Why Outsourcing Inbound Marketing is the best option for most Small Businesses

What do you value most?

If you are a small business owner and you read beyond this paragraph, I’m going to share my inexorable logic why outsourcing inbound marketing is the best of all possible options to find new customers for your small business.

If you are a small business owner, what are the two things that you value most?

After speaking and working with many small business owners, and being a small business owner myself, I can tell you without a doubt, the two most valuable things you possess as a small business owner are (1) time and (2) money:

1. Time. There’s just not enough of it. It’s your most valuable resource. With it you create the 2nd most valuable thing which is:
2. Money. It’s scarce. If you invest it, there’s got to be a return on investment, period. The higher the better, so if you can measure it, and improve it, so much the better.

Time and money are your most valuable resources. And everybody wants what you’ve got. That is precisely why Outsourcing Inbound Marketing is the best of possible options for you.

First, why outsourcing your marketing makes business sense

If you outsource your marketing, it saves you time. You don’t have to do it. If there’s a return on investment, and it helps you make more money, then you’d be foolish not to do it, right? You’re saving time and making money!

Second, out of all the marketing alternatives, why inbound marketing?

If you are looking for something you need, what do you turn to first? Do you go to the yellow pages? Or do you do a search using your favorite search engine? If you’re like most consumers and business buyers, you sit down at your computer, or use your smart phone, and search for what you’re looking for… and you ultimately find what you’re looking for (without the yellow pages).

And the companies who show up at the top of the rankings, and provide you the things you’re looking for? They’re practicing inbound marketing. With Inbound Marketing, you develop a web presence, and promote yourself online so that when your customers are looking for products or services that you offer, they  (1) find you and contact you first (2) you convert them into a customer, and you (3) measure the results.

Inbound Marketing: How it Works

Inbound Marketing uses the best practices in Web Design, SEO, PPC, Blogging, Social Media… and ROI Analytics:

• Web Design ~ WordPress Websites and Blogs that position you in your unique niche, and put you in the driver’s seat.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ~ Top search engine rankings for keyword phrases that drive targeted traffice to your website.
• Pay per Click Marketing ~ Pay per Click Marketing augments your organic SEO, and helps you focus on keyword groupings and landing pages that will help you convert traffic into inquiries and sales.
• Blogging ~ Timely and relevant information that positions you as an expert in your niche, so that when your prospects have a need they call you first.
• Social Media ~ Connect with People, Collect and share information that it useful to your prospects and customers, Use that information to inform your own Editorial Direction, and Create your own content. 
• Traditional and Online PR ~ Leverage content, events, accomplishments to gain back links from other influential websites, and also media hits with traditional journalists.
• ROI Analytics ~ Measure the effectivness of your marketing activities to see what’s working and what’s not working, and invest your dollars where you can achieve the greatest ROI.

The catch? It really works best if you are doing all of these things simultaneously. It doesn’t work if you just try one tactic here, another tactic there. You might get some results with one or two tactics, but to really make it work, it requires a commitment–and it’s a process, not an event. But you can execute an Inbound Marketing program very cost-effectively, and that leads me to why Outsourcing Inbound Marketing is your best possible alternative.

Third, why Outsourcing Inbound Marketing is the best option

What are your options?

1. Do it Yourself: Not an option. You have more important things to do with your time.
2. Use an In-house Resource: It’s expensive to hire a full-time person, and it might only get partly done because many different skills are required. To be effective, Inbound Marketing requires simultaneous execution of multiple tactics, and a sustained effort.
3. Outsourcing Inbound Marketing to a Competent 3rd Party who can handle it for you: It’ll get done and you can measure the ROI.

The great news? Inbound Marketing is very cost-effective. You can get a lot for a relatively small investment.

Conclusion: So now hopefully I’ve been able to present a logical argument why outsourcing your Marketing, if it’s producing a measurable return on investment, is a wise decision. And by implementing an Inbound Marketing Strategy, you’ll help you find your prospects and customers find you at precisely the most important moment: when they’re looking for you!

And that is how I arrive at my claim that Outsourcing Inbound Marketing is the best of all possible alternatives for your business. Because it’ll help you spend more of your time doing the things you need to do to take your business to the next level, and you’ll be making more money.

Pages related to Outsourcing Inbound Marketing :

• Ghost-Blogging and Blog Management
• Social Media Marketing

If you are looking for Outsourcing Inbound Marketing please contact me today.

Are you confused by all the Local Internet Marketing options? You are not alone…

Who's the trusted advisor?

The typical small business owner does not have the time or expertise to effectively manage all the Local Internet Marketing investment options.  

Not only are there more numerous–more complex directory relationships, but pace of the fragmentation in the marketplace is outpacing everyone’s attention span.        

How is a small business owner supposed to keep track of all the different ways to promote their business? Directories, Internet Yellow Pages, Search Engine Optimization, Pay per click Marketing, Blogging, Social Networking, Mobile Advertising, Hyperlocal Advertising Sites–as well as Web Design Issues, Marketing Experiments, ROI Analytics, and all the other time-consuming issues of running a Local Internet Marketing program.           

