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Local strategies for Alaska
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Who's making money on the web?
You're doing business in Alaska or perhaps Alaska is where you live. You're promoting a product or service and you desire to promote your product or service to people who reside in Alaska and various other states too. You've read that consumers are spending lots of money each day shopping online and you're dead set on figuring out how you can tap this online market.
Truth #1
People do make good money on the web, but it's most likely not you.
Truth #2
Site owners that do make the money, are not necessarily smarter than you.
Truth #3
What separates those that make money and those that go broke has more to do with common sense approaches than graduate course degrees. The difference in the 'haves' and 'have-nots' is not measured by any number of college degrees, but rather by the application of a few common sense strategies.
Are you a person like any of the following?
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A person involved with Binney & Smith At Home
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An individual reselling someone else's products or services?
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A small business, with your own products or services?
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An affiliate, linking to other sites to collect commissions on
customers you refer?
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A network marketer, distributor, or direct sales professional
marketing products or services of your 'parent' company?
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Someone with a garage full of 'stuff' you want to get rid of?
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A business owner living in Alaska
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Or an individual thinking about doing one of the above listed items
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If the things we've listed above remind you of yourself, this article is for you. You are about to be taught step-by-step what to do this year to help assure that next year your business, website or blog is excedingly profitable.
Internet marketing tips and techniques for Binney & Smith At Home...
If you wanted to simplify 'what' the Internet is, you could make a strong case for the argument:
The net is a place to dig up stuff
Listen closely to what internet users say when they're talking about the web:
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"Do a Google, and get back to me with on what comes up..."
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"Yes, I compared 4 like items and found the best buy online at..."
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"After a little research I found exactly what I needed..."
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"Let me pull-up the TV guide, I think it's on tonight..."
Everybody's looking, finding, or searching for something. Everybody. So, it's your business to help them find you. It's a little harder, but it's not nearly as hard as you would likely expect. Give yourself about one hour to explore in detail each strategy listed below. After you learn the basics, you might wish to pace your efforts so that each week you tackle one approach until you have each one up and running.
STRATEGY #1
Blogs have become a required part of any well planned marketing strategy. Bottom line, get one. A blog is nothing more than a forum helping you to rattle on about what you might be interested in... perhaps topics related to your business, your industry, or the benefits and customer stories surrounding your products and services.
Market statewide by focusing on how this all relates to Alaska or the benefits people from Alaska might experience.
The reason a blog or weblog is a must for your internet marketing strategy is because it gives you an instant platform to be heard on the internet to provide news and information about the stuff you are doing. Your blog should link to your various web pages and sites. Blogs are "search engine" friendly and much more likely to get registered in Google, MSN search, Yahoo etc than your website.
Invest a little quality time setting up a 'profile page' on your blog (or connected to your blog) that tells visitors a little about you and your website. Also consider linking to this profile page from your various other web site pages.
Post short but frequent messages every week (more often if possible). Keep it lively, interesting, and topical but above all don't hype and don't write sales pitches.
Need advice? Here are links to a few premier blogs that offer affordable services. Some are hosted others you can host.
STRATEGY #2
Invest a little time reading about "folksonomy" or "tags" and how they can benefit your online marketing campaign. A good place to spend time at is Technorati http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html
Once you understand the basics of how tags interact with your site, start using them on your blog and in comments you post to other blogs. Open a no cost photo sharing account at Flickr http://flickr.com/ to upload photos with descriptive titles and stories related to your business, Binney & Smith At Home, or your products and services. Don't forget your tags!
Open a FURL http://furl.net/ account to save and share bookmarks or favorites linked to all your important web pages. Again, add well worded descriptions and associate proper tags to every bookmarked page.
Never stop linking... return to your other site pages, your blog, and your profile page and add links to your Flickr and FURL pages.
STRATEGY #3
Start an opt-in e-mail list and/or give visitors the chance to subscribe to your RSS or XML feed.
Most online business owners have unfortunately found out few people purchase anything on that first visit. How often has anyone ordered or even communicated with you from your site? It takes a bit more "dating" to get past first base, so to speak.
Here's what researchers have learned about who's most likely to buy products or services on the Internet:
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94% of US adults who have subscribed to a permission based (opt-in) email have made a purchase from the retailer... (Source: eMarketer Inc)
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40% of adults with net access, subscribe to or have received opt-in e-mail in the past three months... (Source: Bigfoot Interactive)
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A recently conducted a study on E-mail Newsletter readers and concluded newsletters "create much more of a bond between user and company than a website can"... (Source: The Neilson Norman Group)
What's the bottom line here? No matter how much traffic you drive to your web pages or blog, if you do not provide visitors a motivating reason to sign-up for a newsletter, you will likely hamper your opportunity to make sales by over 90%. Add a subscription box to every page that you plan to direct traffic to. Do not list any web page on a search engine, business card, or other promotion if that page does not have a way for visitors to join your list.
