Category Archive: Internet Marketing Training, eBooks and Courses

May
29
2009

Twitter for local business

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May 29, 2009

Twittering for success with locals

The typical first response I get when discussing Twitter is “I don’t get it”. A statistic once spreading the net in April of 2009 claimed that over 60% of Twitter users simply do not get it’s concept and leave within the first month. Many claim Twitter is simply a passing fad and that there is no real business application to this new medium of communication.

Naked Pizza in New Orleans would have you believe otherwise. Within the first 30 days of applying that application to it’s business, their sales are soaring a minimum of 15% due to an exclusive Twitter promotion. Another business in Chicago has discovered that “Sweet Tweets” brings in floods of Twitters to it’s yogurt shop operation in Chicago. With over 700 followers, Twitters must prove they’re following the shop in order to receive a free yogurt.

The ‘experts’ said it would never fly

The experts said in 1994 that the Internet was not a viable business application. Thomas J. Watson, past president of IBM, estimated in 1942 that the world peak demand for computer was ‘maybe five’. The telephone was discounted in 1882 by President Chester Arthur as a non viable means for human communication.

Twitter can, and likely is, a larger means of communication than the telephone. The micro blogging site Twitter is different and like most new technologies, is being shunned upon as something no more than a pastime. One almost can not fathom that there are 4 billion registered mobile phones on the planet, and in 1985 many wondered by one would want to be accessible while mobile. If you’re one of those who are shunning Twitter, then in my opinion, you’re not a visionary and are someone who is typically a follower.

It’s just marketing

The fact is, marketing a local business on the Internet is merely the process of being where prospective customers are. You attend trade show, chamber meetings, networking events and go on sales calls. You own business cards, brochures, websites and give aways. These events and collateral are simply tools in your marketing toolbox to built, establish and nurture relationships. Over time, you earn the right to do business with these prospects you meet. The electronic world is no different. You are not using the Internet to sell your services, you use the Internet to find relationships, take them offline and earn their right to business.

Users of practically every product and service are collaborating in special places on the Internet. For examples, if Facebook were a country, it would be the sixth largest country on the planet. There are 600,000 new people every single day joining this network. It’s a social networking site, a place to network. Twitter is averaging 8,000,000 tweets a day, with 45% of it’s users in the U.S. Currently ranked as the fastest growing website on the planet, Twitter is experiencing growth of 1382% per month!

Sales start with Networking

The goal is to make the effort to be in the places that prospects are hanging out in Twitter. Just like approaching a conversation of four people at a MCAA convention, you’re welcome to join, however don’t jump in and cannibalize the conversation. Introduce yourself, shake some hands, and engage in the current conversation. Stay relatively quiet for a little while, and when the timing is right, share your business. Once you have earned the right, then plug your product and service. You’re goal is to take the conversation away from Twitter to either your website or offline.

Think like your buyers. You can search all the Twitter conversations and you need to search for local users and those that are talking. For example, a potential client for a delivery business may be in the medical niche. The decision maker might be a hospital purchaser. If this person were to engage in conversation, some of their conversation might reference their career, even with their closest friends. So this buyer might say something like “today was a rough day at the hospital, I got four cold calls from sales people trying to sell me some new computers”. So, search for the words ‘hospital’ and ‘sell’ or ‘sales’ for people in your local area. Twitter will show you all these people who are saying those words. Once you have found someone who you think qualifies as a potential buyer, follow them. Over half the time, they’ll follow you back and the average person only follows 100 people. Send them a personal hello. Tell them you are networking with locals. Over time, this person will see your tweets, which are intended later to spark curiosity, and drive them to your website. Of course, your website will be set up properly to handle the best call-to-actions.

This takes time. It’s difficult to outsource and it requires a level of intellect. There is no get rich quick Twitter strategy and you won’t see immediate results. This is no different than the old school world of networking. Marketing your local business on the Internet is no different than marketing in the old school world, just using a virtual world. Don’t look back in 2012 and say, I should have learned that a century ago, in 2009.

