US Local Businesses Not Making it Online

Local businesses are showing they are stuck in the days of old when it comes to marketing their business properly. Just like the infamous Yellow Pages, many businesses come to the Internet looking for where they can mass advertise, when the smart decision is to target their business to an audience who actually wants what they have to offer.

Different strategies, in online marketing, like SEO and viral video marketing are simple and cost efficient to implement, while allowing these businesses to show up in the search engines.

I remember a bed and breakfast site, my web master and SEO specialist Keith Dennis was working on. The site had been online for over three years and had never received a single visitor; at least not one who wasn’t sent there directly by the business owner.

He claimed the Internet couldn’t bring him any business. Keith called me and said, what type of content would you place on this site to bring the targeted traffic and get business to this man’s bed and breakfast? The simple fact was, there was nothing on the website that would compel anyone to WANT to book a room at his establishment.

For the next day, Keith and I studied the local area in the UK, by using the search engines, finding all types of relevant attractions people would want to visit. Then, we spent time finding pictures and scenic photos that would enhance the look and feel of the site.

The next step was fairly simple, we wrote content and extended each and every page of the website. We even keyword optimized the images so Google would list the site higher in the search results. Finally, we applied a bit of viral video marketing and built a blog on the site, to show the search engines there was a site there which would generate new content on a regular basis.

The result?

A highly targeted website that is bring in more business than ever before and that happened in a matter of days of us doing the work. The one point where this particular business could do better is, actually posting new content on a regular basis.

You see, just like any form of marketing, once just isn’t enough to stay on top. You have to constantly be talking to your market place and the search engines. When people ask ME what I do for a living I have a simple answer,

“I help local businesses with their online marketing so they rise to the top of the search engine listings and dominate their local competition.”

That, my friend, is exactly what all local businesses should be focused on when it comes to the Internet.

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To contact Bob Yeager and his team at eWeb Marketing Management, visit our main sit at http://www.eWebMarketingManagement.com and fill out the form on the Contact Us page. We do NOT offer worthless link building and advertising packages. There is no prescription without a proper diagnosis for your particular business needs. That’s the eWeb Marketing Management way.

Social Media Marketing can be for Brick and Mortar Businesses

In an economy where small business is fighting to stay alive, Social Media Marketing can be effectively leveraged for brick and mortar business. It’s too many times that we look at social media marketing as a playground for kids to hang out. Most social media platforms are actually garbage. Yep, you heard it here first. If I were to have the ideal social media platform built, it would be more responsive, more efficient and it would definitely have a category to focus on the brick and mortar business owner.

Here’s the deal. Social media marketing is about relationships and interaction. With this in mind, where are you spending your marketing budget? Let’s try a tougher question, where are you spending your marketing budget for relationship marketing?

Ahh, got ya on that one right? Most business owners will say, “I spend advertising dollars on the yellow pages, the newspaper, radio and maybe television. But it’s rare if you hear a business owner say, “My marketing dollars are invested in Web 2.0 SEO Social Media Marketing.”

Imagine, business owners who would actually spend money on targeted marketing placement instead of the marketing placement that is subjected to random exposure, like most brick and mortar business owners do today.

Mint Social Media Marketing

I discovered a method of social media marketing for brick and mortar businesses, which I have dubbed “Mint Social Media Marketing.” You see, there is your average social media marketing and management and there is Mint Social Media Marketing and Management.

Mint is simply your ability to to be like an ATM machine in your marketing or, like the US Mint. Which would you rather own? That’s right. An ATM machine has random people coming to it, day in and day out, taking from it but rarely every putting anything into it.

The US Mint only has the top people depositing their money and they put more in, than they take from it.

So, would you like the social media marketing for your brick and mortar business to be an ATM drainer, or a Mint money maker? If you chose the mint, then it is time you begin to build a strategy for a full scale social media, relationship marketing campaign for your Brick and Mortar business. In this section of our site, I will be posting many articles that talk about this topic but don’t allow the social media marketing spider web take you hostage.

Here’s what I mean. Social Media Marketing Campaigns can be very time consuming and we want our message or website to be shown on as many of those locations as possible. If you are spending too much time in one location, then you are simply doing what you are currently doing in your existing business… standing in one place!

