Internet Marketing is not just for people selling products online. If you are looking to boost your company’s sales, take some of the tips and tricks that the experts in Internet Marketing use, and apply them to your storefront business. As an existing business with a physical location, you have many advantages over a company that just has a virtual presence. Use all your existing advantages along with some basic online marketing skills and you will have people finding you on the internet in almost no time.

Search Engine Optimization

This involves first of all creating a useful, readable, extensive, and consistently updated website, and is straightforward to do with some work. There are many books and guides that tell you how to put together a good website; that is not the tricky part. My preference is to use WordPress as a content management system to build the website, and to own the domain name and hosting contract myself.

In parallel with putting together a good website, here are some other things that will start to drive traffic almost immediately:

  • Get your website listed and verified with Google, Yahoo, and Bing’s local search. You have the opportunity to customize your listing information, will have to verify your physical address, and may even have to correct some incorrect information.
  • Identify other directories or wikis that are specific to your industry, and add or update your profile with those organizations.
  • Create Facebook page and LinkedIn page for your company. Add some pictures and maybe some videos.

It is really important to check the directories. When I started looking into them it turned out that the main phone number for our business was wrong. Thank goodness that call-ins were not a large part of our sales!

Become an Authority

After you have a good website created, write small articles at least every week. These can be simple articles of about 300-600 words, about a specific topic in your area of expertise.  Publish them in the blog part of your website. Make sure you put your name at the bottom of the article, and a link back to your main website, because if you do not, you are at risk. I had been publishing blog articles for about 6 months, then discovered that my articles were being copied word for word and published on someone else’s blog! If you put your name on your blog you will have recourse if you run into a similar situation.

Unfortunately, creating good blog entries is only a part of it. If you do that you will probably get only 5-15 readers per day. You need to do something more to make your hard work pay off.

Take these same articles that you are writing for your blog and publish them in a few online article directories. The best one to start with is EzineArticles. Other good one are ArticleBase and Buzzle. Here is a good ranking of article directories for a further list. Do not put any links in the article, but at the bottom, in the resource field, create a catchy draw phrase that will make people want to click on the link back to your website. Use a link that has words that you want to rank well on Google for, and you will both get people to link to your website, and will increase your ranking when people search on Google for your chosen key words.

You can make it more likely people will read these articles by signing up with Onlywire for free, then with each of the about 30 bookmarking sites. Bookmark your articles so people can find them.

Increasing Your Search Engine Ranking

The follow-on part is a little more difficult, and it involves the creation of hundreds then thousand of links from other websites to your website, with anchor text in the link that is relevant to the topic of your website, and surrounding context on the linking page that is contextually relevant as well.

The best way to generate these links is to submit unique content, typically articles about 300 words long each with one or two links back to your site, to article directories to publish. This can be done manually to each article directory, but that will not get you to where you want to be. The services of this first service and this second service are two examples of tools that will assist in getting this done in a massive way, because they will help you get unique versions of your articles posted at many sites on the web, automatically and over a period of time.

When writing these articles, publish them in a blog on your website, so you always have fresh content!

These unique versions will all have links back to your website, with anchor text that you choose. Some words of advice on this method, though. Make sure the articles you write have something to add to the general fund of information so people will choose to publish them, are relevant to the links you create, use appropriate keywords that you have researched, and most importantly, are written well. For my business, I either edit or write the articles myself to ensure quality.

Permissive Email Marketing

This is the building up over time of a large list of people who have indicated an interest in the products or information that you provide. The best way to do this is to have these people individually sign up on your website. Use a system that will allow you to automatically follow up after a signup, and will also allow you to send topical emails at a specific date, and as the situation arises.

If you make sure to provide useful email information on the updates, and don’t send out emails too often, your emails will get read. Then when you have something to sell you will have a receptive audience. The most popular and useful Email Marketing tool is extremely versatile.

Pay Per Click Advertising

This type of Internet Marketing can generate results quickly. There are a lot of subtleties that are important to learn about PPC advertising though. It is important to synchronize the search, advertisement, and landing page keywords in order to get placement at a reasonable price.

I have heard there is a place for this – but I avoid it since I have never gotten any useful results from it.

Google PPC is set up so that the per month $ limits have to be set very high. Then, if you let it get out of control, it can burn through hundreds or thousands of dollars in a month. I learned the ins and outs of Google PPC at my Affiliate Marketing group as part of the membership there. The best tip I learned is to turn off the Display Network option on Google PPC. This burned through about $200 on my first campaign before I turned it off!

If you want to find out more about the resources that I use for both Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing, they are listed on the Priority Cue Resources page.

Take Action!

You can put together a very powerful Internet Marketing plan, and get results, with just a little bit of work. They key is to make the work effective. The blogging that I was doing last year was a lot of work – I took two to four hours to write each article, and posted these articles regularly on my blog. It was very frustrating to me to put in all that work and have nothing to show for it.

If I had put in place just a few of the things I have learned over the past few months, the results of that same work would have been ten times as effective!

The cost for signing up with every one of the services I listed above is peanuts compared to any other marketing expense I can think of. The only difficult part is to get keyword optimized articles written, and if you don’t like to do that, bid out the job on Vworker or Elance. There are hundreds of people that will write articles for you for a very low cost as well.

Take the first step by writing a short article that is informative about something in your industry, and get it out there. The only way to get more traffic to your website is to put information out where people can find it.

Twitt