This is a short video about our before and fter results for one of our clients.
Mobile Marketing
Good morning, Internet browsers! This week, I have something pretty interesting to discuss with you, and I hope that you have your thinking cap on tight! Today I want to discuss ‘Mobile Marketing’ with you.
The statistics are staggering concerning Mobile Marketing, so I don’t think we should just avoid it because it is intimidating. As we look at the statistics, we find that there are 5 times as many smart-phone users, as there are PC users. What that means is simple: your website and information can be sought out by these phone users just as easily as the users of computers.
Truly, I think all of us know people that do not have a computer at home, but they will surely have a cell phone. More than likely now, that cell phone will be a smart-phone. Prices have come down drastically, and the monthly service costs are being challenged daily by the newly emerging companies. While it might cost $120 per month to use a big telecommunications service for wireless, there are some new companies forming that provide a similar service for only $40.00 !
As these prices are lowered, the ability for a user to own a smart-phone is better. This increases market reach, and means that you could have your business information in the hands of every person in town before much longer. Is that of any value to your business?
I want to tell you about some very practical things your business can do, right now, with Mobile Marketing. It could be very small steps to making your business run smoother, or you can create a vast marketing program to boost your income. There are lots of possibilities. Let’s look at some here.
Mobile Alerts: This first part might be the easiest thing to do in this area of Mobile Marketing. Simply put, your client is notified of his upcoming appointment, via a text message. Granted, the process is a bit more complicated than that, but in essence, it is just a simple text message delivered to your clients cell phone, reminding him to the appointment today at 4 PM.
Something of this nature could end your no-shows and missed appointments. Your business could run better and the bottom-line could be higher, as your losses due to employees not being efficiently scheduled would be cut dramatically.
Secondly, with mobile alerts, your business can inform your clients of sales, and specials. For instance, your company finds a great deal on tomatoes, but you must move these quickly, as there is a limited shelf life. You can alert your clients ‘instantly’ about the limited opportunity to get these ripe tomatoes at a heck of a discount. You should make these time-sensitive alerts only for your mobile alert clients.
By the time you think of an advertisement for a newspaper, have the ad representative create the ad for the layout, and then wait for the next issue to display your ad, then wait for the readers to see the ad and respond; your tomatoes are rotten.
In other cases, we have restaurants that want to announce a limited special meal the chef has just prepared, as he had a small quantity of oysters on hand. The announcement was sent out to the list of interested parties, and the meals were sold out. This helps with inventory waste. Aren’t there ways that your business could benefit from such technology?
Thirdly, this system can be used to make routine announcements to your list of subscribers. For example, your Law Office has a weekly newsletter that you send via email; you can also use this technology to reach those that do not use email. Remember from earlier, that there are 5 times as many smart-phone owners as computer owners? If you reverse that logic, maybe it makes more sense: Less than 20% of smart-phone owners actually own a computer themselves. This tells you that the vast majority of these people cannot access computers at all. Email might not be available t them.
Granted, Mobile Marketing is a bit different than Internet Marketing and requires some finesse to make it successful. After all, the user can easily delete and block your texts if you abuse the privilege they have allowed you in contacting them directly.
Our firm also creates mobile websites….this is simply your current website, adapted to the small screen of a cell phone. It takes a special code and technology to display these sites, and the users of cell phone really appreciate this accommodation. If you have viewed a normal website on a smart-phone, you have noticed that it is really tiny, and that some items do not display correctly, if at all. Mobile sites correct these problems and display the data in a totally different format.
What about an ‘app’ for your business? We can do that; too. Lots of businesses are getting apps for Iphones, Blackberries and other smart phones. This form of technology is actually affordable for most businesses now. This is an emerging technology, which is really the wave of tomorrow. Every smart phone user I know is addicted to using apps. The technology of using apps to solve problems and find information makes things so much easier for our daily lives, it’s a wonder we ever survived without them.
Imagine having your own app that the user can display your daily menu with. What’s new today? What about your blog, displayed within an app? What about your pre-recorded lessons for your students, clients or patients? There’s an app for that.
In our previous columns here, we studied some of the other tools that you could use to gain the trust of your prospects. These tools combined create an awesome force on the Internet to help the prospect choose you as the expert to help them with their problems. I hope that you have been cutting out and keeping each column, as you will be creating a small workbook on how to gain more customers for your business.