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/twitter-for-local-business/

May
21
2009

Selling SEO to Local Businesses

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May 21, 2009

NOTE:  Since writting this post, I have joined the faculty of an elite Local Internet Marketing Education portal and we have since created an extremely valuable package to help teach to sell SEO services to businesses.  We know there is a need for this and this report is step-by-step with a video that follows.  Please read the updated post on How to Sell SEO Services.

This is a post on how to sell SEO using my website assessment.  There is a video for your reference below and tools.

When I started witting MLBO my first target audience was the local business owner and their employees.  I visioned a step-by-step process that practically anyone could use to begin marketing their business.  I learned quickly there is no 101 level, either you dive right in or you stand on the side of the pool, there is no getting your feet wet.

I begun starting to attract other Internet Marketer who wanted a business similar to my agency, providing Internet Marketing services to the local businesses.  It dawned on me, not only have I developed the processes to deliver such services, I have tried and tested processes in place to manage 100′s of accounts, employees and contractors.  I have well documented processes for operations, finance and most importantly sales.

Challenges in Selling SEO to a Local Business

Where do I start?  You are trying to sell something that someone can’t touch, or see results for six months.  You can not provide a single guarantee, you need a contract and generally, the buyer is uneducated on SEO.  You are selling a service that has a lot of spammers, unscrupulous people and generally, the SEO market place is not well trusted.  This is not a service to sell for $100 a month and you are asking for an investment in range of $5000 minimum over six months.  It’s a tough sell!

When you do close and SEO account though it’s pay off.  Our typical SEO client’s life is around 10 months.  They get their ROI by month five.  My margins are better than most companies.  If I were working for myself, I would only need 15 new accounts per year to make a decent income.

Selling is about Discovering the Prospect’s Unique Value

In my Internet Marketing Book, I discuss processes to achieve results for a local business.  I discuss how to research and discover how much business lies on the Internet for a local business.  I teach you the right tools to discover that ‘opportunity’.  The challenge is, does your prospect tie those into value for their business?  Most don’t.

I have this process I call a Website Assessment.  It’s a ‘free’ assessment of a prospect’s website, however we place a value of $200 on it because it takes us an hour to prepare and an hour to deliver.

I have created a FREE video for you!  Folks, this is gold, I promise.  The process described in the video has helped me sell $100′s of thousands of dollars worth of SEO services to local businesses.  My closing rate in my sales funnel is a whooping 58%!

Before watching the video, you need to understand your objectives.

  1. Educate your prospects on what white SEO is
  2. Educate your prospects on what a keyword is, how important keywords are and what we use them for.
  3. Show your prospects exactly where traffic is coming from and how many searches are really happening on the Google network.
  4. Show your prospects who their competition is and their estimated click through.
  5. Show them if they are not in the top 6 spots for their ‘money’ keyword(s), they are NOT in the game.
  6. Instill fear with them and scarcity, indicating that their competitors are receiving traffic, traffic is only increasing and they are losing market share daily by not being on the Internet.

play-video1 Click on the image to the left to watch the video.  This is a training video that I created with a bad ass website for the purposes of setting up a website assessment.  You’ll note that I use WEB CEO to do this.  Web CEO is a great SEO application, however I only use it to genenerate rankings reports for my prospects and clients and use it for our Website Assessment.  There is a free version which is pretty good, however they lock you out of features required to run a business selling SEO.  Fork over the couple hundred for this tool, it’s the best selling tool you’ll use.

Also reference the chapter in MLBO (Chapter 5) that addresses the use of Web CEO.  I provide a step by step analysis of this product.

Download Web CEO here.

Watch Selling SEO here.

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/selling-seo-to-local-businesses/

Apr
28
2009

Local SEO is Bullshit! SEO is all Blackhat!

