Help Local Businesses Get (Better) Online

Use Your IM Skills Locally

A New Plan for Using Your Internet Marketing Skills: Go Local

Okay, you've made some money online and know the basics of the business, if not, why? Here's a thought: why not take your skills and help local businesses market their most profitable merchandise, products or services. You can also help them scale up any underused capacity that they want to promote. Best of all, you can plan it so they give you monthly, recurring payments!

This is the lat post in this series so I want to impress on you the money that is in local marketing online. Most brick-and-mortar local businesses know their business, but don't know how to market their business effectively. Sure, they do what their competition is doing, but they don't think outside the box. You, as an experienced marketer, can help them in ways they may never even imagine.

First, you have to realize that what local businesses need is not an education in online marketing. Truth be told, many of them won't understand anyway. They need someone to look at what they're doing with fresh eyes and a willingness to listen to them. The worst thing you can do is walk into a small business with a "business in a box" solution. You need to know what the problem is before you offer any solutions.

Avoid making the same mistake that many new Direct Response Internet Marketing hopefuls make: build a product or service, then check to see if anybody is already buying something like it. Do your market research first. Locate the hungry buyers for advertising and promotion.

Find out who is paying a lot of advertising money in your local area. Approach these businesses first, before you think about helping smaller, less profitable businesses. One easy way to start your market research is to look at Yellow Pages books and business directories. Concentrate on those businesses that have big display ads.

Full-page (or large) display ads cost a lot of money. In fact, the amount is usually so much that they are paid for on a monthly basis. As I mentioned in a previous post, all you have to do is call or write to these resources and find out the monthly fees for advertising in their publications

You may be in for a shock! Small and medium-sized businesses who do this kind of advertising can pay up to thousands of dollars every month in advertising fees with no way to get an accurate feed on ROI, meaning that money is just disappearing. I refer to this as "hope marketing" because it ends with hoping that it is working.

Now you have an idea of which local businesses in your area are already "hungry buyers" for what you can offer them. You'll be able to approach them with confidence. Your marketing skills, applied to their business and marketing plan, can really boost their revenue.

Avoid using IM "jargon" when speaking to these businesses. Remember, they know their business. They don't know about autoresponders, split testing, affiliate links, analytics for Web pages, etc. You'll just make what you do seem foreign to them.

Instead, find out what their business and marketing plans are. Help them target their most profitable merchandise, products or services. Find ways to help them improve the marketing of any underused capacity or products they have.

Think of their needs first, before you offer any solution. You'll be more likely to get a new client and get more money every month for helping that client.

I do wish to help answer any questions you may have about online marketing or business in general, so ask away.

Get Your Client's Website Out of the Witness Protection Program

The Front Door Method of Local Business Promotion

Put a Big, Red Front Door on Your Client's Local Presence

So if you have been following this series, then you have already made your local searches and tests of niche markets, you may have noticed that very few businesses and professional practices ranked well in the search engines. That's because there are SEO mistakes in their landing pages that prevent them from being indexed properly for their niche. Others simply don’t have one.

One of the most effective steps you can take to remedy that is to give them a "front door" to their website. This is a standalone page that has great SEO value and points directly at the clients business or website. These "front door" pages are simple in design, load quickly and have a tightly focused intent: get a prospect to call the business on the phone.

Most people who need a service go looking for it online. When they go looking, they want to call someone. Many have an urgent need and don't want to have to hunt around for the "contact us" page that most websites add like it was an afterthought.

Your Front Door pages need to have:

●       The client's logo or photo of their business as seen from the street

●       The client's business name in big letters and as an <h1> headline

●       The client's phone number in large, easy to read numbers

●       Tightly focused, customer oriented pre-selling copy

●       A strong call to action – call NOW

●       Absolutely nothing else on the page – no AdSense, no other links but the client's (make the header graphic and title clickable links); nothing to distract the reader from calling your client.

This approach saves you from actually redoing the customer's own Web page and gives their site a great backlink, which will improve their rankings. When you combine this method with blogging and article writing that supports the Front Door page, you make yourself invaluable to the client.

