I love talking to people that have started their own business. There are so many different ways of providing value to people and getting paid for it, whenever I have these conversations I find that I learn something new. One of the things I have discovered is that not many people have made their website presence into something that brings them leads, business, and additional revenue. There are some great ways to take information that most businesses already have available and use it to turbo-charge their Internet Marketing.

Over the last year I have spent a bit of time working to learn how to maximize the capability of people searching Google for information to bring those people to me. I want to share the results of that work with you so you have an additional channel to bring business to your company. There is more detail what to do on my website Priority Cue, but the basics are:

  1. Set up your own website using wordpress as the website content management system at a hosting provider like bluehost or hostgater.
  2. Post some good basic information about qualifications, what you do, and success stories.
  3. Start writing short 300-500 word blog entries. I thought for a while that this would be good enough, but it wasn’t, since I would only get 3 people a day reading my material. It is frustrating to put hours into a good article and have very few people read it, so take the next steps!
  4. Take the blog postings that you create and publish them in online directories like ezinearticles.com and articlesbase.com. Make the article informative, then at the bottom in the resource box put something catchy that will lead people back to your website for some more information on the same topic. Look at this example of an article leading to a video on my website that I did: http://ezinearticles.com/?Avoid-Powerpoint-for-Effective-Communication&id=6526812.
  5. Create an article a week, and post them all into the same subject in the article directory. After a few months you will become listed as a top writer in that area. Here is my Expert Author listing on EzineArticles where I write about VoIP and other technical topics: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Rolf_Versluis

This article writing campaign then becomes the launching pad for a few other efforts:

  1. Getting ranked into the top ten search results on Google. For every article you write, you can make the link back to your website highlight the anchor text that you want to see results for. Do this on a consistent basis and you will start showing up in search results for that text. This is just the tip of the iceberg on this technique, since it helps to work on getting ranked for keywords that people actually search for but are not too competitive. One of the search terms I keep working on getting ranked for is “Cisco phone Atlanta” and if you do a google search you would most likely see that Adcap Network Systems is still on the first page for that set of keywords.
  2. In addition to creating articles, you can also create short videos on some of the more popular topics. The videos make great ways to bring people back to your website from the articles, and if you upload the videos to youtube you can embed them easily into your wordpress based website. I have found that after doing that, people start subscribing to your youtube channel as well, so youtube becomes another point of entry to your website.
  3. Becoming known as a subject matter expert and authority on your topic. After you have created tens then hundreds of articles on a topic you will start showing up on searches when people look for experts in your area of specialization.
After doing this, there are even more advanced things you can do to make your efforts bear fruit. Up to this point, everything I have mentioned is something you can do for free, or minimal cost. These additional things are listed on my webpage at Priority Cue – they basically take what you are doing and make it more effective. They also have a monthly fee which is peanuts compared to other marketing efforts.

Some lessons learned as I have done this over the last year:

  1. If you are going to have a couple different focus area, you can set up different websites for each. Don’t do too many! I have found that two or three are the maximum that you want to do. The ones I maintain are:
    1. Adcap Network Systems Tech Tips as an Adcap Technical Blog.
    2. Geeknick for data and networking blog.
    3. Priority Cue for small business internet marketing.
  2. Don’t use Google Adwords! I think I blew through about $8000 last year trying to get new business for Adcap using Google Adwords. It was all wasted money. There are people that use paid search advertising effectively, but I would recommend staying far away from it for a long time.
  3. Use a good website analytics program to figure out what is working and what is not. Google has a free one that can be enabled with a WordPress plugin. That works well for many people. I ended up using a paid one, and it worked a whole lot better.

Keep your end goal in mind of promoting your own business. It is interesting and useful to learn the techniques of people that do Internet Marketing and Affiliate Sales as a business, but unless creating an online affiliate sales business is one of your goals, keep the online marketing techniques focused on your existing business.

One thing I learned from my brother who is in the music marketing business is to maximize all channels of revenue creation. He works with bands to do this, and is really good at getting multiple revenue streams flowing from the same content. In the music business it is live appearances, T-shirts, DVD’s, record sales, music downloads, and all sorts of other things. Just because your main business is business consulting, there is no reason you can’t take all that hard work and make a video series or self-published book that you can sell online. Becoming known as an expert in this area and having a website that gets a lot of traffic will help you sell those products when you have them ready.

 

 

Twitt

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