and high quality but also remember to make it visually appealing if you pursue this route.  Half the battle in getting a link is looking like you know what you’re talking about so make sure your ebook or guide is professionally designed.  If you want to check an example out, view this Comprehensive FHA Loan Guide from a site I work with that has been downloaded over 40,000 times and garnered lots of free links.

Create a Widget

A viral widget is an amazing way to both build links and get some branding.  For instance, I help a Mortgage Calculator Programming Contest for a site that I consult on and we had numerous entries plus got a lot of "free" press.  It wasn’t free because we gave away $10,000 but it was definitely a profitable campaign.  People love calculators and tools that make sometime either easier to calculator or easier to visualize.  Webmasters love to jazz up their sites with pretty tools and resources.  Put those those together and presto!

Hold an Annual Contest

I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of contests or pages with the top 100 blogs in XYZ niche.  Well, it may seem elementary but it works!  As a general rule people, bloggers especially, love to have their egos stroked.  An annual contest with awards going to the "top" blogger (judged on some metric of course) are a great way to build buzz and goodwill in your niche.

This post was written by online marketer Brandon Laughridge

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Time For Some Link Love
31 Ways to Generate Web Site Traffic
Personal Development Downloads
Online Marketing Success Cycle

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it.

He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

Ghandi on serving customers

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Ghandi on life

Satisfaction does not come with achievement, but with effort. Full effort is full victory.

Ghandi on importance of putting in effort

It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Ghandi on humility

As usual, I love to hear your comments.

All success,

Jag Foo

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Words Of Wisdom To Success
Success Begins With Your Words
50 Power Words To ‘Juice’ Up Your Sales Copy
Down-To-Earth Report From A Top Marketer

Here’s another example of how a little tweak can effect a huge change.

In this case, we are going to talk about the power of consensus.
Or the power of the crowd.

How does this fit into the “small change big impact” theme? Let me explain…

There’s this product where buyers can call in to buy.

The product was advertised as an infomercial.
And the call-to-action line was “Call now and our operators will be there to serve you”.

Well…the response was okay, but not fantastic.

So the call-to-action line was re-written and tested.

It now read, “Operators are busy. Please call back again later if the line is engaged”.

Straight away, orders went through the roof!

Why was there such a big impact when the change to the call-to-action script is so small?

Because of the power of consensus!

In the first case, you get the mental picture that operators are free, and are probably twiddling their thumbs waiting for calls to come in.

But in the second case, the picture is that of busy operators who have their hands filled with orders.

And if everyone is buying it, then it probably is going to be a good product. So I must get it!

See the difference?

Yet another example that demonstrate the importance of:
- Constantly testing and tweaking for higher conversions
- Paying attention to the even the smallest of details. Because sometimes they make all the difference.

As usual, I love to hear your comments.

All success,

Jag Foo

P.S Important => What if you can discover the secret element that can increase your profits by 1,000%…and more…

Will you be willing to do a small test – which you can implement in no time and cost zero dollars – that can potentially yield you disproportionally large results?

Click here now if you want to discover these secrets that Jay Abraham, Mark Joyner and other marketing legends have been exclusively to their clients => http://emoneymarketing.com/SmallChangesBigProfits/

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Small Change Big Impact Part 2
Small Change Big Impact Part 1
Deadly Research Resources and Tools
Why Internet Marketing, Business and Finance? – Part 1

By Kathleen Cleary

Congratulations! You’ve jumped on the Social Media bandwagon and set up your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Perhaps you’ve even created a Facebook fan page and scouted out some niche-oriented sites to post comments to, answer questions, and start discussions on.

But wait … do you find yourself wondering if your Social Media efforts and time are really paying off? How do you measure the Return on Investment of relationship-building and engagement? How can you be sure you’re not sucking the time out of your most productive hours each day with little return?

If you are participating in Social Networks in a willy-nilly fashion — a tweet here, a blog post there — without much thought to what your true purpose is, you are just a ship without a rudder in the vast sea of Social Media. And, you won’t be gaining the kind of attention which will drive business to you, or to a client you may be advising on how to effectively use Social Networks.

Establish Your Clear Defining Purpose So You Can Unmistakably Measure the Return on Your Social Media Time

To see results from your Social Media activities, it’s vital that you have a “clear defining purpose” for being there in the first place. Let’s take a look at some of the common motivating factors to getting involved with Social Media …

• Build brand visibility
• Lead generation and list building
• Education and awareness
• Increased credibility and authority (Thought Leadership)
• Increased blog/website traffic and leads
• Promote products and services
• SEO and link building
• Gather insights into your community of interest (surveys, polls, market research)

As a copywriter, your defining purpose might be to: “engage and add value to (your chosen niche) community in order to increase leads and work opportunities.”