See you next month with more information and tips on ways to boost your business using the Internet.
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Let’s talk today about joining the many conversations on the Internet about YOUR business.
Do people actually talk about your business? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t; but do not let this stop you when you find a conversation thread that is near-topic for you.
Example: Say that you sell Silver Widgets at a local store here. You browse the Internet, looking high and low for your topic. There are no references to your topic. What now?
Find a near-topic thread, such as Gold Widgets, Bronze widgets, widgets in the workplace, etc, and join THOSE conversations! This is not rocket science at all. You will just be extending your friendship to people that you can’t see.
Tell them about the Silver Widget, and all the great advantages of owning such a great thing. Show them how it compares to the Gold and Bronze Widget, and how for a little less money they can have almost the same advantages.
Is your widget better at something special? Can it do one thing that the others cannot? How about color, texture, shipping, size, etc?
You can even tell stories about how your Silver Widget helped you get out of a jam once. People WANT to hear stories about your goods and services. They understand stories far better than just facts and figures.
How about what your widget has done for someone else? People love testimonials. You might always say to yourself that you do not believe that what you just read as a testimonial is actually a true testimonial from a real person. However, most people read and partially believe it. It helps, really. As you post to the forums more often with a sharing attitude, the readers will come to trust you more. Then they will begin to believe your stories.
This works for forums, Social Media, Blogs, and any communication. It’s not new. It’s human nature.
Chuck Hall
Web Marketing of North Florida
904-607-3121
In the recent columns here, I have mentioned the tools that I use to drive massive amounts of qualified traffic to a clients door. While the exact system that I use is proprietary, I can at least tell you what some of the tools are and some of the detail on how to set them up for maximum results.
Today, I’d like to talk about the website itself. While anyone would consider a website to be an essential part of our Internet marketing system, you can actually run a successful Internet campaign without a website at all! Of course, for this column, we will be talking about the website creation.
Let me say outright, that practically anyone can build a website now. There are so many resources available on the Internet that will help you build your own site, even if you know nothing about HTML coding. The world is changing, and at least on the Internet, it’s becoming more user-friendly.
The cost of building these do-it-yourself sites is free in many cases. But I want to stress that there is often a price to be paid in the resulting effectiveness of these sites. While the software might help you insert the pictures and text, the underlying search engine optimization (SEO) suffers.
SEO is what we web marketing types design into the website to make sure the search engines such as Google and Yahoo can find, categorize, index, and display your site correctly. If this has been left to chance, then the likelihood of your site showing up in the search results correctly are vastly diminished.
When building the site, we like to see two things: that certain keywords and search phrases are embedded into the site correctly, and that the navigation of the site to the user is smooth.
I recommend that you use the free Google keyword tool to discover the proper search terms and keywords for your particular niche. There are other tools as well, such as Market Samurai, which is quite good, but costs a bit to buy. Embed these search terms and keywords into your site in the Meta Tags area within the HTML portion of the site. Yes, it is true that Meta information is becoming less important to the newer search engine algorithms, but we do it anyway for the legacy systems out there.
Also, use the search terms and keywords within the text in your site as needed. Try to avoid using the same term more than three time per page, as the search engines are weary of sites loaded with repeat keywords. Working in this area is a little like a balancing act. The algorithms change every year, so staying on top of your site is important for good search results.
Within each site, we also like to tie in the pages to each other as links for the search engines to see. Actually there is an exact science behind SEO, so much so, that there is an entire industry dedicated to just that. The bigger the company, the more important that the website and SEO becomes. Maybe they know something we don’t about sales from the Internet?
Let’s go on to site navigation now. There is little worse than having a confusing, crowded site. This will send a visitor away in a hurry. We like to see sites that are bright and cheerful, with lots of open space. This really holds true in print ads also.
Marketing to a stranger is really an emotional experience, not so much a logical one. If the visitor to your site is met with a screen crammed with lots of text and graphics, it may be too much for them, and away they go with a click. We suggest a relaxed landing page with some graphics and text, but lots of open space.