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April 28, 2009

Sometimes I like to be devil’s advocate and stir the pot.  Since releasing MLBO, I have been getting amazing feedback, success stories and a lot of interest.  I haven’t made a penny from it, yet I find myself immersing myself in my greatest passion, learning and teaching.  I’m about to teach one of my philosophies that I’ve danced around with.  I know many will agree with me, however many will disagree with me and I’m hoping to create controversy.  I will add that I am not the first by any stretch of the imagination to write about this controversial topic.

Local SEO will not exist in a few years

OK, local SEO, is Local Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Optimizer.  I no longer call myself an SEOer.  I’m an Internet Marketer.  I do not ‘optimize’ a site for the search engines.  I market a website using the Internet.

Is White Hat SEO just sugar coated Black Hat?

Alright, so the question of black hat and white hat rise.  My clients hire me to get their site to #1.  Some don’t care how I do it.  Others buy my philosophies.  I study black hat techniques and I can in fact play a game like Howie Schwartz.  These techniques are used to dupe the search engines and simply won’t last for a sustainable business.  Mom taught me, if you’re going to do something, do it right.  Black Hat works, just won’t forever.
So what is black hat?  Keyword stuffing, duh.  What about optimizing a keyword into the H1 Tag?  Enhancing the Title tag?  Keyword Density?  Keyword Proximity?  Internal Linking with proper anchor text?  I can argue that each, and every one of the above mentioned concepts is black hat, if you are using them for search engine purposes and NOT for an enhanced user experience.

On-The-Page SEO shouldn’t have a list, just quality Design and Marketing

What about validating your code?  Using CSS over tables?  Optimal use of flash and java?  We know the search engines like certain standards, so we employ them.  What about a dedicated IP, shared hosting, slow sites?  Large pages?  No alt tags on images?  Large image sizes?  These are among many factors that need to be considered when an SEOer gets to work.  And this stuff only represents about 30% of your rankings weight, I haven’t touched on outside factors yet!
Point is, if you are top of your game for designing, and coding, you’ll know or will know enough to hire a quality developer who goes by the book.  Your site should validate!  You should reduce the size of your images!  Tables are sloppy way of programming!  Flash was designed to be a movie, NOT a entire website!  It’s obvious to me, the search engines want a well built website using the technology the way is was meant to be used.  As far as keywords, page design, content, it also makes sense.  For example, you would not want to come back to this blog if new content never came in.  So, the more fresh content I have, the more I’m favored by Google.  Sure, you need to know what keywords people are using to find your site and put those keywords on your pages, but this isn’t optimizing a page for the search engines, this is marketing and understanding your audience, speaking their jargon.  It so happens the search engines understand this and place value on those pages, and in turn we SEOers have reversed engineered the Search Engines and rarely have I found educations that says…UHM, lets just focus on proper marketing.

Don’t look for links, that’s not what SEO is about

So what about off the page stuff, that other 70%?  It’s all about links, right?  Of course it is.  So I’m taught to analyse competitors links, in fact I teach strategies.  I value links, spend efforts on the links that favor the most PR.  I have people posting on forums, blogs, directories, writting articles, doing video.  How shameful of me.  Wait, sure, if we reversed engineers that this works, then deploy it, but in fact, I’m creating transparency and exposure in the most democratic medium we’ve ever seen.  It’s no different than my local business by handing out flyers, business cards, attending trade shows and chamber meetings.  Speaking at local events and getting involved with the school and churches.  Transparency and Exposure.  Sure, I also focus my time on the exposure that yields the highest traffic, like in the days selling cellular phones, it was the mall, not the park.  If I wanted to meet womyn, it was the bar and to create trust and authority to pick up the woman, I brought my ‘player’ friends, not the geeks that I enjoyed spending time with chewing the fat on about computers.
The point is I learned sales and marketing at a young age and I’ve now realised that absolutly everything I do on the Internet can be related to my old school world.  Links are merely endorsements and relationships.  Like marketing my businesses in the old school world, it took time and hard work.  I walked the pavement, knocked on doors, picked up the phone and made sure I played in places I needed to be, it wasn’t the park accross the street.  It was those crazy early breakfast meetings at the chamber of commerce accross town, but it brought business.

