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Localized strategies for South Carolina
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Who's taking in money on the web?
You're doing business in South Carolina or perhaps South Carolina is the state you live. You're marketing a product or service and you need to market your product or service to visitors to your site who reside in South Carolina and various other locations too. You've read that customers are spending money head over heels each day shopping online and you're determined to figure out how you can tap this online market.
Truth #1
People do make a sizable income from their website, but it's probably not you.
Truth #2
Site owners that do make the money, are not necessarily smarter than you.
Truth #3
Those that are successful online are not especially gifted or better educated, but rather they have learned a few tricks of the internet trade. 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 one 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 South Carolina
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Or a small business owner thinking about doing one of the above
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If you are any of the above types, 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 more profitable.
Internet marketing tips and strategies for Binney & Smith At Home...
If you wanted to clarify 'what' the Internet is, you could make a strong case for the statement:
The web is a place to search for information, products and services
Listen closely to what many people say when they're talking about the internet:
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"I'll check MapQuest to find directions..."
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"Yes, I compared 4 like items and found the best buy online at..."
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"Let me pull-up the TV guide, I think it's on tonight..."
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"Welcome onboard, how'd you hear about us? Online?"
Everybody's looking, finding, or searching for something. Everybody. So, it's your job to help customers and prospects 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 working.
STRATEGY #1
There's no getting around it, you've gotta have your own blog. A blog (or weblog) is little more than a platform helping you to yack away about what you're taking part in... maybe things related to your business, your industry, or the benefits and testimonials surrounding your products and services.
Go by focusing on how this all relates to South Carolina or the benefits people from South Carolina might experience.
The reason a blog is a must for your web campaign strategy is because it gives you an instant presence on the internet to provide news and information about the things you are doing. Your blog should link to your various other web pages and sites. Blogs are "search engine" friendly and much more likely to get listed 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 business. Also remember to link 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 publish sales pitches.
Need advice? Here are links to a few well known blogs that offer top notch services. Some are hosted others you can put on your own server.
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 discovered 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 merchandise on the Internet:
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91% of opt-in subscribers are more likely to buy... (Source: eMarketer Inc)
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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)
What's the bottom line here? No matter how much traffic you manage to get 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 visitors 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 web 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 website visitors. Email as a delivery vehicle has lost some of its penetration and profitability in recent years. Users are confused about what is quality content in their email folder and what is SPAM and unsolicited advertisements. XML or RSS feeds are not nearly as complex as they sound and are worth looking into.
STRATEGY #4
A pay per click search engine marketing campaign will create more website targeted 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 facts.
Jupiter-MetaMetrix statistics show that search engine usage is expanding at double-digit rates. Marketing Sherpa studies report that website owners who implement search engine marketing campaigns realize a 24% - 500% greater revenue.
A Georgia Tech study shows that 85% of its participants discovered websites through search engines and were searching with the intent to make a purchase.
And... eMarketer research showed that over the past year, search engine marketing has grown tremendously. Growing up to 125% in last year alone -- (US statistics). Paid search accounts for over 30% of total online ad investing.
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 5440 on page 791 under the keyword phrase "find me if you can" because that's where some search engine employee (or worse yet, some robot) thought your site belonged.
With pay-per-click, web site owners decide how high in the rankings (or search results page) they want to appear by bidding a penny at a time for the best spots. Keywords popular among web 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.
Pay Per Click puts you behind the wheel where you can steer towards a perfectly worded PPC ads (known as listings) with snappy headlines (known as titles), interesting descriptions (10, 15 or 20 words approximately) and stir up perfect matches between keywords and keyword phrases. YOU make all decisions and the destination or landing pages you want to link search prospects to.
The unique 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 cent a click.
There are many expert websites and eBooks with recommendations about setting up a PPC marketing campaign. Many charge you upwards of $100 (be careful), but the best we've found is free and is available to you by joining this internet marketing newsletter.
Get Free Pay-Per-Click Tips
Click link below for details on joining list
Subscribe Today (free tips)
Here are a few expert search engine suggestions and keyword discovery ideas to get you going:
- When cooking-up your keyword phrase list, use an extended "keyword discovery" phase. Your competition, like you, will do basic keyword research. You can only beat them if you take it to the next level, and that won't happen in the first day. Having a large number of targeted keywords in your campaign is a side effect of an extended period of brainstorming, discovery, research, or whatever you want to call it.
- Not very wood with gords? There is a hidden target market of quality visitors who type in incorrect spellings of what they are looking for. Site owners often overlook this. In a recent 30 day period on a major search engine at least 108 people where searching for a 'buisness'? Hundreds more were searching for: 'vitiamins', 'vitimans' and even 'vitamens'... You can bid on misspellings and have very little competition on the search results page.
- Assume that at least half your keywords will be rotten eggs, that is, no one will ever look for them and end up at your site. Because there is no extra cost to add as many keyword phrases as you can think up, treat them like biscuits and bake-up as many as you can... 100 or more keyword phrases for each destination page you list in any PPC search engine.
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The South Carolina Marketing Strategy
Go local. Yes, business owners from South Carolina search for products and services using "South Carolina" as their keyword. That means you must include search engine ads targeting South Carolina and bid on keyword phrases containing South Carolina.
The secret to success with any pay-per-click marketing campaign is preparation and consistency. Do your homework in the beginning to find less expensive keywords to bid on, think up a quality title and description for your search listing and stick with it for at least 5 months as you learn the methods. Set a monthly budget that you are comfortable with (perhaps $96 a month) and consider that your dues 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 strategies until you have the strategies 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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