Many local business owners whom have never attempted to tackle their online audience are quickly realizing that this could be an area of great wealth and has to be an area of focus in the upcoming future. Local business owners have realized that many shoppers are not picking up the phone book anymore but quickly hopping online, and without getting their hands dirty! Search Engine optimization could be a very scary are if you have not had much experience on a computer. So many different websites, where do you begin? It’s nice to know that you have people in your community to turn to for a helping hand. The eBusiness Symposium has been designed to help those in need in the local community. A real judgment free event for all experience levels are encourage to come and attend this event and give your business a kick start into the online world. This local Boston internet marketing event will help you nail the fundamentals of online marketing.

Nick Stamoulis, President of Brick Marketing and long online marketing guru, will be conducting the search engine optimization portion of this event. Nick Stamoulis brings 13 plus years of online marketing experience to this event and the knowledge he holds will help you drive a new audience of business to your already growing business.  Nick has experience public speaking in small business forums and internal company departments looking to train their existing marketing teams. Nick will be teaching the ABC’s of SEO will allow all business owners to embark safely into the land of the search engine and try to tackle their specific online audience. After attending the eBusiness Symposium you as a business owner will have the confidence to tackle your online audience head first.

Nick Stamoulis will be teaching to all about the ABC’s of search engine optimization. This event is designed to help those of all experience levels. The ABC’s of search engine optimization will help any business owner take those critical first steps into marketing themselves in the search engines. Most of the time it is difficult to start off with those first steps but once you get a little shove things just fall into place. Nick will touch upon how you can successfully market your local business in the community and if you have a product that can market nationally that you sell at your location this event will teach you exactly how to map out a plan of attack and get yourself noticed not only locally but also nationally.

Don’t wait until the last minute, early bird registrations going through September 12^th. Save $25 per registration by doing it now. For more information on how to register please visit the website today and pre-register for your space.

Stay online for long and you’re sure to get conflicting messages:

“Learn everything you can about search engine optimization,” the experts will say, “because without your website will die.”

“Don’t worry about search engine optimization,” others will tell you. “It’s just a myth to get your money because the search engines will crawl your site anyway and you want to write your copy for your customers, not the search engines.”

The problem with both of these messages is that they are both correct. Yes, I said that’s a problem. Both statements are true.

Search engine optimization is the science of studying the search engines and how they rank web pages so that you can build a website that gets crawled quicker and ranked better for your important keywords. The issue with putting too much stock in it is when you think there is an automatic formula or panacea for all your lack of traffic or sales. Search engine optimization wasn’t designed to cure all of your problems, but it can cure some of them.

The first thing you need to know for excellent search engine optimization is research. You MUST conduct the proper keyword research. That’s a starting point. Then, you need to narrow down your niche. Do this before you build your website. In future posts on this blog we will show how and why this is important and give you all the details in performing the proper search engine optimization without wasting your time on useless activities. Stay tuned in. More to come.

Lights…Camera…ACTION! Or, in this case, Pay Per Action. In this last of our series on Pay per Click Local Advertising and variations thereof, I would like to discuss what is termed in the ‘biz as Pay per Action. Like other Pay per Click advertising, Pay per Action offers businesses a service that is paid for when a certain action is performed or obtained by a client or potential client. Pay per Action is used by many search engines. You, the advertiser, pays a specified amount upon completion of a particular action. Here are a few examples of some “actions”:Conversion or Conversion Rate. Conversion in marketing is when the perspective client takes the marketer’s intended action. Conversion rate is the amount or percentage of unique visitors who take a desired action on the business’ web site. For instance, Customer X visits your web site through an advertisement they saw on another site (an advertisement or referral to your site). You, as the business, pay a set fee for the Customer X clicking through (click-through rate) to your site. Customer X makes a purchase and tells Customer Y all about your site (word of mouth, another fantastic selling medium, though hardly predictable). Customer Y goes to your site, which costs you nothing, yet you perhaps make a sale. Pay per Action is the “meat and potatoes” of this whole process.Sales Lead. This is the “Customer X” of the sales world. The person who goes to your site intending to buy.

