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Internet Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
By Stephen Nelson (c) 2009 

In this economy, any marketing tool you can use to find new
customers is worth considering. But perhaps the best
marketing tool available to many small businesses is a
yellow-pages-style web site. Such a site means prospective
local customers looking for a business like yours know that
you're in business and ready for their patronage.

But a word or two of explanation... While the traffic
statistics of the typical small business web site may not
impress Google, eBay or Amazon.com, many small business web
sites do generate significant numbers of prospects compared
to the other marketing tools available. Commonly, for
example, small business web sites can attract anywhere from
a few dozen to a few hundred new unique visitors on a daily
basis. And that's a lot!

What's more, setting up one of these Internet marketing web
sites just doesn't have to be that complicated or
expensive. Often times, employing the following half a
dozen tips lets you enjoy surprising success:

Internet Business Marketing Tip #1: Evaluate Your
Competition

A first and very simple tip is this: Start out by sizing up
your competition. Do see what the other guy or other guys
in town are doing. Look at the information they're
providing. And check out the number of links that point to
their site.

In a nutshell, you need a better site than your competitors
in order to beat them at the Internet marketing game. You
need more pages of on-topic content. And you need more
inbound links pointing to your pages.

You can check the number of inbound links pointing to your
web site by visiting the Yahoo search engine page and then
typing link:www.yourcompetitorsdomain.com into the search
box. (Replace the smooshed together word
yourcompetitorsdomain with the real domain name.) Yahoo
then lists the number of links pointing to your
competitors' sites.

By the way, if competitors' web sites provide only a few
sparse pages and a handful of crummy in-bound links, you'll
find it very easy to make your site a rip-roaring success.

Internet Business Marketing Tip #2: Pay for an Inexpensive
Professional Design

Another quick and easy tip: If you have an extra couple
hundred bucks for marketing, spend that money on a
professional web designer.

In other words, once you have a few pages of text about
your business--perhaps a welcome letter, a page that
provides directions and then a page or two that describes
your products and services--pay some professional to setup
your web site.

Web sites like www.elance.com make it pretty easy to find
extremely talented designers who can create outrageously
attractive web sites for modest costs.

Internet Business Marketing Tip #3: Get Smart about your
Domain Name

One caution: You won't want to make the mistake that I
made. In other words, if you can avoid it, you don't want
to name your business using your name or some meaningless
if clever phrase.

For my Seattle area CPA firm, I named my domain name
stephenlnelson.com and have spent the last dozen years
telling people, "No, with a 'ph'...not a 'v' and don't
forget the 'l'...."

Rather you want to use search words, also known as
keywords, in your domain name. For example, if you operate
a drycleaner located in town named Pine Lake, try to get
something like PineLakeDrycleaners dot com.

Putting search words in your domain name will make your
website easier to find when people use those search words.
In other words, search engines are more likely to display a
website named PineLakeDrycleaners.com when someone searches
on phrases like "drycleaning pine lake," drycleaners in
pine lake," "pine lake dryclean," and so on.

Internet Business Marketing Tip #4: Add Your Site to Google
Maps

If you include your business address on your web pages--and
you should--Google will probably, eventually, display your
business's website when people search for a local business
like yours.

If your business's web site isn't appearing when someone
searches for local businesses like yours, you can visit the
Google maps page at http://maps.google.com/maps and then
click on the Put Your Business on Google Maps link to begin
the process of adding your business to Google's local
search results.

Internet Business Marketing Tip #5: Win the Local Links
Competition

You're going to need to get more inbound links pointing to
your site than point to your competitors' sites in order to
rank highly when people look for a local business like
yours.

If you've done a bit of research on your competitors as
suggested in tip #1, you already know how many and what
sorts of links you need. With that information in hand, try
the following:

1. Request that your site be added to free directories.
Free directory links are not worth very much, quite
honestly, but in a local search competition they can help.
Search Google or Yahoo on the phrase "list of free directories"
to get a decent, reasonably-fresh listing of freebie
directories, and then begin submitting your site to the
directories listed. Also, note that you can pay a directory
submission service like www.directorymaximizer.com to
submit your website to around a thousand free directories
for about a hundred dollars.

2. Grab, beg or pay for links from the websites of the
local business and community groups you're associated with,
including the chamber of commerce, community organizations,
the public library, the local newspaper if you advertise
there, and so forth. These links, especially when coming
from a trustworthy local web site, can help your search
engine visibility a lot.

3. Attempt to duplicate the links that your competitors
show. In other words, if your principal competitor in town
has purchased some links in paid directories like Yahoo.com
or Business.com, do the same thing. If the competitor
participates in and gets links from social networking sites
like facebook and linkedin, do the same thing. Imitating
your competitor will eliminate rather quickly any link
advantages he or she possesses.

Internet Business Marketing Tip #6: Experiment with
Pay-per-click Ads

A final quick though general tip: Pay-pay-click ads like
those offered by Google can be quite costly. But the ads
also often work wonderfully well for certain types of
businesses.

If you can pay $2 for a click and 15-20 clicks usually seem
to turn into a customer, for example, that means you can
"buy" a customer for $30 to $40. In many businesses,
acquiring a customer for $30 or $40 may be a steal of a
deal. For more information about how Google's pay-per-click
advertising works, visit adwords.google.com.
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Author, business consultant and CPA Stephen L. Nelson is
the author of more than 150 books about using computers and
the Internet, including many of the best-selling "... for
Dummies" books. Nelson is also the author of a new ebook,
"Starting an Internet Business" which is available for
purchase at http://www.startingyourveryownbusiness.com/
starting-an-internet-business.htm .
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