If your authoritative articles and blog posts all have backlinks that point to the Front Door page, several things will happen

●       Your Front Door page will rise to the top

●       Your supporting backlinks will appear right beneath the Front Door

●       You will push your client's competition farther and farther down in the SERP's

The real value to you, as a marketing consultant who earns big monthly fees for his or her work, is controlling the top spot in the SERP's. Always make sure your Front Door page gets all the backlinks from your supporting blogs, articles and other online resources.

If you like, you can take over the entire first page of the SERP's in some niches! Just add some social networking pages (Squidoo, Hub Pages), some classified ads (craigslist, USFreeAds, backpage.com) and at least one Wordpress blog post with targeted keyword tags. Wordpress tags have great SEO value!

Hopefully you can see now that generalizing online is not profitable, while niche marketing is. So to niche market specifically with local businesses to help their marketing soar is the ultimate in online business.

We have one more installment in this local market deep dive. If you have any questions, let me know. See you in the next post and, until then, here's to your success.

The First Step Is Market Research

Finding Hungry Local Advertising Buyers

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

If you want to make the most effective use of your time and energy helping local businesses get online, start with smart market research. Instead of guessing which businesses spend big ad dollars, go to the Yellow Pages or a local business directory that has display ads.

Start at the beginning and go through the listings. When you find a niche that has full-page or very large display ads, make a note of it. Continue searching until you reach the end, or find more than enough potential niches.

In most cases, you'll find there are "rich-niche" businesses and professions that advertise like this:

●       Contractors

●       Dentists

●       Doctors

●       Insurance

●       Lawyers

●       Real Estate

These businesses and professionals make large sums of money on each new customer or client they get. Spending thousands of dollars every month to advertise is just a fraction of what they receive in profits. You can be the one that gives them great value for their advertising spending.

Most business owners complain that 50% of their advertising budget is wasted. They just don't know which 50%! You know, from experience, about adding Google Analytics, Stat Counter or any of the other third party services for these statistics. You'll be able to prove (and show) a prospect where their potential business is coming from, what they do when they view a Web page and where they leave (exit).

No Yellow Pages book can do that! Instead of guessing whether or not a given display ad is performing well, a customer of yours who has a Web page will have measurable statistics to rely upon. These statistics can also provide valuable market research for the client. No Yellow Pages book can do that either!

For you, the marketer, the results you get from your exploration of the Yellow Pages listings is just the start. You'll have to "weed out" all the retail-oriented display ads like restaurants and other businesses that are working on a small profit margin. Just because a restaurant has a full-page menu, that doesn't mean they're making a big profit. They're just up there because their competition has a menu, too!

Take the final results of your searches and organize them into categories that will simplify the next step in your market research. Put all contractors as sub-listings under the more general term "contractors". That way, when you take the next step and search for them in Google, you'll be able to just run through the list one word at a time, like this:

1.    Contractors building

2.    Contractors concrete

3.    Contractors drywall

And so on…

In case you have any questions in your mind if this is a good way to find hungry ad buyers, call your Yellow Pages advertising department and ask for the cost of all the display ads they offer. You already know from these posts that the prices are outrageous for what you get, but act shocked. Ask them if you can get a discount on the "rate card" they quote you.

After you get their numbers and see their willingness to assist in price, you'll know for sure that this is probably the most powerful source of market research for hungry advertisers in your local area!

In the next post I will get a little more detail on getting that foot in the front door.

Beat the Big Guns with a Blog Post!

Test Your Niches for Total Domination

#1 in Google in 10 Minutes! (OK, maybe not 10 minutes, but pretty close)

In the last post, we discussed getting online with marketing because it won't be for long until Yellow Pages book will be obsolete. We also spoke about how Yellow Pages are now getting online, but the reality is that the site is just as convoluted as the books as it comes to deciphering local businesses from businesses in other towns and states.

Online Yellow Pages sites can have a Google Page Rank of 8 for their home page. Despite that, a lowly blog post from a new blog with a Page Rank of 0 can beat them in the SERP's! That's because, for local search, local content wins.

If you don't already have a marketing blog that's been up for a while, start a new one. In the meantime, you can write an article, using the keywords you want to test in the title. Sprinkle them throughout the article using natural language (Google has really started cracking down on keyword manipulation techniques, so it has to be conversational text, not just a stack of keywords).

