Getting Rid Of The Brochure Mentality
Most small business owners and entrepreneurs build a website without understanding the fundamental reasons for doing so. As such, they create what I call a ‘brochure’ website. You may have done this already.

Well don’t be upset, it’s a pretty natural thing to do. For some reason we decide to follow the lead of the majority, thinking if everybody is doing it, it must be the right thing to do… WRONG!

So, going against all conventional wisdom, why do we put up a website? What is the best way to use it?

The Fundamental Reason for Being
Why do you need or want a website? The answer is LEAD GENERATION. How is your web site structure important when it comes to lead generation and marketing for small business?

Landing Pages
Well, in order to generate leads you will need to make offers. Offers need to be tweakable. Therefore, you need to be able to update your content easily and quickly. More importantly though you must have a specific page for your offer. These pages are called ‘Landing Pages’.

Here’s an example:
Lets say you have a website where you are selling vitamins. One of your supply companies is running a promotion and you think you can make more sales while the promotion is running. Would you send your visitor to the home page, hoping that they find the promotion? That’s not going to going to be a very effective marketing campaign!

Or would you send them directly to the promotion?

You’d send them directly to it and make the offer very clear right?

No matter what you do online, you must be able to make clear offers to visitors in order to generate leads and sales for your small business. You do that by sending them to specific pages, which we call landing pages.

Hopefully, you will be able to edit these quickly and easily, so you can tweak your offers and get the best response possible.
Search Engines Want Content
They love to suck it up! The more content you have the better! There’s a saying ‘Content is King!’. Its true.

The more pages you have the better. The more often you add and update content the better.

Did you know that the way your pages are linked together is very important? Your internal page linking strategy is as important as your external links strategy. I can hear you thinking ’strategy,
shhhhhmategy! this is getting technical, I don’t want to know about this’. That’s fair enough, it is technical. And while you can put a website up and link it together any way you please, if you want a good search engine ranking, it pays to have your site built by a professional who knows about this stuff.

Also, the way your pages are named and the folder structure of your website is important too! So if you’ve got a site that has pages named page1.htm, page2.htm etc, you may just want to pop the cap off that aspirin bottle and start chugging those puppies in earnest!

Your small business marketing strategy must start by getting rid of the brochure mentality. You must start thinking lead generation. Everything starts with a lead!

Follow this link for a free webinar on small business internet marketing
Small Business Marketing Strategy

One thing to understand is that if you think about your website as a lead generation portal, then that’s what you’re going to have in front of you. However, if you think of it like a company brochure, then the dullness and approach will be the same. As Earl Nightingale said ‘we become what we think about’ and so it is with our websites.

The Concept of Lead Generation
In order to create a lead one side (your website) has to make an offer, and the other (your potential prospect) has to be interested in it. If you have this scenario then you have yourself a “hot lead” as some people call them. These are definitely the ones you want to follow up with whenever they come across your path.

The Exact Nature of an Online Lead
Let’s be perfectly clear. You absolutely must get visitors to your website to give you their email address. This has to be obtained ethically with the visitor’s permission. Think about it. If you don’t at least get their email address how will you follow up? You can and sometimes must also get a street address, phone number etc. But for now, let’s assume you’re trying to get an email address.

Providing an Offer
In order to get someone to actually provide an email address, you usually need to offer them something. It has to be something they need that will entice them to join your subscriber’s list. It has to be of VALUE to the reader, which in turn their email address will be valuable to you.

So you see; there isn’t much point in just asking people to subscribe to your newsletter. I’m not saying they won’t. I have customers that do just that and get subscribers. But most people are already overloaded with information and their inboxes are bulging, so they probably won’t sign-up unless the information is valuable or specific.

Get the Offer In Front of the Visitor
There is little point in hoping that a visitor will stumble across your website, search for and find your newsletter sign-up link and then subscribe happily to your newsletter. It just isn’t going to happen! Here’s the kicker. The MAJORITY of websites DO EXACTLY THAT! Have you heard the term landing pages? Well, YOU GENERATE YOUR LEADS ON YOUR LANDING PAGES! That’s right. Give your visitor the option to subscribe to a list that is relevant to the content of your landing page, with an offer that is also relevant and valuable.