If you are consulting with a client on how to participate in Social Media, you must help them define their primary purpose before creating an effective action plan.

Let’s say your client is a fitness center. Their defining purpose might be to: “provide education on the life-changing benefits of proper health and fitness activities for members and prospects as well as to increase leads for new memberships.”

If your client is a natural beauty product retailer, their defining purpose might be to: “increase awareness of the lasting health benefits of using natural beauty products in order to increase the customer base for ‘X’ Brand.”

Once you are clear on your defining purpose, it’s time to set up specific and measurable goals, develop and execute a strategy, and then evaluate your Return on Investment. Social Media actually provides two types of ROI. There is the traditional Return on Investment, which looks at concrete dollars, customers, subscriptions, etc. And, there is also the Return on Influence. Both should be measured.

Return on Influence has more to do with brand authority/credibility and one’s levels of influence, engagement, and popularity in Social Media channels. Positive outcomes here will eventually have a real impact on the measurable dollar amounts which show up in the Return on Investment numbers.

So, back to setting your goals. Be sure they are not too vague or hard to measure. A weak goal for your fitness center client would be: “Our goal is to raise our brand awareness and increase our total number of memberships.”

An example of a stronger goal could be: “Our goal is to increase website traffic resulting in 75 new leads and 25 new memberships in the next six months.”

Perhaps your client is focused on connecting with influencers in their industry. A weak goal would be: “Our goal is to increase our brand visibility and unsolicited mentions of our company each month.”

A much stronger goal is: “To achieve 15-20 unsolicited mentions of our company in industry blogs, publications, and forums each month.”

As a copywriter, a vague goal would be: “To increase my Facebook fan base and Twitter followers.” A more specific and measurable copywriting goal could be: “To acquire 50 new leads from Social Media and contract with five new clients in the next six months.”

In looking at the two types of ROI provided by Social Media activities, here are some suggested ideas of what you can measure:

Return on Investment examples:

• 500 new subscribers
• 50 new product sells
• Six new clients
• Five new joint venture partnerships
• $10,000 increase in donations for a non-profit

Return on Influence examples:

• 1,000 new Twitter followers
• 2,500 participants in your Facebook Group
• 1,500 fans to your Facebook fan page
• 25 mentions per month in blogs, Twitter, niche social sites
• 400 new RSS subscribers to your blog

Useful Tools to Help You Track Your Social Media ROI

Be sure to take advantage of these very useful tools available to help you track your ROI:

1. Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics (This is a very good tool to track website visitor traffic and conversion from Social Media sources)
2. Feedburner – http://www.feedburner.com (Tracks the number of people subscribing to your RSS blog feed)
3. Frogloop – http://www.frogloop.com/social-network-calculator (This cool Social Media calculator is designed for non-profit campaigns, but can be adapted for other business campaigns as well)
4. BlogPulse – http://www.blogpulse.com (Shows the growth in bloggers talking about your business/your client’s company and tracks the growth in blog posts regarding a particular domain name)
5. Trendpedia – http://www.trendpedia.com (This is a comparative tool to track the number of blog posts that mentioned a particular keyword)
6. Social Network Influence Statistics:
   • Increased numbers in Facebook fans on your/your client’s fan/business page
   • Increase in Twitter conversations pertaining to your business/your client’s company
   • Increase in Twitter follows, Facebook friend requests, and FriendFeed subscriptions

If you want to be sure you are participating in the Social Networks effectively, discover the strategies fellow AWAIer Jim Turner uses to find all the clients he needs solely through his Social Network activities. Jim’s program, Social Networking: The 21st Century Way to Find New Clients details how you can use Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to create a steady stream of hungry prospects and new clients for your freelance copywriting business.

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Unleash The Power of Multi Channel Marketing
Tips On How You Can Harness The Massive Power Of Social Media
Landing That Deal – With 10 Persuasion Techniques You Can Use TODAY!
A mind-boggling array of Financial calculators for your benefit

At the same time, you will end up overcoming your fear of writing.

Writing For Traffic

When it comes to getting traffic with Google AdWords and article marketing, it is all about words. Using your words, you can write persuasive PPC ads that get people to click and to visit your website. You also use words to write articles with interesting titles and compelling resource boxes.

Writing For Conversion

With your words, you can turn traffic into profits. Simply by writing in a conversational yet persuasive style in your affiliate presell pages, your sales pages, landing pages and email follow ups, you can get your visitors to make purchases and you will get paid for it.

Writing For Help

At this point of time, you might be thinking of hiring people to do all that writing for you. Smart move! Other than having money to outsource your writing, you still need to be able to write so that you can hire people. After all, you need to write and post ads to find the right people.

Writing Required

By now, you realized that importance of writing and you just need to do it. It might sound intimidating for most people, however, once you do it, you will find that it is not as hard as you think. Just like most things, the more you do it, the better you get.