Either way, your content could end up being crawled and indexed by Google very quickly. An established blog or article directory gets crawled more frequently than a new blog or website. Use "seasoned" resources like these to make your test.

If your blog post or article ends up in the top spot of the search engine results, you have a viable niche! While the blog post or article may not stay there right away, don't worry. Google's dynamic indexing will eventually give you a solid place in the search results over time.

Test as many of these niches as you need, according to your plan. Prepare yourself to dominate the ones in which you rank well. The best next step to take is to start a blog that's specifically made to support your prospective clients.

Once you realize the power and ease with which you can use your IM skills to dominate local search, you'll get excited! This is a wide-open market with few effective competitors. Unless there is another Direct Response Internet Marketer in your location, you'll have no effective competition.

Even if you have one or more colleagues in your area, you can get together and divide up the territory among yourselves. There's no need to fight battles among yourselves, unless you like the competition!

This whole process you've begun is leading up to your main marketing strategy: getting as many of the local businesses you can give top spots in the search engines to pay you a monthly fee that's a percentage of their Yellow Pages fees. Once you can show these heavy advertisers that you can help them dominate local search with your ongoing help, they'll pay you ongoing fees to do just that!

The amazing thing about this particular part of your testing is how fast it can happen. A blog with a Page Rank of 1 that is regularly crawled by Google can have a new post in the #1 spot in less than 10 minutes! An article on a well-respected article directory can do the same thing just as fast. That's unusual for articles, but blog posts get special treatment.

Now you need to think about how you can help your prospects beyond your blog posts and articles. They may already have a website. It just doesn't appear in the search engine results because of SEO mistakes. The great thing is that you don't even have to repair what's wrong to help them out. All they need is a "front door" to their local business.

Next we get into market research, so keep an eye out for it.

As always, here's to your success.

"Drill Down" to Big Profits

Find the Niches Where There is No Competition

Let Google Show You the Money!

I have written on this before, but I have gotten a few questions from those around me, so I thought I would do a slight deep dive into this again. If you are ready to take the next step in helping local businesses and profiting from helping them; with a list of local advertisers who spend major ad money on display ads in the Yellow Pages and Google, you can target potential profits for yourself. It's easier than you may think! All you need to do is go where there's no local competition.

In many local markets, the keywords that describe the niches you are exploring are dominated by non-local websites. Yellow Pages online, business directories and so-called "scraper" sites (which get their content by "scraping" Yellow Pages content and repackaging it) have a low Page Rank. You'll be able to dominate the search results for these niches because you will have an actual, local presence.

Local sites for local businesses dominate some niches. You don't want to do battle with these niches. Instead, you "drill down" to more specific long-tail keywords that these Page Rank 4 sites didn't include.

Here's how to do the next step of your market research:

●       Pick a niche to search in Google

●       Enter your keywords in this order: location, general niche, specific sub-niche – manhattan lawyers estates

●       Look at the green text at the bottom of each listing. That will be the URL of the site you're competing with

●       If the first search results indicate business directories, classified listings, news items or Yellow Pages online, this is a very good niche

●       If the first search results indicate actual local businesses, this is competitive. Move on or "drill down" with your keywords.

You may find that the first listing is actually for an out-of-state business or professional who happens to have a word or two about your local area on the landing page. This is also a very good niche for you to test further. No one else in your local market is indexed in Google for your area!

If you do find a niche like divorce lawyers is dominated by local law offices, try variations or other specialties of the legal profession. Lawyers can limit their practice to areas like aviation, bankruptcy, commercial law, immigration and so on. Don't fight unnecessary battles – win the search engine war!

The point is that there are few local listings for businesses and professionals that rank well in the search engines. Smart Internet Marketers will go to where the money is and where there is no competition.

Keep in mind, in just a few years, Yellow Pages books may be a thing of the past. If you and your clients are well placed in the search engines, you will have another advantage – age. Google places a premium on older websites that have fresh content added on a regular basis. Make sure your clients are there with that content when the future arrives.

Your next step in getting into the local Web development market is to actually test the best niches for viability. All it will take from you is a blog post or article in an article directory to get you results!

As we continue deep diving on this subject of working with local markets, if you have any questions that I am not covering, drop me a line and let me know.

Time to Promote

Effective Ways to Sell / Promote Your Home Business!