Internet marketing tips Bonus Idea: Many site owners now offer XML or RSS feeds as an alternative to newsletter subscriptions (not necessarily a replacement). Explore options to offer XML or RSS feeds to your site visitors. Email as a communication vehicle has lost some of its effectiveness and profitability in recent years. Users are confused about what is quality content in their inbox and what is SPAM and unsolicited advertisements. XML or RSS feeds are not nearly as technical as they sound and are worth investigating.
STRATEGY #4
A search engine marketing campaign will create more website traffic at a lower cost than any other form of website marketing. Without question. Yet the overwhelming majority of website owners ignore this route to a continuous flow of highly motivated visitors.
Consider these statistics.
A Georgia Tech survey revealed that over 80% of its respondents discovered web sites through search engines and were searching with intent to buy something.
eMarketer statistics showed that last year, search engine marketing (SEM) skyrocketed. Growing over 120% -- just in the US. Paid search advertising accounts for about 40% of total internet ad spending.
All these millions are being spent by small businesses, large businesses and people just like you. It's called PAY-PER-CLICK ( PPC or COST-PER-CLICK ) and it allows you complete control over your search engine listings. No more optimizing, waiting and praying only to end up as listing number 5955 on page 790 under the keyword phrase "why bother" because that's where some search engine employee (or worse yet, some robot) thought your search engine listing belonged.
Pay Per Click puts you behind the mix-master where you can whip-up perfectly worded ads (referred to as listings) with lively headlines (referred to as titles), compelling descriptions (10 to 20 words or so) and stir up perfect matches between keywords and keyword phrases. YOU control everything and the destination or landing pages you want to link search prospects to.
With pay-per-click, web site owners decide how high in the rankings (or search results page) they want to appear by bidding against your competition for the best spots. Keywords popular among site owners cost more while other more diligent web site owners find less expensive keyword niches that may bring equally good results for much lower per-click bid rates.
The great advantage in PPC marketing is that you can bid on dozens or hundreds of keywords associated to your products, services, business or affiliate offer while never spending a penny until someone CLICKS your listing. Add to this the fact that some keyword listings in some PPCs can start as low as 1 penny or a few pennies a click.
There are many expert websites and eBooks with recommendations about setting up a PPC marketing campaign. Many charge you an arm and a leg (be careful), but the best we've found is free and is available to people joining this internet marketing newsletter.
We recommend the following newsletter
(All list members get a free search engine tips PDF)
Pay-Per-Click Search Engine and Marketing Ideas
Here are a few expert search engine suggestions and keyword exploratory ideas to get you thinking:
- Remember that with PPC campaigns, you are not sending search visitors to a site, you are sending them to a web page (called: a destination or landing page). You must discover keywords and set-up ONE page at a time.
- Remember that people search by typing in more than one word:
- The 7 most used word phrases in search engines according to OneStat.com:
- 2 word phrases 32.58%
- 3 word phrase 25.61%
- 1 word phrases 19.02%
- 4 word phrases 12.83%
- 5 word phrases 5.64%
- 6 word phrases 2.32%
- 7 word phrases 0.98%
- Start your "keyword discovery" process by visiting the destination page you intend to send your search engine visitors to. Put on the 'reading glasses' of a customer and look at your page through their eyes.
- Ask yourself this: "What keywords might a person type in a search box where when they arrived at this destination page, they'd say 'BINGO' this is what I was looking for?" Find these keywords and you've discovered your best keywords.
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The Alaska Marketing Strategy
Go local. Yes, people from Alaska search for stuff to buy using "Alaska" as their keyword. That means you must include search engine ads targeting Alaska and bid on keyword phrases containing Alaska.
The path to success with any pay-per-click marketing campaign is preparation and consistency. Do your homework at the start to find less expensive keywords to bid on, compose a quality title and description for your search listing and stick with it for at least 8 months as you learn the ropes. Set a consistent budget that you are comfortable with (perhaps $76 a month) and consider that your investment in the search engine school of hard knocks. After you graduate, you'll begin to see results. It's an education worth the time, money and effort.
STRATEGY #5
Don't start any other techniques until you have the techniques outlined in this article implemented. However, you should invest in yourself by reading articles and eBooks on internet marketing.
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ArticleArticle911.com source:
Article researched by ArticleArticle911.com staff and contributors.
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© Copyright 2005 by
ArticleArticle911.com
or article author
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