A Small Business Internet Marketing Strategy
by John Eberhard

I routinely get asked by small business owners how they should approach Internet marketing. What things should they do first, second, third, etc.? Which actions work best and which things are immediate and what takes longer?

These are all valid and important questions. First of all, I will list the most important actions that are working in Internet marketing today.

1. Pay-per-click search engine marketing
2. Search engine optimization (SEO)
3. Link building through submitting articles to article directories
4. Optimized press releases
5. Collecting identities on your web site and email marketing to those identities

I have spent a lot of time sifting through the multitude of data on Internet marketing contained in many blogs, newsletters and web sites. The above are what I judge to be the most effective actions based on experience. And there is plenty of data out there on actions that are pure fluff.

Pay-per-click Search Engine Marketing

The problem with many Internet marketing activities is that they take time to build and come to fruition. Not so with pay-per-click search engine marketing (Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing). You can literally create a campaign, start your account and have ads appearing the same day.

There is a bit more to learn about successfully managing an account, which I cover in my books and in other articles. But it can be learned and the results can be fantastic. Pay-per-click search engine marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your site right away, without having to wait months for things to build up. If you don't have the time to learn a bit about how to do it, it is better to hire a professional to set up and manage an account for you.

One caution is that some industries have become extremely competitive in the pay-per-click arena (like real estate agents for instance), meaning that there are lots of companies with pay-per-click accounts vying for the attention and clicks of the online searchers. By its nature, since pay-per-click prices are based on bidding, the more competition there is, the higher the price you will pay per click, especially if you want to be in the top 3 positions. Generally, the more competition there is in your industry or market, the more work and the more cleverness is required to get the campaign producing well.

If you desire immediate results with your web site, I generally recommend that you start a pay-per-click campaign. Over the long haul, however, you want to build non-paid, or "organic" traffic to the site, which will generally be higher volume and more consistent. But it takes longer.

Building Organic Traffic

Building organic or non-paid traffic to your web site is the key to long term viability for the site, i.e. having it produce leads or sales on a consistent basis. These actions take longer to achieve, so you have to be prepared to work and/or spend money on this over a period of at least 6-12 months. The actions here consist of:

a. Search engine optimization (SEO)
b. Link building through submitting articles to article directories
c. Optimized press releases

Search engine optimization consists of selecting the right keywords (see my previous recent articles on this), then ensuring the keywords are well represented on your pages in all the right places. See my books and previous articles for specifics on how to do this. This is also called "on page optimization" because it refers to actions you take directly on your web pages, to make them likely to be ranked well on the search engines for your given keywords.

Once you have your pages optimized, your job then turns to link building, often referred to as "off page optimization." This is where you take actions to create links to your web site coming from other web sites, preferably other sites that have high ranking themselves.

The strategy I use for link building is two-fold, one action for quantity links and another for quality links. The action I use for creating quantity links is through submitting articles to article directories. These articles mention your company name and include your web site URL, so each one submitted acts as a link to your site. We also have a special technique that gets you more links to your site than the actual number of submissions, which I have creatively dubbed "supercharging."

Depending on how aggressive you are with this, submitting to article directories can easily build up your links from zero to several thousand in a couple months. Once you stop submitting, the number of links will always drop off a bit, so I recommend doing article submissions for a year, after which time your site will be extremely well established.

For quality links, I write press releases that are optimized for the keywords you are targeting. Then these are put out on an RSS feed (really simple syndication, a great new way of disseminating information on the web), and put on PR sites including Google News. These actions create higher quality links to your site and really establish the site for the keywords you are targeting.

Collecting Identities and Email Marketing

Once you start developing traffic to your web site, you should definitely have ways of capturing the identities of visitors. There are many ways to do this, and I don't mean having a guestbook to sign, which never works. You have to offer things to the public that are appealing to them, where they will give you their name and email address in exchange for getting the thing you are offering.

Some of the things you can offer which will get someone to fill out the request form include an email newsletter subscription, a special report or white paper, or a software demo (if you sell software). The creativity here is to think of things you can offer for free to people that will cause them to fill out the form, preferably things that are electronic and don't cost you any money. By doing so you want to build up a sizable email list, which is a tremendous resource for any business.

Once you build up that email list, you can start sending an email newsletter to it, or emails selling specific products or services. See my books or articles on email marketing and make sure you obey the laws and remove any askoff requests from your lists. Most lists can withstand being mailed to as much as weekly, but you have to monitor how many askoff requests you're getting to know how frequently you can email to them.

Following these actions you can build traffic and turn your web site into an effective marketing medium.

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