SEO is Merely Quality Marketing

Alright, so I threw either water or fuel on the fire here.  I’m saying that everything you do on the Internet to promote your business, local or online, if you’re going to long term growth, forget about 99% of the SEO noise you read about.  Don’t worry about this or that.  Close your eyes and ask yourself if what you are doing enhances either
  1. The visitor of your site
  2. The democratic value of the Internet
If you can answer yes to one of those truthfully, then chances are it’s something the search engines have already recongnized and have built into their algo.
If the answer is no, then chances are it’s black hat and don’t do it.  It might work today and I challenge anyone on the Internet to this philosophy.  There is nothing you can do to your website that doesn’t answer Yes to any of those and is a sustainable strategy to SEO.

Don’t hire your carpenter to sell your house

If feel sorry for all those web developers looking for work, studying SEO and calling themselves experts.  They better learn marketing, or they’ll be out of business soon.  I AM an Internet Marketer, not SEO guru.
Disclaimer:  Notice the link at the top, Internet Marketing Guru?  That’s a internal link on this post to help the search engine follow a link to my homepage, which is a keyword I begun optimizing for.  So I’m contradicting myself.  Of course I am.  Read this post again and you’ll notice I’m not.  That link sends people to a page about and Internet marketing.  I live by a self fullfilling prophecy, act as if.  There is no trickery here, just marketing.  Keep your head focused on proper marketing and rankings will follow.

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/seo-is-bullshit-seo-doesnt-exist/

Mar
27
2009

TWEELIVERING (n.): The process of using Twitter to find Business for Local Businesses

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March 27, 2009

Ahhhh, Twitter.  You thought Google rose quickly and then MySpace what is pulling in 230,000 users a day.  The man behind the Evolution of Dance displayed that YouTube has greater distribution power than NBC, CBC and Fox COMBINED!

For the first time in history, we as the average American can truly have a freedom of speech that is entirely uncensosed and broadcast to millions.   I mean it, millions.

Twitter is yet another hugely successful Internet idea.  It started as a concept for an internal solution at a corporation, now Barack Obama is following me, Scott Gallagher.  I know that Lance Armstrong slept well last night because he told me this morning.  My clients who follow me found out this morning that I’m visiting a large Internet Marketing conference this evening.  They see updates that I’m on the hill snowboarding.  Do they really care?  Probably not, however perception is reality.  They get value on occasion from resources that I tweet about however they also build a relationship with me, albeit virtual, that is unknown in the traditional business world.

People buy People.  They don’t want to be sold, they want to buy.  A Chiropractor, for argumentative sake, is not much different than the chiropractor down the street, in terms of their services.  However their personality is likely very different.  Their patients will buy from the first doctor because of their relationship with them.

Courier service, a not so complex service.  You pick up a package and deliver it on time.  There are 300 couriers in Chicago.  Besides branding, there is very little distinguishing factors among couriers.  Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and now Twitter allow you build those relationships online and take them offline.

If you don’t think this works, ask the Industry Guru from Hot Shot Delivery in Houston.  Past president of the Texas Courier and Logistics Association, Eric Donaldson tweets from his blackberry in his car (at red lights of course), office and maybe sometimes or places in his home.  He has followers and building a local audience to take relationships offline to make some money from a business that is one of the oldest industries ever.

The goal is to find locals that are talking about the products and services you offer.  Once you find these people, start following them on Twitter.  About half the people you follow, will follow you.  Once someone is following you, you now have permission to tweet them, friend them, drive them offline and market to them.

I’ll use the example of Eric in Houston.  Eric should go to Twitter and do a search for ‘houston’.  This will bring up all the tweets where anyone has mentioned ‘Houston’.  These might be locals, but at the least have an interest in Houston.  He’ll look at each of the 100′s of profiles and determine whether he should follow them.  If they are active, several hundred posts, and they appear to offer business dialect, a close to 50/50 split of followers and followings with more than 50 followers, Eric should friend him.   Then wait three days.