No need to take writing classes, just write like you speak. If you insist on not writing then you might want to record your voice then hire someone to transcribe your voice into words. This is a fast way to create content and many top selling authors use this method to write their books.

Last but not least, improve your ability to write and your life will get easier. All the best!

Samuel Ng

“Google AdWords System” (Value: $49.97)
Are The Gurus Lying To You About Google AdWords And PPC?
Here’s How You Can Get High Conversions With Low Cost Traffic
Google AdWords System <== Click Here Right Now

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Words Of Wisdom To Success
50 Power Words To ‘Juice’ Up Your Sales Copy
Common Words That Kill Your Sales Process
AdWords Marketing – Words That Add Urgency to Your PPC Ads

Best of all, what you are about to read will surely help you succeed faster.

Education

If you have been online for at least awhile, I am sure that you have bought books from Amazon, courses from ClickBank and a whole lot of other stuff that is collecting dust on your shelves or collecting digital dust on your computer.

You are in the process of getting yourself educated so that you can have the knowledge of how to build and run a successful business online. This is a good thing, provided you will implementing what you are learn. If not, you need to practice more of what you know!

Action

If you have been to some personal development talks or some network marketing talks, you always hear about stuff like being self-motivated and taking massive action. Then again, what the heck is taking massive action?

You can take all the action you want and if you do not have the proper knowledge, you will fail anyway. I have seen so many people take action without proper knowledge and all of them are totally burnt out with nothing to show for their effort.

Success

Success happens when you take pieces of the puzzle and you put them together to see the whole big picture. Getting educated is where you find the pieces of the puzzle, taking action and doing your own testing is where you put the pieces together.

Education + Action = Success

Mistakes

Do you find yourself making a lot of mistakes? Mistakes can hardly be avoided because it is all part of your learning experience. Always learn from your mistakes so that you will not repeat them again. Also, if you did your research properly, you will make less mistakes and they will cost you less as well.

Pace

Do not rush, do things at your own pace, 1 thing at a time. When you do 1 thing at a time, you are more focused and it may seem slow, however when you are done, you will realize that you did a good job at a reasonable pace.

When you are rushing, you cannot think clearly and clarity of mind is the best thing you need when you have an urgent deadline or when you are facing a tough challenge in your business.

Progress

Keep a simple journal or notebook where you can track your results, progress and mistakes too. This is where you will learn from your own mistakes and you can see clearly which are the exact activities that are useful for your business and which ones are not.

Productivity

Create 2 simple to-do lists, 1 for weekly tasks and 1 for daily tasks. Use short and simple words on your to-do list so that you will not get the feeling of overwhelm and overload.

Always block out 45 – 60 minutes time slots to do your core tasks. Make sure that you take short breaks in between these slots. Do your best to have enough sleep so that you can keep your energy level up.

Focus

Stay focused and stop chasing after the latest Johnny come lately guru of the week. Their job is to distract you and get you to buy stuff from them. Your job is to avoid them so that you can stay focused on what you need to do to make money for yourself!

Last but not least, be persistent and never give up. Mistakes will happen and you do have what it takes to make it right. All the best!

Samuel Ng

“Google AdWords System” (Value: $49.97)
Are The Gurus Lying To You About Google AdWords And PPC?
Here’s How You Can Get High Conversions With Low Cost Traffic
Google AdWords System <== Click Here Right Now

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

If You Are Not Tracking – You Are Not In The Game…
Online Marketing Success Cycle
Unbreakable Solid Rules To Winning In The Online Marketing WAR!
Piracy Can Be Good For Marketing…

I write about many of these topics on my blog, but specialize in market segmentation and gathering target market information. So I want to share with you how to do a free target market analysis that takes only minutes.

Step 1: You Need Demographics To Perform Your Market Analysis

First you must identify the best potential customers for what you sell. Then you need to know five major demographics for your target market:

1. Age provides generation and life stage characteristics.

2. Gender provides marketing appeals that differ between men and women.

3. Education provides social class and lifestyle characteristics.

4. Occupation is the best predictor of social class.

5. National origin, or race, provides characteristics that differ by culture.

Now this information is sometimes difficult to locate, particularly if your business is Internet based. But I recently discovered a site that provides age and gender demographics by keywords. You’ll be surprised at how many marketing characteristics you can learn from just these two demographics.

So go to http://adlab.microsoft.com/Demographics-Prediction/DPUI.aspx. and get age and gender demographics for your major keywords, those that you’re building your site or blog around.

By doing a Google search for your target market, you’ll discover additional demographics to perform your market analysis. This isn’t necessary, but the more demographics you have, the more complete you target market analysis will be.