This is the primary reason so many 3rd-party providers have jumped into the Local Internet Marketing game over the past few years. There is a void to fill. And there’s a desire on the part of small business owners to hand off this business of Local Internet Marketing to a trusted advisor.          

Who ‘s the Local Internet Marketing Expert?

So who’s the expert in Local Internet Marketing? Your Web Design guy? The local SEO expert? How about the Local Phone Company? Your Local Newspaper? The Company that publishes your Tax Software? Because all of these people also claim to be your best Local Internet Marketing Expert.  If everyone is a Local Internet Marketing Expert, the problem is: “Who do you trust?”  

Whoever you choose to help you–here are a 7 Things Every Small Business Owner Should Do  to launch a Local Internet Marketing program, obtain greater visibility, and drive business through the door. I’m going to share some of the things I have done and that I do to help me drive business for myself, and hopefully by doing that, you’ll pick up an idea or two that will help you with your business. 

7 Ideas Every Small Business Owner Should Do to Achieve Success in Local Internet Marketing        

 1. Claim your Directory Listings  

Claim your listings

All of your contact information should be consistent on Google, Yahoo, Bing, Best of the Web, Yelp, and the Mobile Directories.  

At the very least, you should include your business name, address, phone number, your main keyphrases that someone would type in a search engine to find you, and include links back to your website or blog. Also make sure your Google Map is up-to-date. Luckily you can do this all in one place with a Universal Business Listing. 

2. Create a web presence  

A web presence is essential

 You can create a free website at WordPress.com. Or Weebly.com. Or even better, get a designer to create a self-hosted WordPress website with a pre-built theme customized to match your logo. You can take a pre-built them, make it your own, and have a website you can be proud of for a relatively small investment. While you’re at it, create a Facebook Page for your business, and a Company Profile on Linked-in, because these days they’re all connected. 

Even then, keep it simple. Regarding your website design, all people want to know is: “Who are you?” “What do you offer?” And “Why should I trust you?” Unless you have an ecommerce website and are selling lots of things online, or you’re selling something very complicated, a simple 5 page website plus a blog should suffice for most small businesses.  

Small Business Tip: If you already have a web presence, make sure that it’s easy to optimize your website to get traction with the search engines. Maybe you don’t need a new website, when a simple SEO Makeover with On-page Search Engine Optimization would suffice. If you want to add blogging capability, maybe it’s time for a do-over anyway. 

3. Create a Special Offer for New Customers  

Offers drive business

Restaurants regularly offer 50% off one item for new customers, or an appetizer for free with a minimum purchase. Hair stylists offer a free color with a hair style for new customers. Do you have an offer especially designed for new customers?  Use the offer in conjunction with a Groupon, or a FourSquare program. 

If you structure your offer correctly you should have no problem driving new customers through your door. Keeping your pipeline filled, and new customers are the lifeblood of any small business.  

4. Optimize your Website
One of the best ways to maximize the results of your Local Internet Marketing is by optimizing your website for local keywords, for example: Your Service > Your City, Region, State, Zip Code.  Also you can add a list of the local communities or municipalities in your service region at the footer of your website to drive additional local traffic. The trick to getting top spots in the search engines is to create pages with high keyword densities (the proportion of the number of times one keyword phrase is used to the total number of words in the page: 3-4% is a very good number to aim for). 

I have optimized my website, and in the image below, I’m showing you a top-view screen shot of my Google Analytics Web Statistics from the last 30 Days, so you can see how this is working for me, and how I use it.  

Use Web Stats to Measure your results

As you can see from my Web Stats, my main keyword phrases are: ”Direct Marketing Consultant” and “Small Business Marketing” in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. If you looked at the rest of my stats you’d see that I get small ”long tail” hits for every combination of those keywords, as well as some great traffic from some my more popular recent blog posts, like “How to Build a Great Website” and “How to Create a Better Linked-in Profile.”  

Small Business Insight: I’m also getting a lot of unintended and undesired traffic for how to make an *c-h-e-a-p* (sic) small business website, because in my most popular recent blog post “How to create a great website,” I used the word *c-h-e-a-p* (sic) twice. So now I need to think about a way for me to rephrase that to take advantage of the current traffic, and instead of that undesirable word, use the word ”low budget,” which I could actually turn to my favor: small business owners who have a little bit of budget to create a website.  

5. Get Other Influential Sites to Link Back to Yours  
Your search ranking is determined not only by the web optimization and the quality of the content on your website, but also who links back to you. A great way to create back links is to sign up for local directories, to submit your blogs and articles to other influential websites (like Ezinearticles.com and Bizsugar.com), and to comment on other influential blogs in your area. You’ll see I’ve got some nice traffic coming from BizSugar.com, Linkedin.com, Smallbiztrends.com, and Twitter.com. It all adds up!   

Small Business Tip: Linked-in and Facebook are influential sites. Two great ways you can control getting other influential sites to link back to yours are by Optimizing your Linked in Profile and Gaining Likes on your Facebook Page for Business. 