After three days, if they have not followed you, stop following them.  Unless you are really concerned about marketing to them, you don’t want too many people you follow who don’t follow you.  Oh, follow Barack Obama, then he can spy on what you are saying… ;-)   Check out this tool, Twitter Karma.  Log into this with your Twitter username and you can easily see who is following you and compare it to whether you are following them.  Then make batch updates.  So simple!

There is awesome third party tool to help.  It’s called Tweet Later.  Click on the link to check it out.  This program, which has a free no credit card trial for 3 weeks, allows you to set up auto-responders.  This means that when someone follows you, this system will automatically send them a tweet from you welcoming them.  You can also include a link to perhaps an article you wrote, a cool tool they might enjoy or your website.

With this program, you can set it up to send Tweets at a later time, or scheduled.  It is very robust for the local business to market themselves through Twitter.

A final tool I’ll discuss that I use is called Tweet Deck.  It’s a piece of software that you install on your computer that allows you manage your tweets from your desktop, rather than the web based Twitter system.  I love it, except for the annoying tweet sound every 15 minutes!

So, use keywords that are relevant to your geographical location, your service and a combination of both.  Start following.  Tweet A LOT.  Make it interesting, funny, slightly controversial.  Retweet others.  Unfollow those who aren’t following you.  Add an auto-responder.  Tweet to send people offline.  To an email list.  Do this for one month, 30 minutes a day.  You will get results.

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/tweelivering-n-the-process-of-using-twitter-to-find-business-for-delivery-companies/

Mar
25
2009

Local Internet Marketing is solved!

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March 25, 2009

Well, after a year of grueling work, Marketing Local Business Online is completed, at least the book with step-by-step instructions. Local Internet Marketing in 2009 is huge!

I remember considering this project almost 12 months ago. I wanted to build a community of people that wanted to listen to me. I wanted to establish re-occuring revenue. I wanted to build a group of loyal readers and followers. I wanted to build something that I love to do and will support my lifestyle for the long term. I was tired of working during so called business hours and tired of having to wear a suit, because someone wanted me to.

I decided I wanted an info-product and figured I really could only teach people something that I’ve been financially successful at. I could teach people to sales in a B2B environment, or I could teach people how to market their business over the Internet. I already own a company that serves companies servicing a local market. When asked about cannibalizing sales from the agency with an info product, I thought….

Businesses need either time or money to grow. You need to work on and in your business or pay people to do that. My agency charges over $800 a month with a minimum 6 month contract for SEO. That’s expensive man for a company generating a $1M in sales at 10% EBIT. So, what about those dentists, chiropractors and attorneys that have young web saavy employees, those interns and contractors that are paid $15 per hour. I could teach anyone how to do this, with the right framework. The local plumber can’t afford my agency, but I could teach them how to do it!

So I tested myself. I found several companies who would pay me $800 a month to teach them how to do this. I did this on my own time and learned with several successes that I not only can do this for others, I can teach people how to do this and now they’re making money. How cool.

There are 23M small businesses in America. Imagine if I could have 50,000 of those businesses reading my material, even if it were for free. I know I could monetize loyal readers and move towards what my passion has been…speaking on stage. The difference is, people now seek me out and pay me to talk. How cool!

So, there is a brief history of MLBO. It’s my third live business venture. They all work together and MLBO is my biggest passion. I just love teaching.

Now I’m just slowly promoting downloads and come September I’ll have the official launch of the video course, workbook and files, along with a member site and private and semi private coaching. Of course that won’t be free, but I assure you will be much, much less than the price paid SEO agencies and affordable even for the one man show local operations.

Exciting times!

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/local-internet-marketing-is-solved/

Jan
06
2009

PPC versus SEO

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January 6, 2009

Pay Per Click versus Organic Search Engine Optimization

In an ideal world you would use both strategies to maximize your site’s profile.  Due to budgetary constraints however, this is not often possible.  Trying to do both on a limited budget or with limited resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results.  If this is the case, you must focus on one or the other.  Since the majority of users click on organic listings and anyone can pay for PPC listings, I almost always focus my effort on SEO over PPC.  However, this short article maybe give some insight into what’s best for you.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

I’m going to identify some of the advantages here of SEO versus PPC.