Get right to the message you have on the first page. You might not get another chance, as they might move on. Internet browsers take about 2 seconds to determine if the site they are on is worth staying on.
Do you have a visually pleasing page, or is there a jumbled mess here? Does the first page speak directly to their need? People only search for you because they need answers to problems they have, not because you are their hero. Do you show them that you are not threatening? Do you come across as a friendly person / business?
Most important of our tools is the ‘offer’ for more information. Is there an irresistible offer for them to request? I can’t stress this enough. We always build an autoresponder into every site, and tie it into a follow-up system. This is an all-important tool to use for endearing your clients to your services.
In website creation there are many other things to know that I don’t have the room to go into here. Let me hit the highlights quickly.
Next issue, I’ll go into one of our other tools for massive traffic creation to your business. If you have questions about your website or marketing your business online, perhaps I can address them in this column. Please email your questions to me at the address below.
We Sell Clients, Buyers and Customers
(Not Ads, Coupons, or Leads)
Here is how we do it. We use sophisticated tools on the Internet to create a following for your goods and services. It’s a long and drawn-out technical recipe. Most people sort-of lose interest as we explain it. So, I have included a small illustration to help.
The chart shows that we drive hungry buyers from these 8 tools to your website, and THEN to your door!
More important than the chart, is what this system does for your business, IF implemented correctly. And I do mean, correctly!
There will be no results if you start this system and then stop after a month. It’s not a one-shot deal. Do NOT think that you can get hopping with a little social media, and see riches fall into your lap.
We spend hundreds of hours working on these tools, and creating an online presence for your company. We do this everyday. The results are that you will have customers that you could never have found before.
People are searching for answers. If your service solves a problem for them, why not let them know? They need your service, and they are willing to pay someone to solve their problem, why not YOU? Using the Internet to market your business is not necessarily ‘intruding’ into someone’s privacy. Our tools are located where people search for solutions.
People are turning more to the Internet now, than to the traditional methods like the yellow pages and newspapers. In another few years, things will have changed even more. Perhaps you should consider looking into Internet Marketing right now, before all your competition does.
I want to stress that we sell Customers. That is what we are hired to do. We are not hired to just post stuff on the Internet. A 10 year old can do that. We are business builders, and that is all.
Please call us today for a private consultation.
Chuck Hall 904-607-3121
Web Marketing of North Florida.com
Internet Marketing for Small Business
Whereas this is a new column, I suppose I should explain the premise of this today, to bring all the readers up to speed. What I want to show you in these monthly columns is the real-world how-to for getting paying traffic to your business. It’s that simple. Use the Internet to drive hungry, money-bearing customers to your business.
Sounds great, huh? Well, it really is! The age of marketing is changing right before our very eyes. Many small business owners think that the Internet is some sort of fad, or perhaps a novel idea that isn’t for them. That’s just not the case. The Internet has and is changing everything about marketing your business. Perhaps you’ve noticed that most people today reach for the Internet before they reach for the yellow pages? Also, you’ve noticed that the yellow pages have their own Internet presence? They, too, have come to understand the power of the Internet.
I want to show you how to bring your business into the Internet Age, and show you how to start driving that targeted, qualified traffic to your front door! So, if you think that you’d be interested, all I ask is that you follow this column, and begin implementing the instructions. In respect for the general readership, however, I’ll try not to make this too dull and boring, as oftentimes technical instructions can become!
Let’s look at some of the benefits of Internet Marketing.
First, there is the Reach of the Internet. For most small business owners, there hasn’t been much interest in marketing to 7 billion people around the world. Well, there hasn’t been much interest before now, as they were impossible to reach, and way too expensive to go after. Know this: all that has changed. Small business now has access to those world markets. If you have the product, they have the need. Reaching them has become affordable now.
Ease of Marketing: With the old ways of marketing your products, there was the need to create a giant marketing and distribution program, determine the logistics of getting enough customers into the store to buy, and how to staff the store appropriately. Now, business owners can schedule the work, control the staffing needs, and lower these costs.
Inventory Control: Most small businesses must keep that inventory on-hand, ready to give to the customer upon demand. With Internet sales, this is simply not the case any longer. There are some Internet businesses that do not maintain any inventory at all! Think of all the freedom and affordability this gives your small business. You could actually run a small business with no inventory, no storage, no staff, etc. Admittedly, this is rare, but it can be done.
