Your web site and the internet in general is an extension of your efforts to promote and brand yourself locally. Don’t look at your Internet marketing campaigns as being separate from local marketing efforts. It will connect your customers to your business and enhance it.

In case you haven’t checked, your local print advertising space and media time slots are very costly. If you are like the rest of us, you don’t have time to give complete descriptions of everything you do or every product that you decide to sell. However, if you can use that media to drive valuable traffic to your site, then you can provide your visitors with a wealth of information. When you have a professional designed site coupled with strong sales copy, you have a great chance at closing a sale. I know that it’s hard but, you need to think of your web site as your sales staff, who takes orders 24 hours a day…as well and working for nothing.

The Internet is like the ‘new’ Yellow Pages, it’s increasingly becoming the way that people find what they are looking for. Additionally, paying customers conduct research on local businesses with the companies that they are considering doing business with. Your company needs an advocate, if you don’t get busy online and take steps to capture web traffic that is searching for your product or service, your competition will.

Get motivated!  Set up a web site, but then take it a step further. Create geo coordinate meta tags on your web site. This will enable people to generate directions and maps to your business. This works extraordinarily well, I can personally attest to doing business at particular retail locations just because they happened to be the only local business that had this feature.

It’s a no-brainer that you should optimize your site for the search engines. In an ideal world you should discuss search engine optimization issues with an SEO consultant before your site is built. However you decide to move forward, get your site optimized to ensure that you get the ‘right traffic’ for your business.

On great way to promote your local business is to write articles. I’m sure that you’ve heard all this before - but that’s because classic self-promotion techniques such as authoring articles and books works to establish credibility in your field. Unfortunately, most business owners are just too unmotivated or too unorganized to do follow this simple advice.  This gives your business a tactical advantage!  You can stand out in your local niche, and use your writing skills to create online promotional material. One great example is; you could publish a newsletter for your clients and prospective customers. From there you can then re-publish these newsletter articles to internet article directories which will drive traffic to your site.

Take a good hard look at your business and think of more ways to marry your online and offline marketing efforts.

**Todays Tip- Give your local customers a reason to leave their email address! Encourage them to visit your web site and join your newsletter list.  Sell it as though this free resource is worth a million dollars!  This will ensure that your site receives as much local internet traffic as possible.

Michigan webite promotion

A lot of folks get into Internet marketing, and then after a while, think that certain aspects of running their business are logical and simple. Really? If it’s that easy, why didn’t we think of all the things that it took us months or even years to think of if everything is so darn easy? Here are a few things that people would assume are logical, I’ll show you how they are not so easy.

Take this proverb for instance “Your  business needs to advertise in order to make sales.” On the surface, this would seem obvious wouldn’t it? Of course you have to advertise to make sales. How else will anybody know your web site even exists? Well, if that’s the case, if this is so obvious, why is it that so many people create a web site and do nothing more than submit it for listing to a search engine? Do they REALLY think that’s advertising? Maybe they do. Maybe in their mind, that’s all advertising is. Point is, most Internet marketers know that you have to do a lot more than that to make a sale. That’s why we have safelists, Adwords, ezines, traffic exchanges, web 2.0 sites such as YouTube and so many other advertising avenues. So no, it’s not so obvious that you have to advertise to make sales because some people just don’t bother doing it.

How about this statement? “You have to sell something that people need?” Seems pretty obvious, right. Truth is, it’s totally wrong. You don’t have to sell something that people need. You have to sell something that people WANT. Tell me the truth…do people need so MLM scheme that costs $3,000 and has no product other than to get somebody to sign up under them? No, of course not. They don’t need it. They don’t even want the product itself. What they want is the $3,000 commission. So let’s not kid ourselves here. People buy things NOT because they need them but because they think those things will make their life better. It’s a want…not a need.

Maybe this sounds familiar? “You need to know how to write in order to write sales copy?” Of course you need to know how to write it’s very obvious. Sadly, I see a lot of sales pages out there that look like they’ve been written by 10 year olds, they are THAT bad. Think these people know how to write? Think they even KNOW that they have to know how to write? They figure that they can throw up any sales page and just because of the fact that it’s up there, it’s going to make sales effectively. Yeah, and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Next time you think something is obvious…look around you at all the people who aren’t doing it…and include yourself in your search.

Many things are only revealed and understood after it’s known how important that they really are.

You ever wonder why talk shows are so confrontational?  It’s probably because no one wants to watch a show where everyone agrees with each other.  In marketing you very quickly learn that people say one thing, but DO another.

People say they don’t like controversy but shows like: Dr. Phil, Judge Judy, The Hills and even the lame Brett Michaels career revival tour ‘Rock of Love’ are wildly popular.

Here’s a real world example for you on how much controversy sells.

Last week on ESPN’s Sports Center, Mel Kiper (ESPN’s veteran draft guru) and Todd McShay (new draft guru guy) were arguing about who the Detroit Lions should take with the number 1 pick in the NFL draft.  McShay’s point was that the Lions should not take Matt Stafford as the number 1 pick because he doesn’t have the talent of a number 1 pick.  Kiper’s point was that Detroit needs a quarterback and they should take Stafford.

The conversation deteriorated to the point where McShay told Kiper that his point was asinine (which it was, you take the most talented player on the board) and from there the whole show melted down.

The next time that Sports Center ran through they had edited out all of the controversy which was a big, BIG mistake.  The argument was almost reaching critical mass on the local Sports Radio network.  It got to the point that the local guys were polling listeners whether or not they agreed with McShay or Kiper.  Everyone was waiting to see the argument when they reran Sports Center but they didn’t repeat it.  However, by the end of the day the shirts at ESPN figured out that they were getting some buzz, so they reran the clip but by then it was too late.  People are engaged in Sports Radio while they are at work, by the time ESPN decided to play the tape again it was too late.

Gene Simmons, the bassist for the rock band KISS famously observed that ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’.  It would serve ESPN well to learn the meaning of this phrase.  They could have used these clips to drive traffic to their website and give their sponsors some exposure, but they blew it.