Sales. The ultimate goal in any business is to make a sale, whether retail or service, local or worldwide. The bottom line is sales. This is your final “action” as a marketing strategy. Pay per Action can generate these sales, but it is up to the business whether the conversion VS. the cost of each Action will end in profits. Look for ways to generate leads through referrals that can lead to word of mouth, and your Pay per Action will be well worth it in the long haul.

In today’s post we continue our series on pay-per-click for local advertising. In part 5 of the series, I would like to talk to you about another variation of pay-per-click; Pay-Per-Delivery, which is a variation on e-mail marketing.

E-mail marketing is a form of marketing using e-mail to send advertisements, specials, coupons and other information about your business or fund raiser to customers or potantial customers via e-mail rather than “snail mail.”

E-mail marketing in itself has many useful applications. For example; Send e-mails out to enhance already established relationships with current customers or potantial customers, using your target market and audience as your goal, and in establishing a relationship with new clients and customer loyalty through repeat business.

E-mail marketing can also be used to convince current clients to spread the name of your business (”word of mouth”) to others by offering a discount or other incentive if they “bring a client in.”

Adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers can also help spread the word.

Pay-Per-Delivery is a technique used by certain companies to expedite the e-mail marketing target. The company helps businesses set up and manage e-mail campaigns, send targeted e-mails and the company only pays for the successful e-mails that are sent out, instead of having to do everything “hands on” and possibly wasting a lot of corporate dollars in the process, as e-mails sent to defunk addresses and off-target audiences are useless and take a lot of time. Company time and dollars!

Pay-per-Delivery is out there, but not yet a common medium for local advertising. Like other advertising, it’s up to the company to determine if it’s easier to do it yourself or have someone do it for you.

I know, you think of telephone calls and paying for calls with annoying telemarketing sales pitches. “I don’t want my business’ reputation to be associated with telemarketers,” you say. But, fear not. Pay-Per-Call is not a telemarketing technique.

Pay-Per-Call is similar to PayPer Click (which, by the way is the most popular form of online advertising in the market today). It is different, however, in that advertisers use web forms to generate phone calls. As in a pay-per-click platform, merchants set up their campaigns by choosing relevant keyterms (rather than keywords), they choose their desired categories and then decide on their specific geographical location, or desired location. For local businesses, this is ideal. But it can also work nationally or even internationally.

From there, they create their ad, containing their company name, address, a short description and a trackable toll-free number which redirects to the advertiser’s actual phone number.

And Pay-Per-Call is a growing advertising medium. Ninety-eight percent of all U.S. businesses don’t buy PPC yet—but they all have phones,” said Dan Ballister, Vice President of Sales for FindWhat.

According to the Kelsey Group, the pay per call market is expected to reach US$3.7 billion by 2010. Perhaps this is the perfect marketing tool for your business.

Everyone knows what a search engine is. It’s a term we have been hearing since the computer age began, or at least since computers became a part of modern language. You type in a word and the most relevant terms come up.

In this series, I want to discuss how pay-per-click can help your business. But pay-per-click is not all “pay every time someone clicks,” and in this blog I would like to discuss the possibility of what is termed Service Engines as a possible way to advertise your business locally.

A Service Engine allows advertisers to provide feeds of their service databases. When someone searches for that service, the most relevant links to available services comes up. Like regular PPC (see previous posts for more on PPC), the advertiser pays whenever a potential client clicks on the relevant link. The difference is that Service Engines are mostly for services, rather than working only with keywords. Some pay per click product engines have expanded into the service space, while other service engines operate in specific vertical markets (a group of similar businesses and customers that engage in trade based on specific needs).