It is important to have team that has experience, the exposure and the reach to create a strategic social media marketing campaign for your brick and mortar business. I was even one of those who fell into the trap of doing all of this work on my own. Then I engaged with CoraLyn Hughes, our executive virtual assistant, Mike Silva our Lead Project Manager and Paul Counts our SEO Specialist. Together we are able to create a dominating social media marketing campaign for our own businesses as well as, our clients online and brick and mortar businesses.

You see, when you have the team in place, the sky’s the limit. When you are a lone wolf, you have lonely social media experiences. Check it out, click the green box at the top right of this site, then, when you reach the next page, click the green report button and look through all of our other media and resources that can help YOU NOT lose business this year.

Business Blog Customization: Customizing WordPress Themes

Understanding WordPress Functions

Business blogging can be difficult to the untrained marketer, but once you understand the full functionality of a blogging platform, business blog customization using a WordPress theme can be very rewarding.

WordPress is a blogging software that is free to download that must be installed into a domain’s C-Panel in order to fuction properly online. With the many thousands of themes and plugins to chose from, it can be difficult to know where to start.

I would not try to insult your intelligence by implying that I will be able to teach you everything you need to know in this one article. But, it is my hopes to help you lay the ground work in understanding where to begin to create the fundamental building blocks for business blog customization.

There are a few main functions and applications on a WordPress blog to get it to communicate properly with the rest of the web. That’s right, I said communicate. You see, a blog is not merely another website. It is an interactive communication tool that allows business owners and marketers to speak with the market place through multiple channels.

The main functions of a WordPress blog you would want to be educated on are as follows:

1. Plugins: Let’s just say that these little pieces of software allow our blogs to have many functions to increase our chances of developing a stream of traffic, as well as, it allows us to simplify certain tasks on our blogging platforms while posting.
   
2. Widgets: No, these are not just little elements of nothing. The widget is what you see in the sidebar and sometimes in the header and footer area of the blog. They appear to be little boxes with information in them, because that is exactly what they are. They allow us to separate that information so that it stays the same on every page of our site, while not conflicting with the body content of our posts.
   
3. RSS Feeds: I’ve always said, it’s not always important to know how something works, just simply know that it works. RSS feeds are like little news channels, within our blogs, that send out updates any time we decide to make a change on our blog. Imagine, every time you update or add a new post, your readers get a notification on their favorite news feed, in their internet browser and, sometimes, even right on their desktop!
4. Themes: The theme is the most important and the least functional piece of the blog. Basically, you scower the internet, or even WordPress.org for a theme that matches up with the context of your business, install it into your blogging platform and you now have what used to take ages; a fully functional website is built within seconds. The theme should always be easy on the eyes, better to have a white background in the content areas and should be neatly arranged, so not to confuse the reader of the functionality of the blog itself.

There are other more “High Tech” aspects to blogging, but this general overview should suffice for the purposes of this tutorial.

Customize Your WordPress Blog

Your WordPress blog is highly customizable. Although there are many elements such as CSS, PHP and Stylesheets to be concerned with, only skilled bloggers and web masters should really mess with these things, considering any wrong move could render your blog useless.

But, you do have the ability to customize it with custom header graaphics, the name of your business, your own email subscription form as well as, you can pick and chose which plugins you would want in there.

The plugins should be chosen carefully, as adding too many plugins could slow down the load time of your blog which would cause for a poor experience for your readers. Many plugins are available for free download and you can install the zip files that they are stored in, directly into your blog through your dashboard.

A few of my favorite and most used plugins are:

1. The All In One SEO Plugin
2. Dig-EZ
3. Zemanta

The All In One SEO Plugin allows for a blogger to add a title and description to each post, as well as a seperate set of keywords to help the search engines and pinging sites to find the description that YOU want them to list when they rank your blog in the search engines and blog directories. It’s important that these descriptions contain your keywords, in order to place properly in the search engine listings when a reader searches your keyword phrase.

The Dig-EZ plugin will display a dig social bookmarking button at the top of each of your blog posts. Your readers, who have Dig accounts, will click that button every time they read a post of yours that they like or, “Dig It”. This will add a listing about your blog in one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, where thousands of people discuss many different blog topics. Dig submissions show up very well in the search engines, which would indirectly lead more visitors back to your blog… cool stuff

The Zemanta plugin is one of the newest out there. I don’t see many bloggers using it, but it does have many advantages; such as:

1. It will show you relevant keywords to your blog posts which will tell you if you are on the right track and you can use those by adding them to your post.

