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Local techniques for Idaho
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Internet marketing tips for Innovage in Idaho
By ArticleArticle911.com
For updates visit the Innovage Tips Blog
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Are you pulling in cash on the web?
You're interested in Idaho or perhaps Idaho is the place you live. You're marketing a product or service and you wish to sell your product or service to visitors to your site who live in Idaho and various other places too. You've read that internet surfers are spending lots of money every day shopping online and you're dead set on figuring out how you can earn money from the internet.
Fact #1
People do make a lot of money online, but it's most likely not you.
Fact #2
Business owners that do make the money, are not necessarily smarter 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 Innovage
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A entrepreneurial business, with products or services of your own?
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Typical homeowner with a garage overflowing with 'stuff' you want sell?
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A reseller of products or services provided by another source?
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Someone interested in affiliate programs?
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An MLM'er, distributor, or network marketing professional
representing products or services offered by your company?
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A business owner living in Idaho
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Or a person thinking about doing one of the above listed items
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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 ensure that next year your business, website or blog is enjoyably profitable.
Internet marketing tips and techniques for Innovage...
If you wanted to state simply 'what' the Internet is, you could make a strong case for the argument:
The web is a place to dig up stuff
Listen closely to what folks say when they're talking about the internet:
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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 task to help customers find you. It's a little work, 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 are exposed to 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 (or weblog) is little more than a platform helping you to blab about whatever you might be interested in... perhaps subjects related to your products and services, your profession, or the benefits and endorsements surrounding your products and services.
Market statewide by focusing on how this all relates to Idaho or the benefits people from Idaho might experience.
The reason a blog or weblog is a must for your online promotion strategy is because it gives you an instant voice 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 business. 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 publish sales pitches.
Need advice? Here are links to a few highly popular blogs that offer quality services. Some are hosted others you can put on your own server.
STRATEGY #2
Invest a little time learning 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 complimentary photo sharing account at Flickr http://flickr.com/ to upload photos with descriptive titles and stories related to your business, Innovage, 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 opportunity 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 emailed you from your site? It takes a bit more "schmoozing" 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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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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People tend buy from non-brand names AFTER they subscribe to newsletters put out by those same web site owners.
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91% of opt-in subscribers are more likely to buy... (Source: eMarketer Inc)
What's the bottom line here? No matter how much traffic you generate to your web pages or blog, if you do not provide visitors a good reason to sign-up for a newsletter, you will likely reduce your opportunity to make sales by over 90%. Add a subscription box to every page that you plan to direct internet 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 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 site visitors. Email as a marketing vehicle has lost some of its effectiveness 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 complicated as they sound and are worth learning about.
STRATEGY #4
A search engine marketing campaign will drive more website prospects and customer traffic at a lower cost than any other form of website marketing. Without a doubt. Yet the overwhelming majority of website owners ignore this route to a continuous flow of highly motivated visitors.
Consider these points.
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, 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 5451 on page 711 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 places you behind the mix-master where you can whip-up well worded PPC ads (called listings) with spiffy headlines (called titles), interesting descriptions (10 to 20 words or so) and bake up perfect matches between keywords and keyword phrases. YOU chose and the destination or landing pages you want to link search customers to.
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 web 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.
The unique advantage in PPC advertising 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 cent a click.
There are many newsletters 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 anyone joining this internet marketing newsletter.
Recommended Newsletter: Musings of an Internet Guru
Follow link below to join (search engine eBook complimentary)
Join: Musings of an Internet Guru
Here are a few expert search engine techniques and keyword brain storming ideas to get you started:
- If your product or service is something that can be related to a locale, like a city, state or region you may be able to find some ripe tomatoes in phrases like: 'retirement homes in Florida', 'Mississippi flat rate phone service', 'herbal sunscreen for southwestern sun', 'indoor air filters for Los Angeles'.
- Discover more keywords by narrowing down to extreme specifics. People can be VERY specific when they search. Use names of months and years like '2004 tax savings', 'May flowers', 'Christmas of 2005' or 'September back to school supplies'.
Let's say you are marketing a broad line of herbal products... why not get a list of all herbs (there may be thousands) and use that list as a keyword list. Maybe your product doesn't contain every herb on the list, but people searching for any ONE herb specifically may be interested in others. Try specific model numbers, makes and designs if your products are sometimes referred to this way: 'Epson stylus CX6400', 'Apple G5', etc.
- Add adjectives to your keywords like: big, purple, new, cheap, affordable, soft, aromatic, healthy, etc.
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The Idaho Marketing Strategy
Go local. Yes, entrepreneurs from Idaho search for things using "Idaho" as their keyword. That means you must include search engine ads targeting Idaho and bid on keyword phrases containing Idaho.
The quickest way to results 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, write a quality title and description for your search listing and stick with it for at least 9 months as you learn the ropes. Set a reasonable budget that you are comfortable with (perhaps $72 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 commitment.
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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