6. Create a Small-budget Pay per click Marketing Campaign
Pay per click gives you additional insights into what’s working and what’s not working.  Start with $100 or $200 per month on Google Adwords, Yahoo Search, Microsoft Ad Center, and/or Facebook.  The trick to Pay per Click is to create a separate landing page for each logical grouping of keywords. The investment will quickly pay off (quickly meaning you can start gettting hits today). Pay per click Marketing is a great way to augment your organic (free) search traffic. 

Take advantage of all the PPC networks

7. Measure your results
Why is it that so few companies measure their results? WordPress.com Stats is Free. Google Analyticator is Free. My new favorite, Going up Web is also Free. Increasingly, your company website is the focal point through which you can measure the results of your marketing. Each of these tools provides great insights that will help you improve your traffic and your inquiries and sales.     

So that’s my bare bones strategy for Local Internet Marketing Success. Whomever you choose to work with to help you with your Local Internet Marketing, it’s going to require some real work, and if anyone tells you it’s easy, then maybe they’re not telling you the whole story. Every small business owner should be doing each of these things simultaneously, and doing them now! 

If you are a small business owner, and you do these 7 Easy Steps to Local Internet Marketing Success, chances are you’ll be happy you did. If you do, let me know how it works out! 

Pages related to Local Internet Marketing :    

• Hyper Local Internet Marketing
• How to Get Great Leads

If you need help with Local Internet Marketing please contact me today.

Could you benefit from a Website Makeover? Or should you just start over?

Does your website need to go?

When you discover you’ve made a bad hire, you usually don’t hesitate to fire the person–or to provide coaching and training to fix the problem(s), so that your employee is a happy, productive, contributing member of the team.  

The same should be true of an unproductive website. You should assess your website so that you can determine whether you can fix it with a Website Makeover — or junk it, and start over.  

Your website represents you. Some might even say, it is you. A finely tuned website could be working for you around the clock–helping spread the word about what you do, how you do it better than anyone, and creating opportunities with customers and prospects who need your products or services.  

I realize that others have put together lists of factors that create a productive website, but I put this list together specifically for small business owners to help them determine if they could benefit from a Website Makeover. If I’ve forgotten anything please feel free to add yours in the comment form!  

7 Factors to Determine Whether a Website Makeover would work for you:

1. Code/structure: Is the website coded properly to build keyword densities for the main key phrases on each page?
2. Backwards Links–Do other influential websites link back to yours? Along with the code and structure, this is the #1 factor that influences your search engine visibility. 
3. Usability–Does your website follow accepted conventions of usability? Is it easy to use? Can the website be viewed in all browsers? Are there any bottlenecks or broken links? Or information that needs to be updated?
4. Identity/positioning–Does your website accurately capture your identity and position you as a leader in your field? Does it accurately and positively reflect you and your business?
5. Content–Does your website offer fresh, relevant content to engage your readers? Does it speak directly to your customers and prospects and accurately communicate what you can do to help them?
6. Capture/convert–Is your objective to generate inquiries, leads, or sales? Does your website help you achieve your objective? Does it have web forms, invitations to chat, and/or social media buttons? Do you offer an e-book or something else of value to get prospects to sign up for your newsletter?
7. Measure–Are you using Google Analytics, WP Stats, or something else to measure your success? You can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Do a Website Assessment

One of the best ways to assess where your website is in relation to other websites is the Website Grader, a free tool from HubSpot that provides an Internet Marketing Report for your website. It tells you how well your website is working… if it’s getting traffic, if it has SEO problems, how popular is it in social media… it’ll give you a step-by-step guide to fix it so you can start getting more inbound traffic. [This website scored a 97.8 of 100].  

How does your website rank? Is it time to give your website the Pink Slip, or can you fix it up with a Website Makeover so it’s working for you? What do you need to do to fix it up?  

No matter how good your website is, there is always room for improvement.

If you need help either analyzing your website, fixing up your current website with a Website Makeover, or building a new website, please contact me.

Why and How to create a Gravatar

 A ‘Gravatar’ is a ’Globally Recognized Avatar’.

An avatar is an icon or a little picture you see next to comments in a website, and is used to or distinguish yourself from others. In other words, a Gravatar is an Avatar you can take with you. Created by Tom Werner, and available at www.gravatar.com, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web.

Why is this important?

One of the factors in achieving higher search engine rankings for your website is what’s referred to as “off-page optimization,” which is determined to a large part by how many influential websites with a high page rank link back to your website.

By posting comments in forums or influential websites, which have a form with your name, email, web address, and comments, enable you to create a link back to yourself, which is a factor that can help increase your search engine visibility.

That’s why it’s in your best interest, when you read an article or a blog post that interests you, to add your two cents. You acknowledge the person who wrote the article, and also if you distinguish yourself with your comment, others might see it and follow up with you for more information.

How to Create a Gravatar

To get your own Gravatar, go to en.gravatar.com/site/signup, and:

1. Enter your email address
2. Activate the account (by clicking on the activation link in the email they send you)
3. Upload a picture ( your picture or a logo or some other image you like)

That’s it! Now whenever you post a comment, or chat in a forum that uses Gravatars, people will be able to associate a face (or a logo) with your name.

If you have any questions about How to Create a Gravatar, please contact me today.