Step 2: You Need A Simple Process To Perform Your Market Analysis

Just having demographics for your target market doesn’t help you much unless you know characteristics for them. That’s why I developed my matrix market segmentation process for my students when I was still teaching at the University of Oklahoma. I knew my students wouldn’t use the process unless I made it easy.

So I developed matrices that contained the major characteristics by each demographic segment. For example, generations differ considerably in what they value, what they trust, how they want to live and work, their concerns, and their hopes. So I developed a matrix for each generation so students could just copy and paste into a table. When finished the table contains the major characteristics for a target market.

This worked well and I provide a free report on how to use this manual process when you subscribe to my blog.

Step 3: You Need A Way To Perform Your Market Analysis Easily and Quickly

After I retired from higher education and started my Internet business, I soon realized that business owners need an even quicker and easier way to use my process. So I paid a programmer $550 to automate it. Now the program does all the work for you.

But it’s a good idea to read the free report before getting your free target market analysis. Then you’ll understand what the program is doing and how to best use the results.

You just login to AutoMarketAnalysis.com and do the regular opt-in routine. When you’re returned to the site, you’ll select demographic options from your research in step 1, and click the submit button.

Because this site was created by the programmer, it’s not very pretty, but if you can overlook its looks, you’ll be amazed at the information it’ll provide.

You’ll immediately get characteristics that are shared across demographics, the best marketing appeals for your target market, and for some target markets, media preferences and buying behavior.

Step 4: After You Perform Your Market Analysis, Implement It.

When you’ve got your free target market analysis, you have to use the results in your marketing strategies and tactics. It will do you no good to perform your market analysis if you don’t use it.

But with your free target market analysis report, you’ll have all the information you need to select marketing appeals that your potential customers will relate to and be influenced by. So why wouldn’t you use it to improve sales and customer relationships.

Step 5: Gather The Other Information You Need To Perform Your Market Analysis

As stated earlier you’ll need additional information about your competitors, product, market environment, pricing, distribution, etc. To start you can go to my blog, click on “Site Map” in the top navigation and see categories with links to my posts on each.

I know you’ll find my posts helpful as you perform your market analysis.

Linda Morton writes on many aspects of marketing on her blog at http://StrategicMarketSegmentation.com/blog. But her specialty is market segmentation and target marketing.

She wrote a national column on her market segmentation process for ten years. To use her automated process, go to http://AutoMarketAnalysis.com.

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Small crazy personal reminiscence on Investment and a great tool I (and you should) use – ChartNexus charting software
Getting to Grips with Google – Part II – Keyword Analysis
Crazy day at the Market! You want some?
Powerful Marketing ToolKit From Marketing Experiments

In the previous post (part 1), we talk about using the principle of consistency technique that helped a restaurant reduce their cancellation of table reservations by 30%.

This was achieved just by adding 2 “small words” to the call script used by the phone receptionist.

Today, we are going to explore another “Small Change Big Impact” scenario.

I got this from a newsletter issue from John Forde’s Copywriting Roundtable. I thought it’s pretty relevant to today’s theme.

And I think you will like this. It goes like this:

In Italy, and for many countries for that matter (including Singapore where I am based), you get penalized with points if you commit a traffic offence.

Once you accumulated points to a certain level, your driving license get suspended.

Now Italy is well well-known for bad driving on the road. And while this measure probably work to a certain degree, the authorities decided to do a small tweak to the system.

They Flipped It Around!

That means you start of with points on your record. With every violation, you get points taken off. If you hit zero, you are IN LUCK! Say goodbye to your license!

What happened after that?

Traffic deaths went down. Accidents went down. Speeding incidents went
down. Helmet and even seatbelt use went up!

Small change. Big impact.

But why?

Because fear of loss is a powerful motivator!

When it’s down to “fear of loss” versus “benefit of gain”, the former wins. Hands down.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the stock market. It can take years for a stock to reach its absolute peak. But you only need a matter of months (or even days) for the stock to plummet back to square one during a panic.

Wonder why weekend clearance sale work so well? Because people are afraid of missing the bargain. There is “scarcity” involved. That’s very effective in getting people to act. And act now.

Amazing how human emotions work right?

As usual, let me know your thoughts below.

All success,

Jag Foo

P.S Important => What if you can discover the secret element that can increase your profits by 1,000%…and more…

Will you be willing to do a small test – which you can implement in no time and cost zero dollars – that can potentially yield you disproportionally large results?

Click here now if you want to discover these secrets that Jay Abraham, Mark Joyner and other marketing legends have been exclusively to their clients => http://emoneymarketing.com/SmallChangesBigProfits/

---
Related Articles at E-MoneyMarketing:

Small Change Big Impact Part 3
Small Change Big Impact Part 1
Deadly Research Resources and Tools
Why Internet Marketing, Business and Finance? – Part 1