Lead Generation IS List Building
This article is about lead generation marketing. There are a lot of online marketers that call this effort List Building. It is that, but I prefer lead generation as it makes me think more specifically about whom I’m trying to interest with my offer and how I’m going to follow up with them. You may have heard the saying ‘The Money Is in the List’? Well, the list is the end result of your lead generation efforts. And yes, the money is in the list, but you have to know what to do with the list and how to do it.

To find the Google external keyword tool just go to Google and search for ‘Google external keyword tool’ and it will be the first organic link at the top of the page. Click on that link and you get to the tool. The first thing to do is select the website content option, which is on the left side of the page.

Then enter the website domain name in the ‘enter a web page URL’ box. Check the box that says ‘include other pages’. Then click on get keyword ideas. The tool will run and it may take a few seconds before you see any results. When it’s finished scroll down a little bit and you’ll see a section that says ‘showing keywords grouped by these terms’.

The highlighted links are what I like to call themes and so what this means is that Google is telling you what are the main themes of your website. This is really cool because it shows you the footprint of your site. This is a great analysis tool, not only for your own site but you can analyze a competitor’s site too and find valuable information about the websites content. It gives you the ability to spy on your competition.

You can see whether or not your site is really on the topics that you want it to be on. You might find that there are some topics that you would like to be in there, some themes that should be included in your content, which are not there. You might also find some themes in there that you don’t really want.

Each theme is sorted by relevance according to Google. So the first theme is likely the most relevant topic that your site is about in Google’s eyes. This is important to know! The keywords below the theme topics are also sorted by relevance and this is what we really want to know. This means that Google is showing you the best, most relevant search terms relating to your websites content.

What you can do is pick the most relevant terms that have a reasonable amount of searches and use those terms as anchor text for back-links. This will work wonders for your natural search engine optimization for those search terms.

If you work smart like this with the data that Google tells you is relevant to your site, as long as the topics are correct of course, you can use this intelligence from Google to get faster search engine optimization results than you ever thought possible.

I have to agree that the thought of government trying to regulate search seems pretty darn ridiculous to me.

The anonymous author states ‘It’s now conventional wisdom that search engine optimization, representing the organic result sets on any search query, is more voodoo than science’.Well I don’t agree with that at all. If you ask me its always been more voodoo than science. The biggest problem was, is and will always ever be SPAM!

We’ve had link spam for years, content spam for years and now that Google is pulling search results form multiple channels in universal search we’ve got universal spam.

The authrors premise is that the search engines control who shows up in the saerch results and who doesn’t, paid search accounts can be blocked at any time etc.

It sounds like he doesn’t like Google much. Maybe his company just got slapped? Gee, I know how that feels (it hurts, especially for no fault of your own – thanks G)

You can read the original post here;
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/13/the-time-has-come-to-regulate-search-engine-marketing-and-seo/

And this is an interesting response from Aaron Wall of Seobook;
http://www.seobook.com/it-time-regulate-ignorant-anonymous-guest-posts-techcrunch

I don’t know about you, but this really pisses me off. I don’t really understand why companies have to use spam filters at all? Are they worried that their customers might be offended if they have to even look at spam or aknowledge its existence?

The problem is spam filters are generally a big pain in the butt! Very expensive to buy, install, configure and maintain and for what? So your Average Joe Whiner doesn’t have to see any spam? Well, thats probably ok but I know for a fact that the very same AJW is the first person to get on the phone when an eagerly awaited email has not been recieved. Er, sorry Joe, it looks like it was eaten by the spam filter. The the crap hits the fan all over again.

I’ve got the perfect spam filtering solution. It’s called Microsoft Oulook junk mail folder. Here’s how it works;

1. Email comes into my outlook mail client
2. Any email with an address that is not ‘whitelisted’ by me goes into junk mail
3. All other email goes into my inbox
4. A couple times a day I scan my junk mail subject lines, look at any that might be wanted
5. Any that are wanted i move to my inbox
6. If necessary I whitelist the senders email address or domain
7. The rest I delete
8. This takes me no more than 30 seconds a day

Dear Google,

I’ve just found a couple thousand inbound links that are a pharmacy spam exploit. This may be the remnants of an exploit I reported about a year ago here http://www.trstechnology.com/blog/index.php/k1b0rg-doorway-loader-v02/

These links have been indexed by googlebot and now point to my site, not good. How come googlebot sucks this stuff up and then points them at unsuspecting websites? Surely this is obvious spam? There are thousands of hidden links at the bottom of this blog page. I would have thought it was obvious. Yet here I am again with nasty crap pointing at my site and probably I’ll start to rank for ‘cheap viagra’ again. This pisses me off!