2. It will display a series of images that you can chose to have one image show up at the top of your blog post.

3. It will provide you with anchor text, which supplies you with outgoing links to high ranking information sites, by opening in a new browser window, the search engines love that!

4. It also applies a “re-blog”  function to the bottom of each of your blog posts, so that your reader can pull an excerpt from your post, post it to there blog, where it will link back to yours… I do hope you can see the potential for even more targeted traffic with that!

All of the functions I have discussed above can easily be had and you can have a blog online, with content on it and showing up in the top of the search engines within a matter of hours. I have proven time and again that blogs can be set up in twenty minutes or so and I can have my posts show up in Google within a matter of twelve minutes.

This isn’t impossible and is rather easy, if you understand the full potential and functionallity of a WordPress Blog Web 2.0 site. Virtual Assistants are very important in this process as well, to continuously manage the blog, post content and social bookmark the blog to the thousands of locations around the Web.

That’s why eWeb Marketing Management has it’s very own in house, Executive Virtual Assistant CoraLyn Hughes on Staff . CoraLyn is a blog expert and along with our SEO development team headed by top SEO Specialist Paul Counts, as well as myself… our blogging and web 2.0 capabilities are virtually un matched.

Entrepreneurs will lose busiess this year. By not leveraging the proper technologies and placing all of their stock in brochure sites, they are missing the guaranteed targeted traffic they could have by leveraging web 2.0 technology. Click the green box at the top right of the site. eWeb’s main hub will open in a new window.

Read more informative and crucial articles there, but also click the “Get Free Report” button on that site. A PDF file will open in a new window and you can save it and give it to your friends and colleagues. I wrote this report showing you why traditional media is personally allowing you to lose business this year and it WILL at that.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and be sure to check back often and bookmark this site to stay up to date.

Web Design Layout Tutorial Part One: Define the Purpose of Your Website

Defining a Web Site :

The very first step in designing a Web site is to define it. To properly define a site there are three questions that must be answered.

1. Who is the end user
2. Who is the owner or client of the website
3. What functionality will be necessary for that user or client

Too many times I see half-cocked web designers rush right into building a website with a bunch of bells and whistles, that is obviously built by someone who thinks flash and bling is kind. Guess what? When people have a slow modem connection and there is a bunch of flash components to a website, it sucks.

I try to keep it clean here, but there is nothing more annoying than waiting for a webpage to load. It takes me back to hearing echos of the AOL dial up sounds of a fax machine and dial tone. Today, most people have a fairly high internet connection speed. But, the only time flash should be used on a site is, if it is a site that is intended for big corporations to see from the comfort of their office building, where their internet connection speed is at business grade.

Now that we’ve covered what you don’t do for the end user, let’s talk about the owner of the site. If you are creating a site for a family to post a bunch of photos on or perhaps, to write blog posts on; there would have to be some basic functionality of loading photos, blog posts and maybe some embedded videos. You would want it to be streamlined and easy to use.

Building websites isn’t just about something that looks pretty on the internet. We have to keep the owner of the site and the user in mind at all times during the planning, building and launching phase of the project. This tutorial feels like I am writing it for my students, but it is necessary to put this out there in as much detail as possible. That’s why, in part two throug (whatever number I stop at) I will consult with eWeb Marketing Management’s Head of Web Development, Keith Dennis to fill you in on more YOU should know about web design layout.

And to find out how your business is going to lose money this year [WARNING] click the green box at the top right of this site. You will be redirected to our home site, where you will find a similar green box. On that one, simply click the get free report button and a PDF file will open in a new window.

I spent some time writing you a report I think you will find urgent and will help you out.

Traffic and Lead Generation: How to Get Guaranteed Targeted Traffic

It’s not a myth that traffic and lead generation can be a difficult task, if you do not know how to do it properly. The first thing we need to do is create a system that will show you how to get guaranteed targeted traffic, but more importantly, is to get you guaranteed targeted traffic to your website, blog, opt-in page and sales page.

I’d like to start backward and work my way forward a bit. It’s important to know where you will be when you accomplish the end goal of developing a targeted traffic generation system. Although we think that getting thousands of people on our subscriber list is important, that’s actually not the case.

