Internet Marketing for Small Business

Do You Want To Grow Your Business Online Successfully?

If you are coming from my searchengineoptimization-usa.com site, you’ll remember I was telling you how did I get into Intermet Marketing, almost by “accident”. I thought that having a decent website in the first page of Google was all that you needed to be successful doing business/selling on the internet.

I was in for a big surprise!! and I don’t want you to believe that and make the same mistake!

Let’s go back tor the good stuff!

We are going to continue with THE MOST IMPORTANT first four questions that must be answered in any business if your business is going to grow and thrive, from the wisdom of Rich Schefren:

• where are you going to find your customers?
  If your business is off line, some answers might be: newspaper/magazine advertisement, radio/TV/media advertisement, mail in brochures/catalogs, etc. If you have a website, some answers will be: good SEO so people can find me in the first page of Google; some kind of web media or social media; incoming links from othe websites; etc.
• what products will you sell them first?
  After your make your first sale to a prospect, and that become your first time customer, you have to think how to sell your her/him once more, twice more, etc. On the internet it is not like an off line business, after the customer walked away through the door, she/he is gone!
• how much will you charge for it?
  Did you know you can find out how much a prospect or customer is willing to pay for your high quality product? Surveys, analitics, and competitive intelligence will help you to find this out, even before your product is out in the market!
• how will you convince them to buy?
  Rich Schefren teaches about what he calls the USP, Unique Selling Proposition, and offer you prospect can not refuse.

And until you figure out those four questions, you really don’t have a business, a scalable business, a business that can grow.

I’ll elaborate on each one of the four questions above.

This is a very simple example, yet powerful model of an Internet Marketing model to attract prospects to your site:

You have a website and you need traffic. How do you bring traffic to your site? Paul Lambert from StomperNet Formula 5 says that a good analogy of an online business marketing model to bring traffic, is this:
Your business online is like a stool with some legs to support it. If it has one leg, let say just SEO, it will be very difficult to seat effectively and keeping your balance, unless you are a magician!
If your stool has two legs, it will be a little easier to seat on, but still not much secure. You need at least three legs to seat in a secure and comfortable way. Still he recommends to have at least 5 legs: think about it. If you seat in a 5 legged office chair, it is almost impossible to fall, even if you are shacked (by the ups and down of your market).

The 5 legs to bring traffic we are talking about are:

1. SEO, search engine optimization; this is not only to optimize the code or meta tags of your site or blog, but apply other SEO technics as well.
2. Incoming links: if you have great content, people eventually will link to your site. This brings a good word to Google, and increases your Google ranking.
3. A blog; there is no better way to create great free content than writing good or great articles (pillar articles according to Yaro Starak original definition, see Pillar Articles by Yaro Starak).
4. Social Media or Web 2.0. Buzzing news in social media sites like Face Book, and Twitter, spread like wild fire over the net.
5. PPC or Pay Per Click. Great way to get good converting traffic instantly (if it is done properly!)

There are other ways, many others. This five are the most common and if well done, very powerful.

I almost forgot one of the most important!

6. e-mail list: promotions, reports, online catalogs, etc., through an autoresponder like Aweber, OneShopping Cart, Infusion software, etc. (those three are the most popular ones among internet marketing gurus and professional bloggers, like Rich Schefren (Strategic Profits), Andy Jenkins-Paul Lamberg (StomperNet), Mike Fillsame (butterfly marketing), Jeff Walker (Product Launch Formula), Frank Kern (Mass Control),  Yaro Starak (entrepreneurs-journey.com), etc. I think I don’t have that many left!

Now, your question at this point is: “How do I managed to do ALL this?” (a solo enterpreneur or even an offline business just going online). Are you really ready for the million dollar answer?

Very simple: one step at the time!!! What do I mean by that? You have to take ONLY ONE of those 6 steps, and work on it until it’s FINISHED!!! Then tackle the next, and so on.

If you do not know the technical aspect of SEO, PPC campaigns, how to set up an e-mail autoresponder campaign, or how to get quality incoming links, just give it to an expert, or outsource it. It’s easier, faster, and less expensive. No overhead, which is very appealing in today’s economy.

If you do it your self, it might take a lot of your valuable time to learn, apply, and re-learn from your mistakes; which is OK.

Another very effective and important approach is to have an Internet person in your marketing department to handle the Internet Marketing. If your business is already successful off line, it means you have great marketers on staff. However, if you have even one employee in your business/company that is just paid to think and work on Internet marketing, some one who is an avid reader, somebody who loves the Internet, knows how to move around Twitter and Face Book, who is resourceful, who knows how to research and find what is needed in Google; that person will be able to multiply the effectivenesss of the whole marketingdepartment. This is another of Rich Schefren’s golden nuggets.

I understand and support the concept that it’s always better to be resourceful than looking for resources or some body who will give you a turn in key package, or “your internet marketing” in a silver plate. But now days, as an entrepreneur, our time is extremely valuable. We MUST focus on the activities and projects fro the highest ROI (Return On Investment). The person just described above, will be an asset to your business. It can be even a consultant, if you can not afford a new employee on today’s hard financial times.

You can go to Internet Marketing Gurus like Rich Schefren (my mentor and teacher), Frank Kern (Mass Control), Jeff Walker (Product Lunch Formula), etc. Rich Schefren is extremely busy growing his business, and the waiting line to get his personal advice (over the phone) may be a year; if you are the lucky one to get his attention, you will need to pay a minimum of $5,000 an hour of consultation (no kidding).

With Rich Schefren in his office, in Delray, Florida, 02-08-09

Internet marketers have learned from their own mistakes, but most of all from their brilliant ideas put into practice!

Now another question for you is: “where in the internet marketing am I?”  ”what do I have?” what do I need?” ” what do I want?”

This are the two most common answers I get from small business, when I ask them the following questions:

Q: “Does your site has any traffic? visitors coming from Google or other sources?”

A: “I don’t know”

MOST websites do not have analitics, or metrics to measure the site performance:

• how many visitors come to your site?
• where are they coming from?
• how many unique visitors you have?
• what do your visitors do in your site/pages?
• what do they come for?
• if any, what is your site conversion rate? (how many buy vs how many land in your page)
• Demographics,
• how long do visitors stay in the site, on certain pages
• what do they do while in the site, what they read and/or click. This will tell you why you loose your visitors

Q: Do you sell from your site (on off line business that have a website)?

A: “Not really. We have some traffic. We’ve been waiting to sell for … months/years, and still waiting.”

Having some traffic does not guarantee you will sell.

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will continue!

Please, if you have any question regarding any of these subjects, leave a comment below with your questions., like these ones:

• What is the most burning question/situation you have about moving to online marketing?
• What do you need to know to grow your business online?
• Can my business be succesful online? I need your niche or product to answer that questionI’ll be back!

Carlos