Larger Markets: While this seems related to the first item, we should speak to this in more detail. The market that your small business reaches now might be thousands of readers of your advertising efforts. So, you staff your store accordingly. You anticipate having 50 customers per day, so you hire 3 clerks. Their time spent with each prospect on average is about 35 minutes. With breaks, and other needs, you are well staffed, until someone gets sick, or goes on vacation.
With the Internet, you can more easily schedule the work. You can even miss some time, as the order will remain in the queue, waiting to be filled. After all, it has already been paid for!
But the size of the market available to you is simply awesome. While you service thousands now, you could do far more soon. With a little effort, your Internet reach could be hundreds of thousands quickly. The 3 largest search engines; Google, Bing, and Yahoo, report about 15 billion searches per month! Don’t you think that you could capitalize on some of that traffic?
Getting Paid: Small businesses now have many ways to get paid over the Internet, and safely, too. The old days of worrying about where your credit card info just went are practically over. Millions of transactions each day are conducted safely over the Internet.
Physical Delivery Systems: As you know by just watching TV, FedEx and UPS can get your products to anywhere in the world. You don’t need a store in Belgium now; you just need to ship the goods! Fortunately, the buyers are accustomed to paying for the shipping, so it’s not a cost to the seller.
Local Traffic: The Internet now has the ability to create local traffic for local businesses. Frankly, that is my specialty. This is a fascinating field, as we are able to see the results with real people-traffic walking in your door. For me, there is nothing as gratifying as seeing a small business owner realize for the first time that the Internet can actually help drive local traffic to his own business! So many small business owners still think that the Internet is only about world-wide traffic. Thanks to some big changes in the search engine algorithms, we can now enjoy local traffic first, before venturing out to the world markets.
In the upcoming columns, I’ll talk about how we actually go about creating all this wonderful traffic to your store/office. I’ll discuss the proper ways to build your website, and how to communicate with the prospects. If you have any specific questions, please contact me at the email provided below.
Chuck Hall, MCSE, is an Internet marketing consultant, specializing in local Internet traffic building. Email your questions to info@WebMarketingofNorthFlorida.com
You can almost think of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a somewhat secretive industry. You see a lot of people claiming to be SEO experts, and some charge a lot of money for their SEO services. Some people guarantee results and some don’t. At the same time, almost nobody will tell you the exact methods he or she uses to improve your web site’s rankings, so you are left wondering: am I paying too much? Am I being too cheap? Am I hiring the right person? What should I look for when hiring a SEO company? Is it worth the investment?
If you think about it, there is a reason that the SEO industry is somewhat secretive. For one thing, search engines like Google do not like people tampering with their search results. If you are a dentist in Chicago and you realize that thousands of people type “Chicago dentist” into Google every week, imagine how much more business you would get if your web site comes up first in the search results! When I say search results, I mean the organic search results, not the paid advertisements, since 70% to 80% of people click on the natural search results instead of the paid advertisements.
This brings me to the second reason why search engine optimization companies are somewhat secretive. They take away Google’s revenues from paid advertisements! The more people hire SEO companies to improve their rankings on the natural search results, the less likely they are to use paid advertising with the search engines such as Google AdWords and pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements.
For these reasons, search engines such as Google do not like search engine optimization companies, and the SEO experts have to be somewhat hush hush with their methods. As a result, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions when it comes to hiring SEO companies. However, this does not mean you need to be at a lost. You are likely to get better investment of your dollars with some SEO companies than others. With a little education and understanding of SEO companies, you will be better equipped to choose the right SEO company for you.
Here are the top 3 myths when it comes to search engine optimization…
1. The majority of the SEO work takes place on your web site. The logic behind this myth is that if you design a really search engine friendly web site, your web site would be ranked high by search engines such as Google. Yes, it may be true that having the right keywords and meta tags on your web site help your ranking, but if it were that easy, don’t you think everybody would be doing the same thing? The truth is – only a small percentage of the SEO work is done on your web site. The majority of the SEO work to improve your ranking should be done on other people’s web sites! Search engines tend to care a lot more about what other web sites think about yours rather than what you have on your own web site. This is the reason that a good web designer is not necessarily a good SEO expert, and vice versa. Web designers tend to focus almost all of their energy working on your web site. Good SEO experts, on the other hand, tend to focus their energy on other web sites in order to help improve your web site’s rankings.