An email database is supposed to be made up of a list of people who are interested in your products and services, are interested in what you have to say and feel like they have built a relationship with you, whether that is due to commenting on your blog, reading your newsletter or, purchasing your products.

Targeted Email Campaigns

Building a targeted email campaign is less complex than it sounds. Many marketers tend to over complicate this process and there really is no cookie cutter approach to it for any given industry. I always follow the same methods for building a targeted email campaign and I will lay it out in detail below this part of our article:

Constructing a Targeted Email Campaign

There are two types of targeted email campaigns:

1. Broadcast Campaigns

2. Auto responder Campaigns.

Let’s start with the broadcast campaign. Sometimes we think that it is important to pre-load an auto responder with multiple emails that will span over weeks or even months. This is not always the case. You see, for some campaigns, we are looking for a short lived series of messages that go out until we decide to promote something different. You would see
this, mainly, when a marketer is doing a product launch.

Product Launch email series are for a certain, short amount of time that will only continue until the day of the launch. What you would want to do in this case is covered in the bullet points just below:

1. Pre-Launch Targeted Email Campaign:

This is a series of emails that will be written to send out a week or two before you launch your new product or service. Do not program these into your auto responder. It is better to do a manual broadcast on this, so that all of your subscribers, no matter when they signed up; will receive them at the same time.

2. Launch Targeted Email Campaign:

This is a series of emails that will be written to send out the week before and the week of your product launch. Once again, these would be broadcasts that are sent out manually to ensure that all of your subscribers receive these on the dates specified through your launch management.

3. Follow-Up Targeted Email Campaign:

Never leave the sale on the table. Sometimes your subscribers missed the launch date. You can do a followup email series to ensure they have the opportunity to purchase your product or service. What is more important, is the follow up targeted email campaign that you send to those who made the purchase.

Send them unexpected bonuses, new tips, updates, an offer to ask you questions, or invite them to a live tele-seminar for Q&A. The follow up sequence to your buyers will make them feel you appreciate their business and will have them waiting for more that you have to offer.

The second of your two types of targeted email campaigns is the auto responder campaign. This is typically a series of emails that you pre-write that have a targeted focus on one product, service, or newsletter. Think about it this way. You have decided to write a newsletter for your subscribers. Wouldn’t it be nice if new subscribers would receive a newsletter that you write last year, which would lead them into a whole year’s worth of content?

This will help you to build a steady communication channel for every new subscriber that signs up on your email list.

Next, imagine you marketed a product to your list that sold extremely well. If you have this email series programmed into your auto responder, it will continue to sell that product for you to every new subscriber that comes through. You can also send them to past archived blog posts, videos, articles and more. This will help you to continue to make profits from past products that you have promoted and your business becomes something that is virtually on auto pilot.

Targeted Banner Advertising

Targeted Banner Advertising is still an efficient way to generated guaranteed targeted traffic, if it is leveraged properly. Targeted banner advertising is simply, placing a banner advertisement of your company’s product or logo, placed on a website or page that is relevant to your product or service, that a reader is able to click on to arrive at your sales page, opt-in page or website.

Many people use banner advertising wrong. It can not possibly be targeted to generate guaranteed targeted traffic, if it is not placed in a location where your targeted market visits. A prime example of placing advertisements in useless locations may surprise you. These useless advertising places are:

1. The Newspaper
2. The Yellow Pages
3. Banner Sharing Sites

You see, the three examples above, which are more traditional, are appearing in places where the focus of the traffic is not on your particular product, service or industry. An example of places where banner advertising would work are as follows:

1. Magazine specific to your market
2. Websites or web pages that other people own, that are specific to your market
3. Google Ad Words

That last one, Google Ad Words, should be handled by a professional advertising and marketing firm, where it can become increasingly difficult to maintain a campaign. Google does allow for banner advertising on their clients’ Ad Sense locations, but there is a quantitative system for doing this properly without losing your shirt over the deal.

I’ve written a special report called “Why Your Business Will Lose Money this Year” and you can find it by going to our home website at eWeb Marketing Management. This report is very quick to read and there is no need to sign any forms to receive it. Simply click the green button on any page of the site that says “Click Here for Free Report”. I do hope that this article and blog has been helpful to you and know that eWeb Marketing Management is always here for you and you can contact us at any time.