When your business is up and running, you need to reach out to the masses so that the public is aware of its existence and the kind of services you are providing. Hence, one of the major steps in setting up a home business is having a marketing plan. Marketing your home business is not necessarily expensive. Read on to discover several effective yet low cost methods to promote your business to all your potential customers!

1. Website / Blog

Set up a simple website or a blog containing all information on your services or products. Consider using free services such as Wordpress which offer templates and some simple customisable features if you are not ready to pay for a website. Having a website gives you access to a bigger client base as you can direct practically anyone you met to your website for details.

2. Social networking

Capitalise on social network e.g. Facebook, Linked In and Twitter. Use them to get in touch with your clients and potential clients as well as to understand their needs. Imagine asking a question regarding your products on your business’ Facebook page and almost instantly you get responses from your clients. Where else can you get such quick and direct feedback?

3. Article marketing

You can do this by publishing articles about your business in online article directories such as Ezine Articles which have high traffic everyone from people looking for certain information on niche areas. Alternatively you can also write your own eBook on any interesting subject, publish and distribute it for free. Give it to your existing clients or make it available for free download on your website. In your eBook, include some details of your business and a link to your website. Those who think your eBook is good will share it further with their friends and family – it is free viral marketing strategy!

4. Business cards

Make your own business cards which provide the details of your business as well as your contact details.                 Having a business card shows that you are professional and are serious  about your business.

5. Ask for work or leads

You can first start off by calling non-governmental organization (NGOs), schools, universities or other businesses that might require your services or products. Bring your business to them instead of waiting for them to come to you!

This is the last post in this series. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, I am giving away a guide, free of charge, on how to start your own home based business.

All you need to do is email me at 12th.pillar.solutions@gmail.com or comment below and tell me what your biggest fear or concern is when it comes to starting u your business.

Home based case study

Home Business Success Stories

Want to be a successful home business entrepreneur but don’t know how? One of the easiest ways is by modelling other people’s success stories. There are many entrepreneurs who are willingly sharing how they start up and develop their home business on the internet.

Sam, a 21-year-old undergraduate from the United States started his own company from his dorm offering advertisement-free electronic invitation cards for formal events. Read Sam’s story here. http://www.womenhomebusiness.com/startup/sam-franklin-going-green-with-an-electronic-invitation-business.htm

Kate and Tamala were working in hospital as occupational therapists before they started their own home business providing occupational therapy to needy clients at their homes. Read their stories here http://www.homebasedbusiness.sbdc.com.au/10_01_casestudies.asp

Andrea, a former online inventory manager, started off her Take My Mac service to help Apple device owners to sell and recycle their gadgets, instead of throwing them into the bins. Read Andrea’s  story here http://www.womenhomebusiness.com/startup/andrea-bebirian-recycle-and-sell-apple-devices.htm

Some common things among these successful home business entrepreneurs above are:

1. They worked on something they are passionate about.

Sam’s idea of an electronic invitation cards is in line with his belief in going green and saving the trees. Both Kate and Tamala have 25 years of experience working as occupational therapists in hospital offered their services to the community through their home business. Andrea wished to provide a solution for Apple devices owners to get rid of their old gadgets while helping the needy (e.g. schools, etc) to have their own Apple devices.

2.  They worked on a niche market.

Sam’s advertisement-free electronic card received good response because most e-Cards come with many advertisements which are sometimes unwelcoming. Kate and Tamala saw the demand for occupational therapies at a community level and hence decided to quit their jobs at hospitals. Meanwhile Andrea’s Take My Mac made it easier for Apple gadget owners to sell their devices as more and more people are using the Apple devices.

3. Things were never easy at the beginning.

All of them have their own shares of challenges and difficulties when they first started their business. However with perserverence and hardwork, their efforts have born fruits.

Plenty of such success stories are available on the internet to serve as a source of inspiration for all aspiring home business entrepreneurs. Learning from their successes and failures will definitely help in building up a successful home business!

In case you didn't catch the previous two posts in this series (128 & 129), I am offering a free guide to help you start your home based business. All you need to do is send me an email at 12th.pillar.solutions@gmail.com or comment below and tell me what your greatest fear or concern is that is keeping you from jumping off the fence..