2. Good SEO can be done cheaply. There is a saying that people tend to get what they pay for, and this saying applies to hiring SEO companies. However, you should not base your decision on price alone. What you should understand is why some SEO companies charge you so little (such as $49.95 per month). Some keywords are more competitive than others. For instance, let’s say you run a hair salon in Los Angeles called “BJ Hair Design”. Which keywords do you want to optimize? Do you want to optimize “BJ Hair Design”, or do you want to optimize “hair salon Los Angeles”? I can charge you very little to improve the ranking of the keyword “BJ Hair Design”, but potential customers searching for hair salons on the Internet don’t know your company name (which is why they are searching in the first place), so no one is going to type in “BJ Hair Design”. Chances are they will type in “hair salon Los Angeles”, and this is when you want your web site to come up first. It is much harder to get a high ranking on competitive keywords such as “hair salon Los Angeles”, which means it will cost you a little more to get high rankings on highly desirable keywords. So before you go with the cheapest SEO company, think about this… Which keywords are they helping you optimize?
3. SEO stops when your ranking is high. Another myth is that SEO is a one-time investment. If you have a very high ranking on Google, there are probably 9 other companies trying to compete with you. If everyone else is advancing but you, your ranking will eventually drop. That is why you should think of SEO as an ongoing investment for your business. By continuing to invest in your web site’s ranking, you will ensure a steady stream of new customers that will visit your web site and call you up.
Well, I had the pleasure of hosting the Web Marketing Small Business Workshop this past Thursday at the Hampton Inn here in Fernandina Beach. The room was overbooked, as we had to bring more chairs!
Everyone seemed to have a good time. Lots of discussion about Internet Marketing and offline marketing, too.
We will be having another one on August 20th, 2009. the topic will be “Ezine Your Way to Success”. I’ll be showing small business owners how to create their very own online magazine!
Here is an exerpt I stole from John Cow, and it is terrific. It says what I have been telling my students all along.
It relates to ‘how to position yourself’ when it comes to relating to your customers. This is HARD advice to follow….it is our nature to dump all over a prospect if we think that he MIGHT buy something from us.
Read and ponder……
This is the crux of it: you are just trying to further the information about your industry out there; you’re trying to provide a service to your buyer persona’s that will make their life easier. You are not trying to sell them anything. You are, however, establishing yourself as an authority in your niche, or, as I like to call it, a Trusted Expert.
‘How can this help my business?’ you ask, ‘How can it make me money if I’m giving away things for free?”
The answer is this: you give information freely (and you put effort into making sure that it’s useful information); this establishes you as an authority in your niche (Trusted Expert!), and when it comes time for purchase, who do you think buyers would prefer to buy from? The guy who has done nothing but try to sell them things, or you, Trusted Expert, the guy who genuinely was trying to help them with their problems. The added benefit of being a Trusted Expert is that it also sets up a relationship that is conducive to additional purchases after the initial conversion; people will keep going back to people they trust.
The web offers you an easy way to spread your ideas to potentially millions of people. If you offer communications that are thoughtful and useful, you have the potential to influence many thousands of your buyers in a way that you would never be able to do by targeting them with traditional marketing and advertising.
This is why you need to start thinking differently; the power of the web requires a different kind of thinking to truly reach people. They’ve been so inundated with advertising from all sources online, you need to do something to differentiate yourself; you need to provide value, for free, before you even begin to try and sell them anything. Become that Trusted Expert your buyers are looking for.
So stop advertising!
Instead, get your ideas out there in a way that is useful, and understand what your buyers want and tell them the stories that they want to hear, that are the answer to their problems. Communications implies that it is two-way, traditional advertising is one-way. You need to start having conversations with your prospects. By engaging their attention with two-way communications, you won’t have to shout at them to get their attention over everyone else. They’ll already be listening to you.
Remember, being a Trusted Expert in all your communications with your buyer persona’s will brand you as someone that people want to do business with.
Thanks again John. Good advice.
