Seasoned Marketer

Small businesses should be taking advantage of the online local marketing opportunities out there.  There are all sorts of choices, some free and some paid.

For example, Groupon.com is a deal site for local retail or service businesses.  Basically a small business puts up a special offer or deal on the site (like 50% off your first purchase) and then there is a time limit on how long the special is offered for.  The advantage of doing something like this for small businesses is abundantly clear.  You can generate more customers and generate buzz.  If I were a small retail biz, I would definitely be doing groupon.com and offer a loss-leader to help generate more clients, build brand, build word of mouth, etc.

The other example is Google Local.  This is a free service that Google offers that allows your business to be added to local listings.  Free exposure to highly targeted customers?  Uh yeah, that’s a no brainer.  Part of that system also includes customers that have reviewed your business and given it a star rating, like 5 stars or 3 stars.  And then actually written a review.  I can tell that the businesses that get the most reviews and the highest stars will get clicked on the most.

Now you don’t have to stop at local results.  If you have a retail store and an ecommerce store (which you should have – if you run a brick and mortar – you should be offering your product online and for online purchase), then you could check out something like SlickDeals.com.  This place allows you to place ads for special deals.

And the thing about all of these sites are that they get a massive amount of traffic.  And it’s extremely targeted traffic.  And 2 of them are free.

Of course, speaking of not free, then you should also have some sort of budget for advertising online via pay per click.  You can go with Google Adwords or Microsoft Ad center to help target your customers online in your local market.

That just cracks me up.  All these so called ‘gurus’ have been banned from Google.  Let me tell you one thing.  If you are following the advice of any of these ‘gurus’ who got banned from Google, then I’d recommend finding someone who isnt’ trying to scam you or Google.

The reason they got banned is that they were not following the Terms of Service that Google clearly lays out.  And you really have to do some serious BS to get banned from Google.

Recently, I saw this guy was selling a PPC secretive course for like $197 teaching all these great techniques for how to get cheap traffic from Google Adwords.  The next thing you know this guys course is WORTHLESS because he got the boot by Google.  His techniques were not only unethical, but now are completely useless and if you used them, you might just get banned yourself.  And he’s not the only one, there are lots of these guys trying to use shady techniques that are pretty much just to make a quick buck.  They don’t care about building a long term business and they certainly don’t care about helping people through their so called ‘courses’.

And it seems most of them are in the the ‘lead generation’ business.  Which seems to be all the rage now.  And while they might be showing you their massive profits, what they aren’t showing you is how much they spent in ads.  So they probably aren’t taking home most of the money. 

So what’s all this mean?  A whole new slew of HOW TO GET TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE courses, other than Google, of course.  Go figure.  And the top products from some sleazy marketers are even suggesting using adware secretly installed on peoples computers to get ‘targeted’ traffic to your site.  Uh, yeah, that’s exactly how I DON’T WANT TO BUILD MY BUSINESS.  That particular company by the way got busted a while back and has apparently changed their name and is now back in business. 

Getting traffic is not hard to do.  SEO is still as valid today as it was several years ago.  PPC done correctly is still a quick and easy way to get traffic.  All these traffic networks popping up are also worth a shot, but I would test the big 3 first before wasting money on the other networks.  The big 3?  Yep, Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Ad Center.

I taught a course called the UpStart Network a couple years ago.  And the techniques I taught in that course are 100% still valid and still useful.  And they didn’t get people banned from any of the search engines or from their ad programs.  And as promised I am re-opening that course (after 2 years) and updating it and it’s set to open this summer, hopefully in June 2010.

In the meantime, just build a business the right way for the longer term and you will have a HUGE head start on the competition.  Don’t fall for these get rich quick, do no work schemes.  They are leading you down a path that they have already shown you once to be worthless to your own business.

A conversion is simply a goal you want to achieve with your site.  A conversion can be a sale or successfully generating a lead via an email sign-up.  And by using an analytics program like Google Analytics, you can easily keep track of your conversions.

It is so critically important to track your conversions, especially if you are buying ads (either PPC or CPM).  And even if you don’t have sales conversions, you should be tracking your email / newsletter sign-up conversions.  Ideally, you should be tracking both.  And it’s so easy not to, or to forget to add the tracking code to your web pages.

By tracking your conversions, you know which keywords are performing for you and which ones are just a waste of money.  Now keep in mind, even if you have an ecommerce site, not everyone is going to buy from you on first visit.  In fact, MOST people will not buy from you on the first visit no matter how good your site is.

So it is highly unlikely you’ll have a 100% conversion rate.  And actually it’ll be more like a 0.05% to 5% conversion rates.  So if most people aren’t going to buy from you on first visit, then you’ll need to at least entice them to sign up for your newsletter (offer incentives like discounts, great info, reviews, etc. to boost newsletter sign-ups).  This process will allow you to hopefully build trust and establish a relationship with your new visitor and ideally they’ll become a customer.

But if you aren’t tracking this stuff (Google Analytics even gives you the code – all you have to do is copy and paste it into your site), then you won’t know what’s making your site successful.

And here’s a key and the real gold nugget in this article is what to do once you’ve collected a few months of conversion data.  Let’s say you are buying ads via PPC.  And you’ve been somewhat successful and you’ve been tracking your conversions.  The next step is to setup a brand new campaign and take ONLY those keywords that convert and increase your budget and run your PPC with that campaign only.

Doing just that should help you increase sales, not to mention help with branding and building your newsletter list.

My friend, who is President of a MIS company, thinks I am crazy for doing so much SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  And he thinks that PPC is better and just plain ol faster, cause you can just buy it.

And my response after several years of testing shows time and time again that it’s worth taking the time to do SEO. And for several reasons.  But the primary reasons is just sheer volume of traffic.

For those of you who don’t know what PPC and SEO are, they are 2 different ways to get visitors to your site.  PPC stands for Pay Per Click andthat means exactly like what it sounds.  You can literally buy traffic and you ‘pay per click’, meaning you pay each time someone clicks on your ads.  And over the years that has gotten more and more expensive to do.

SEO is all about designing your site both for visitors and search engines and then getting links back to your site that help with your rankings in the major search engines. 

For example, on a Google search results page, the PPC (also called sponsored listings) is found on the right hand side of the page and all the results on the left hand side of the page is called “organic’ or natural “FREE” traffic and is usually a result of a well orchestrated SEO effort, particularly if we are talking about highly competitive search terms.  You’re not going to rank #1 for Viagra by accident.

So is PPC better than Organic SEO’d traffic?  Not in my opinion.  But it’s also a bit like apples and oranges.  With PPC you know that if you bid ‘x’ amount of dollars you’ll get ranked in the top 2 spots in the sponsored results listings.  But that usually requires a good chunk of change to drive any volume of traffic to your site.

SEO, once you have worked your way up into the top 10 results, you’ll get a constant stream of traffic for little to no money.  It doesn’t cost anyone money when people click on the left hand side results (unless those sites have hired someone to do SEO for them or have joined a bunch of expensive directories or have purchased links, etc.).  Which is often times the case.

The down side to SEO is that it’s highly competitive but can drive tons more traffic than PPC and can save you money.  The down side to PPC is that it’s expensive, but at least it’s predictable (meaning you can just buy the results / traffic you want - IF you can afford to).

So my recommendation is… to do BOTH.  Buy PPC in the beginning of your SEO efforts to test traffic and while you are waiting for all of your hard earned SEO efforts to pay off.  You can also use that PPC data to help you determine what and where your SEO efforts should be placed.

That’s all for now, see you next time!