Trust.  Studies have found that searches trust organic listings 86% of the time versus its counterpart.[i]  This is because paid ads are, well just that, paid.  Anyone can place an ad on the networks and entire fundamentals of Google, to organize the world’s information, is why their search engine is number one.  Their listings and their algorithm is very, very tough to game, and in turn, their results are very accurate.  Hence, increased trust.

Click Through Rate.  I know you’ve clicked on more organic listings in your lifetime than paid.  So has your competitors, friends, family.  It’s a given and therefore its safe to assume the click through rate on organic listings outperform PPC listings.  To prove this, a study I discovered found that search users are up to six times more likely to click on the first six organic results than they are to click on any of the paid results[ii].  Another interesting find was a study of eye tracking, a solution to measure where the human eyes go on a webpage.  This study found that over 50% of users start on the top left corner of the listing, varied groups scanned middle left to right and few users started their scanning on the paid results[iii].Finally, another study shows that 30% of searchers click on paid listings, leaving a whopping 70% who click on organic listings[iv].

Visitor Value.  Trends are showing that more sales are resulting from organic listings than PPC[v].Additionally, the overall conversion rate of a few of the sites that we manage, which are local businesses, is $17 higher for unpaid search results than the rate for PPC.

PPC Awareness.  Hundreds of people on the Internet are millionaires, some billionaires, from managing affiliate PPC campaigns.  It’s much more difficult to do this since PPC has become visible to the average surfer as a marketing tool.  While I don’t have this statistic reference, I recall reading that only 50% of searches are aware of the distinction between PPC and organic.  Frankly, when I’m selling SEO and I ask the question “Do you know the difference between PPC and Organic listings?” the answer is typically, ‘well no, not really’.  I know this happens more than 50% of the time.

PPC Pricing is increasing.  This is obvious.  This is economics of supply and demand.  As more advertisers compete in the PPC world, the supply doesn’t change that much, however the demand is increasing.  Therefore, as costs go up, your profit margins shrink.

Long Haul Game.  Marketing anything is a long term endeavor, however, PPC changed that.  While there are pros and cons of each, SEO takes longer to get results, but your efforts stick for a longer period of time.  Just as quickly as you can get an ad up in PPC and begin to get results, you lose that traffic as soon as you stop paying.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

I can hear your little voice now saying, why would I want to even read this PPC section, I’m sold on SEO.  I’m not discounting PPC - it’s an effective strategy.  If you have the budget left, even $200 a month, I would suggest running a PPC campaign for at least your first 6 months.

Results.  Your results are instant.  You get an account right now, in 15 minutes you could have traffic.  Your SEO efforts can take months to get results.

Budget.  OK, nothing is free.  While we say organic traffic is free traffic, let’s not kid ourselves.  Organic traffic is not free, in fact it’s very expensive.  Whether you’re spending your time or money outsourcing, it’s costing you.  Hiring someone for $250 a month will not get you decent SEO results.  We charge upwards of $1000 per month for a small business on SEO.  But bear in mind that for $12,000 per year, we have generated millions in revenue.

Easier to manage.  OK, so this is a long post and I remember the first time I begun to learn SEO, I was overwhelmed.  It has taken me years.  I don’t expect you to know SEO like I know it.  Even a step by step book can’t simplify SEO to the point that a monkey could do, it still requires intelligence.  A simple PPC campaign can be managed in house by someone with little experience in marketing.  I’m not saying this person will be successful though, since I heard once over 50% of all online campaigns fail.  I think they were referring to PPC.

No Contract or Time Commitments.  While we do not have time contracts for PPC, most SEO firms will require you to invest with them for six months or more.  For SEO, I’m considering offering 12 and 24 month SEO contracts.  We need six months of your investment, or we won’t get results.  Granted, we’ll get local results in the first month, but we need top placement results to look good for several keywords.  We achieve this in the third and fourth month and by the sixth month, our clients have translated a lot of that traffic into business.

