One of the most common marketing mistakes is not focusing your business on the needs of your prospects and customers.  Take an honest look at your website, your Yellow Pages advertising, magazine ads, etc.  Do you talk about your business or your customer?  As a basic rule, if more than three-quarters of your ad relates to benefits for your Customer or Client, your execution is good.  If most of your advertising concerns your business, your services, your features, your information (location, hours, etc.), then you are failing to be relevant to your Customer.  

Some of the greatest copywriters in the last 70 years have said this in many different ways, but it’s the same basic idea — focus on the sizzle and not the steak.  Focus on benefits, not features.  

People really want to know what’s the upside for them, especially when they are online searching for a solution to their problem.  Do your business a great service and focus on your Customer.  It will help your marketing tremendously.

If it’s too “close to home” to dissect your own marketing efforts, take a look through your Yellow Pages.  Are most of the ads describing the companies (location, hours, honors & accolades, their products or services), etc.?  I think you will find that nearly 100% of the ads you read are focused on the business and not on what the business can do for you, the potential customer.  

It has been said that Internet marketing is a lot like direct marketing; it is “me to you” communication.  This is true whether your website is focused on a B2B (business-to-business) model, B2C (business-to-consumer) model, or strictly informational with no commercial agenda.  It is very direct, personal communication.  Therefore, think in terms of your prpsective customer or client; in everything you create, imagine you are them.  What would you want to know?  

Now think in terms of your own copy (the content in your website or advertising).  After every line of copy, ask, “So what?” as it relates to your customer.  If you can pass the “so what” test at every line, you have something relevant to say to that prospect.

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One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of online marketing is that it’s not complicated. Or more to the point, there are a lot of “experts” who try to make it complicated. Aside from whatever motivation they might have to do that <COUGH: SELL THEIR STUFF>, online profits happen as the results of one simple equation –

Traffic + Conversion = Sales

– performed over & over & over again

There are MANY ways to get traffic (visitors) to your site and get them to take some action (convert) which will either result in more leads or (less frequently) result directly in more sales to your business.

So here’s the other simple rule — you only need to master 1 or 2 traffic methods and 1 or 2 conversion methods, and you will make money. You don’t need to master the entire kitchen to make a grilled cheese sandwich, and you don’t need to know EVERYTHING about internet marketing in order to add revenue to your business.

With that in mind, there are a few basic traffic techniques I’ve implemented in some of my sites and client sites that have universally and consistently WORKED. Here are a few of those methods — but remember, you only need to pick one or two:

Traffic Generation

1) Twitter is a highly effective means of targeting your niche and developing the conversation with your customers and prospects. There really is nothing like it. However, most businesses don’t know how to use it effectively. They spam with “sales tweets” — “Look at the cool new thing I’m selling.” The 80/20 rule is highly effective — 80% of your tweets should be about something interesting, funny or otherwise engaging… a question of the day (“What’s for lunch?”)… anything to get people talking, laughing, thinking… Also, keep it consistent and be generous with re-tweets. A few tweets a day go a long way toward establishing a rabid list of followers. The wrong thing to do is to Tweet like a madman for a day or two and then disappear for a month. Or worse, don’t reply when someone direct messages you or @messages you. That’s like ignoring someone at a dinner party when they ask you to pass the gravy. You WON’T get any dessert.

2) Video marketing. This is still a very fast way to rank your site and get lots of inbound traffic. Keep your videos consistent — don’t show up one day in a baseball cap and dark lighting, talking about the rain, and another day bouncing in a jungle gym screaming about business leads. Consistent message, consistent tone, consistent look & feel. Also, be sure to put a call to action in your video’s description, as well as the full URL of your website’s landing page, and use appropriate keywords.

3) Article marketing. This is an evergreen method for outstanding traffic generation, with one HUGE caveat — mix it up! Putting the same article on 400 article directories will get you nowhere fast. You will get a bump in traffic from all the inbound links until Google figures out they’re all the same article and basically count it as one link. There are content spinners out there that alter the content of your articles automatically, but you have to be very careful here as well. Most content spinners change a word or two to replace it with a synonym, or they mash up the article randomly to the output is basically junk that cannot be read. It has to pass human review. So if you’re looking for a quality content spinner, ideally you want to be able to change the entire sentence, do that with many sentences in the article, and then have it spin those into hundreds of different articles. That’s the professional way to do it. At the bottom of your article, have a call to action in the information field; a blurb about you (the author) and a link to a free guide the reader can pick up at your website.

Conversion

1) Keep it simple. The landing page has to do ONE thing — get people to ACT. For this reason, it’s been called a SINGLE ACTION PAGE. Pear it down to the bare essence of what you need the visitor to do. Consider placing a video on the page with a very simple message, “Hey thanks for stopping by for my free whizbang. Just type in your first name and e-mail address and I will rush it right over to you. In just a moment after you send your information, you’ll get an e-mail with a confirmation link. Click that link and I will instantly send your free whizbang.”

2) Direct, direct, direct. Notice the video script in #1 above — see how we instructed the user on exactly what they need to do? And then we told them what to expect next, and what they would then need to do. And we closed with a reminder of the benefit — the free whizbang.

If you have trademarked the term “whizbang,” then I apologize in advance.

3) Test, test, test. ALWAYS have two versions of your landing page operating at one time. You can optimize your landing page using freely available Google tools in the Web Optimizer toolbox. You really can’t go on “gut” here — the data will be you every single time. Even on PPC ads, we have literally seen the addition of a question mark in the ad increase conversion by 16.8% So test, test, test.