The links are in this blog at the bottom of the page, hidden. Go view the source.

http://www.dr-pier-albrecht.net/

Please remove all inbound spam links pointing to my website. Hint: anything relating to pharma / drugs is spam. Another clue: anything /blog/ph.php* is spam.

Thanks

steve

In the real world, clients want to talk about search engines, search engine optimization or search engine marketing (Google Adwords / Pay-Per-Click).

Why? The current economic downturn is having an impact on businesses and with the majority of people now using Google (mainly) to find information on an all subjects across the board, many organizations are re-evaluating their online marketing and website strategy. It’s an area that clients in every market are asking for advice on.

Many are now concerned by their visibility to prospective customers. Businesses that previously saw a website as an online brochure are waking up to the fact that online they’re completely invisible to those searching online for the products and services that they offer. Not a good place to be at the best of times, but a business killer in a recession.

These same clients also recognize another huge challenge. Failing to act now to improve visibility will leave them even farther behind their competition when the economy starts to grow again. This fact is compounded by the changes in the search engine world over the last 18 months of many people are completely unaware. These include Universal Search in Google over the longer term and more recent changes to local search in Google.

Search engine marketing isn’t a one off activity. It requires constant attention, tweaking and monitoring, which is true of both Search Engine Optimization (the free organic listings) and Search Engine Marketing (Google Pay-Per-Click etc).

The best place to start is with an audit of where you are, what are they key words and phrases that are being used by prospects and how well are you currently ranking. Here are some questions to consider;

1. Has your website been built with optimization in mind?
2. What can you do in the short, medium and long term?
3. How are you going to grow links?

It’s also vital to ensure that your paid and natural search is properly co-ordinated. Increasingly, you also need to think about online PR and drive coverage on social media sites, which can both benefit SEO.

Now is the time to act, before your competitors either beat you to it or get so far ahead of you that you’ll never catch up. From what I’ve seen in the local search markets in some industries, there is already a war going on.

Face the challenges of search engine marketing and search engine optimization head on. With the demise of printed media it is increasingly important to stake your claim in the search engine soil. It can be time consuming (especially at the start) but once you begin you can very quickly see improvements in your rankings. Very soon you can also see the benefit on the bottom line with more visitors, more subscribers and more sales!

Start with a $97 FREE Search Engine Ranking Report
and Review of Your Current Web Site
& Get More Traffic Today!

Just click the button to get started!

A tax cut has been approved in Washington state; I quote “Newspapers across the country have resorted to layoffs and other cost-cutting moves to deal with a wounded business model and a recession-fueled drop in advertising”

Read about tax breaks here

I really don’t get it. They are even blaming Google for their problems? I’ve been recently checking into advertizing rates for display and other types of ads in local papers and magazine here in Sarasota. They have got to be kidding! Sky high prices, with no way of really tracking results. And yet they are still failing?

I think most people see printed news as largely outdated and cumbersome.

This video post from Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand. I’m off to apply for a bail out too!

That’s why I’ve written a special report;

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6 Hidden Traps that Kill Online Business
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The information in my report is honest and really good advice if you are looking to buy a website.

You probably put up your website without knowing exactly what to do. Or you hired a designer that was focused more on graphics than the sales copy. The sad fact is few website designers know how to build a site that sells.

Web designers seem to think that your sales message is less important than logos and pretty pictures. They love high-tech things like animations, little intro movies and fancy navigation menus. Well, fancy animations don’t generate income… except for the web designer. In fact, they frequently drive visitors away.

Clearly, people online are in a BIG hurry. More than likely, they didn’t get online to go shopping. They came to your website seeking information or a solution to a problem.

You have a tiny amount of time to convince visitors that your product or service is the solution they need. If your website doesn’t demonstrate that solution, FAST, they’re gone. That’s why fancy animations and graphics just get in the way.

If you would like to read my special report you can download it here and you can get $261 worth of FREE Bonuses too, no really! Go get yours now!;

6 Hidden Traps that Kill Online Business