[i] eMarketer

[ii] Oneupweb Study

[iii] Enquiro, July 2005

[iv] Search Engine Guide, August 2005

 

[v] Search Engine Guide, August 2005

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Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/ppc-versus-seo/

Dec
12
2008

Video for Small Business

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December 12, 2008

∞$15 Billion Videos viewed monthly
∞52% of all web Traffic is video[i]
∞Video Listings show up in the SERPs within 10 minutes
∞The human brain is optimized for story telling and immersive sensory experience – this is video!

Online video is one of the best venues to connect an audience.  This new avenue allows video creators to communicate a message on multiple levels through visual imagery, spoken words, music and visual text.  This is a huge potential to reach a massive audience with your small business.  This strategy alone can help dominate the entire front page of Google. 

With online video you can also reach a huge local audience for a minimal investment, thus the ROI of online video marketing can be surprising.  According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau; more than 50% of the US population will watch video online next year.  That’s over 150 million!  According to comScore, Americans watched 9 billion online videos just in the month of July.

While there are many sources for your video to be viewed by many, we’re talking local business marketing and many of the online video strategies you’ll talk about just don’t apply.  Online video for small local businesses is more about conversion than driving traffic, yet plays a great role in acquiring links and completing you online strategies.

The question is, how video applies to your small business?  Video help conversion.

Conversion.

We live in a world of video, yet the internet is still in a place where newspapers were a hundred years ago.  Then came television news, and specialized stations broadcasting the news to us in similar formats.  The television has completely changed the way we used to acquire and distribute our information from a hundred years ago.  The Internet is no different, however today we are in the dark ages.  That’s right, the Internet as we know it today will be mocked by our children as they grow up.  You think Granny has seen a lot of change since the early 1900′s?  The rate at which humans have adopted technology has exponentially increased in time.  While I can not support any figures without documentation and supporting evidence, please try and challenge this claim.  For the population of Americans to hit a saturation rate of 95% for newspapers took longer than the telephone, which took longer than television and now the Internet is well on its way to achieving that magic number in much, much less time than them all.  Ironic isn’t it, that the Internet as we know it today is merely a digital version of a newspaper, at least for the small local business.  Follow the trends folks, video is popping up everywhere on the Internet, why not your own business.

Let’s consider this.  Companies like Google want to organize the world’s information.  They have highly paid, MBA and Doctoral grads studying trends all day long.

They know where the Internet is moving; at least they are predicting it better than us.  Didn’t they just buy the largest video broadcasting site in existence?  Ever heard of YouTube?

The point is here is that video is, or soon to become a staple of the Internet.  Broadband is cheap, hosting is even cheaper, technology is fast enough and video creation is fairly easy and cheap.

Video is also a very big thing right now in SEO.  Video on your site greatly increases you’re exposure and ability to be ranked.

Video also vastly increases your conversions on your site.

TO LEARN HOW TO CREATE VIDEOS, SIGN UP FOR FREE AT WWW.MARKETINGLOCALBUSINESSONLINE.COM

 

4 comments

Permanent link to this article: http://www.scott-gallagher.net/video-for-small-business/

Oct
28
2008

Something Nice to say!

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October 28, 2008

Well, its been a while since I’ve frequeted this blog.  See, I’ve been focussing my time on my offline business and I just came back from a trip to Tucson.  It was great.  See, Internet Marketing is not all about traffic, but conversion.  So, I took my camera with me, met a few clients and asked them what they had to say about my company.  Here’s what they said.

 Well, they liked me!  If you visit our site which is all about Courier Marketing Solutions, you’ll find I’m adding new videos to it monthly, greatly influencing the conversion rate. This video I expect to increase my conversion rate immensily.

In a short time, I’ll be taking this video, shortening it down and watching the conversion rate on this blog increase. So stay tuned folks, the material for this blog are going to change dramatically in the next two months…I have something big coming…

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