Conclusion

These methods work on any business in any industry. Here is some social proof –

• Local landscape designer increased her traffic by 7,342% (yes seven thousand percent)
• Local artist went from three visitors a day to an average of 41 visitors a day
• International digital publisher had zero e-commerce and started converting 16% of all traffic to revenue within 72 hours of implementing one traffic strategy and one conversion strategy
• Changing a landing page to a simple design on an e-book site turned conversion from an anemic two sales per week to eight sales a day — on the same traffic.

I hope this helps your business. The average business fails to do what it takes to drive traffic or achieve conversions to their website. While they exercise 20-30 traffic methods on average, they don’t do a single one effectively.

I have written a definitive guide listing 750 traffic generation methods that’s available here. Choose one or two and do them effectively.

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You own a small business, just like me. You own a brick & mortar business. I have over a decade of personal, hands-on experience with that; I have paid rent, payroll, payroll taxes, sales tax, worried about inventory and sell-through… I get it. Your margins are getting thinner and sales are getting smaller. You have been looking at every expense item in your business and you have probably run out of things to cut. The next thing to cut will be you, or the business itself. What you need are more customers. More customers will solve your problem, won’t it?

I’d like to ask you to think about advertising your business in the Yellow Pages. I’m not suggesting you think about it as a viable means of advertising — I’m asking you, consider the advertising that you’re doing, whether it be the Yellow Pages or any of the other “old school” methods for advertising your business. Consider how that ad works for you. Consider how that ad MUST work for you in order for it to do its job of bringing more customers into your store or restaurant, or getting more prospects to call you. Someone needs to get the idea to open the phone book, page to your category, peruse the ads, find YOU, see something in your display ad to make them take action and call. NO ONE works that hard anymore to seek you out. That advertising costs thousands of dollars a year. How many of your new customers came from the Yellow Pages last year? Do you even have any metrics (data) to know where your new business came from? Humbly, I suggest the best thing you can do is eliminate that display ad; create a regular, simple listing and pay for an extra line for your website address.

Now please consider your website. I’m going to be very direct and honest with you — if you are running your website like most small business owners, it’s failing to add anything to your business. Many small business owners operate their website as though it were a Yellow Pages ad; it’s there. Your customers won’t randomly find you on the Internet. They won’t just happen to think about your business and type it in. Even if your potential customers go to a search engine and type in your TYPE of business, they probably won’t find you unless you have 1) optimized your pages properly and 2) created specific methods to increase the presence and visibility of your website to the search engines. You see, not only your customers need to know who you are, but Google, Yahoo and MSN does as well. If they don’t know you exist, they can’t deliver your site to people who need your product or service.

Done properly, a website can be a VERY effective method of adding customers to your business. It can be modified very quickly to adapt to trends. Through your website, you can feature sales, talk to your customers and find new clients. A website can be any size you want it to be. You can even sell some of your products on your website and reach beyond your local market.

Consider your website name. If your business is about plumbing, and you don’t have “plumbing” in your .com name, does Google know what your site is about? Do the pages of your site talk about the various aspects of your business? Oftentimes, you’ll see a local business have a three-page site — a Contact page, About Us, and then a HUGE page about everything it is they do. Why? Because they “got a deal” from a web designer for a three-page site that was cheap and easy to implement. This is a terrible strategy in terms of search engines. Segment your pages into one topic per page. Make sure the metatags on each page match the topic. You can Google a discussion about metatags, but essentially, metatags are the code Google looks at for clues on what the page is about. YOU determine what the metatags are. Oftentimes, web designers don’t put anything in the metatags because you have paid for “web design” not “SEO.” That’s one reason why you got such a “deal” on the price. (Kinetics Web Pro only creates SEO-friendly sites, so every page has metatags.)

Metatags are easy to find. Just go to your website, and then in your browser, go to “View Source.” Search for the TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags. If you don’t have anything there, or you can’t even find those words in your code, then your page is not optimized for search engines in the most basic way.

Metatags are the simplest way to optimize a website for search engines, but really, it goes to the very structure of the site. Think in terms of an outline with 1) 2) 3) and sub-sections of a) b) and c) — search engines think the same way. They like to see orderly, planned websites that function logically. Your site should be the same way.

We hope this has been helpful to your business.

If you don’t have time to do this work yourself, we can help. Contact us today.

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A while back, Website Magazine released the 2009 List of the Top 50 Social Media Resources that was based on a study conducted by Universal McCann in Fall 2008.  The report discussed three major trends happening in non-search related traffic on the Internet: the rise in social media, the importance of digital “friends,” and the rise of social influencer channels.

What this means for the small business marketing itself online is an opportunity to capitalize on the visitor traffic funneling through the social media sites who are searching for specific interests related to your business.  Of course, there are nuances of technique involved that make this strategy effective, and a small business owner should be cautioned against creating any social media page without first crafting a deliberate strategy that’s engineered toward their desired result.  The good news is, anyone can create a social media page about anything.  The bad news is, anyone can create a social media page about anything.  As with anything Internet, your pages should not ever be about “anything.”  

Social media has tremendous leverage and levels out the playing field for any small business seeking to build their brand and expand their audience.  Properly targeted, it can drive a lot of qualified traffic to your website.  Social media outlets are just hitting their stride, so the potential is nearly limitless.  

Small businesses would be well advised to create accounts and post relevant content on the social media sites listed below that would likely serve your intended audience.  Not all sites are created equal, and not all will apply to your business.  Neither is social media the only form of marketing or traffic building you should pursue.  It’s one effective strategy amongst many.  There is a time and place for social media, and it’s definitely not the only method of finding qualified prospects for your business.  It is, however, one of the least expensive and most effective.

Here is the list of Top 50 Social Media Sites as compiled by Website Magazine:

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