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Localized strategies for Vermont
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Who's making cash online?
You're seeking information about Vermont or perhaps Vermont is the state you reside. You're selling a product or service and you desire to promote your product or service to customers who live in Vermont and various other places as well. You've read that customers are spending money head over heels every day shopping online and you're commited to learning how you can earn money from the internet.
Fact #1
People do make good money on the web, but it's most likely not you.
Fact #2
Site owners that do make the money, are not necessarily brighter than you.
Fact #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 web site owner living in Vermont
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Or an individual thinking about doing one of the above
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If any of the above activities sound like you, this article is for you. You are about to discover precisely what to do this year to help guarantee that next year your business, website or blog is enjoyably profitable.
Internet marketing tips and methods for Binney & Smith At Home...
If you wanted to state simply 'what' the Internet is, you could make a strong case for the statement:
The net is a place to search for things
Listen closely to what folks say when they're talking about the net:
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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..."
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"Yea, $20 bucks on eBay, can you believe it..."
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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 business to help customers find you. It's a little tedious, but it's not nearly as hard as you probably 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 once week you tackle one approach until you have each one working.
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 platform for you to rattle on about what you're involved in... perhaps topics related to your business or web site, your profession, or the benefits and testimonials surrounding your products and services.
Go by focusing on how this all relates to Vermont or the benefits people from Vermont might experience.
The reason a blog is a must for your web campaign strategy is because it gives you an instant voice on the internet to provide news and information about the things 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 ranked 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. Also 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 highly popular blogs that offer top notch services. Some are hosted others you can host yourself.
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 apply to marketing, 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 website owners have learned few people purchase anything on that first visit. How often has anyone ordered or even contacted you from your site? It takes a bit more "relationship building" 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:
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 diminish 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 sign up for 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 web site visitors. Email as a communication vehicle has lost some of its punch and profitability in recent years. Users are confused about what is quality content in their email folder and what is SPAM and unwanted advertisements. XML or RSS feeds are not nearly as complicated as they sound and are worth looking into.
STRATEGY #4
A search engine marketing campaign will generate more website targeted traffic at a lower cost than any other form of website marketing. Without question. Yet the biggest majority of website owners ignore this route to a continuous flow of highly motivated visitors.
Consider these statistics.
Research by Jupiter-MetaMetrix shows that search engine usage is expanding at double-digit rates. A Marketing Sherpa report showed that web site owners who used search engine promotional campaigns realize 25% - 490% revenue growth.
eMarketer research showed that over the past year, search engine marketing (SEM) has skyrocketed. Growing nearly 125% in last year -- in the US alone. Paid search advertising accounts for over 35% of total online ad spending.
All these millions are being spent by home run businesses, corporate businesses and people just like you. It's called PAY-PER-CLICK ( PPC or COST-PER-CLICK ) and it allows you maximum control over your search engine listings. No more optimizing, waiting and praying only to end up as listing number 5901 on page 560 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.
With pay-per-click, site owners decide how high in the rankings (or search results page) they want to appear by bidding penny by penny for the top spots. Keywords popular among site owners cost more while other more diligent site owners find less expensive keyword niches that may bring equally good results for much lower per-click bid rates.
Pay Per Click positions you behind the the controls where you can whip-up well worded ads (called listings) with zippy headlines (referred to as titles), compelling descriptions (10 or maybe 20 words) and bake up perfect matches between keywords and keyword phrases. YOU chose and the destination or landing pages you want to link search visitors to.
The great advantage in PPC marketing is that you can bid on dozens or hundreds of keywords connected 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 lists 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 people joining this internet marketing newsletter.
Musings of an Internet Guru: Newsletter
Click here to subscribe (free PPC eBook included)
http://www.danhollings.com/class/newsletter.html
Here are a few hot search engine tips and keyword discovery ideas to get you started:
- Expand your keywords by asking your spouse, friends, neighbors, relatives, existing customers and strangers to look at your web page and offer their keyword suggestions. In this phase you cannot have too many cooks in the kitchen.
- Put your biscuits in the oven and watch'em rise... That is, use web based 'keyword expanders' and research tools to expand your keywords beyond what you can come up with on your own.
- Remember, searchers may type in something that describes your product, but more often than not they will be typing in words describing their problem. If your product or service solves, fixes, heals, masks or even distracts them from their problem, you want those keywords on your list.
- "In-house" keywords (those used frequently by others in your industry or business) are often the most costly because lazy business owners don't often think beyond their own nose. The result is these limited keywords get bided-up sky high. Customers on the other hand seldom search using "in-house" keywords. Your goal is to find keyword niches popular with customers but less popular with your competition.
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The Vermont Marketing Winning idea
Go local. Yes, business owners from Vermont search for stuff to buy using "Vermont" as their keyword. That means you must include search engine ads targeting Vermont and bid on keyword phrases which have your state: Vermont.
The quickest way to results 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, write a quality title and description for your search listing and stick with it for at least 6 months as you learn the ropes. Set a monthly budget that you are comfortable with (perhaps $89 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 commitment.
STRATEGY #5
Don't start any other techniques 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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