The following are notable PPC service engines:

• NexTag
• SideStep
• TripAdvisor

So, decide what is right for your business and choose one or more to advertise. Remember, the more you get your business out there, the better your customer base will be.

To Click or Not to Click Pt II

In part 2 of our look at local pay per click (or PPC as it is known in the biz) and how it is or is not right for your business, I’d like to take a look at what is called Product Engines, or better known as Product Comparison Engines or Price Comparison Engines.

The first question you have to ask yourself is, what kind of business are you running? If the business you are advertising is service only, this type of PPC model might not be for you. Product Comparison Engines use what is called Product Feeds, which is basically a summed up variety of listings that a business has to offer. Service only sites rarely have products they sell or offer and so rarely have a product feed to work with. In the event you have a service only site, site oriented PPC would probably be your best bet; site oriented PPCs show your ad only on certain target sites, usually those with similar content as yours. Later in this series I will be discussing more ideas that might suit your service only business.

If you have an e-commerce store or another business which offers content on your site, you might want to consider PCE (Product Comparison Engines) as part of your online marketing campaign.

The most common PCE sites include Shopping.com, which uses a PPC model and has a defined rate card, Google Product Search, NexTag, PriceGrabber, and Shopzilla.

Many of these sites you might have heard of or even come up with as you searched for products yourself. If your site offers items to the public, it migt behoove you to try one or more of these sites out, so you can get your name, your brand and your site noticed.

That is the question. Most people know the term Pay Per Click by now. Particularly those in national and global markets and large industries. But local Pay Per Click? Why not? I think the main reason a lot of local businesses don’t think to turn to Pay Per Click is because they fear it’s a waste of their money. Why pay for every click of a customers’ mouse when you can spend your hard earned dollars on business cards, local advertising and the good ol’ Yellow Pages?I will tell you why…because there is more to Pay Per Click than meets the eye. There are several types of Pay Per Click campaigns, and one or more might be right for your business besides the normal “build a campaign and pay every time anyone with a computer clicks on it.” As a matter of fact, there are six different kinds of Pay Per Clicks you can choose from: keyword based, product engines, service engines, pay per call, pay per delivery, and pay per action.How do you know which is right for your business? Over the next six posts we are going to discuss each PPC and see which one is right for your business, because like customers, every business is an individual and should advertise in the way that is most condusive to their particular agenda.The first, and most common, is the “keyword based” Pay Per Click. This is the most common and the one most people think of when they hear the term PPC (or Pay Per Click). In this medium, you as the business will bid on certain search terms. The more popular the term (or keyword) the higher the bid tends to be. Keywords consist of words or of phrases. If this is the brand of PPC you choose, be sure to choose keywords that suit only your business or the page in which you are advertising. When someone types in a certain keyword or phrase, and it matches one of yours and those of your competitor’s, searches come up based upon the bid price you are paying.

The problem with this is obvious.

Budget.

For some local businesses, this method can be unnecessary and costly. It’s up to each individual to determine their company’s eligibility and whether bidding on keywords and phrases is right for them.

No longer do your fingers need to get cramped up while “doing the walking” in the Yellow Pages portion of the phone book, nor do those of your customers. Online marketing for local businesses has taken a turn for the future.

Once upon a time, most businesses online were national, even worldwide, consisting mostly of ecommerce and those businesses whose customers could benefit from their services no matter where on the globe they resided. Local businesses remained just that…local! Their brick and mortar existence saw no need to seek the world-wide-web. Why would they, after all? Local customers could find them by cramping their metacarpals through the Yellow Pages.

Now, however, you are not a business if you are not online. Well, okay, maybe you are still a business, but you are missing out on a lot of eyes viewing what your store or service has to offer.

According to e-Local Listing, “a staggering 86% of adults now use search engines to look up information on local businesses. With 80% of Americans’ income being spent within fifty miles of their homes, a successful local internet marketing company is imperative to a business’ success.”

And this is not just a sales pitch. This is well known fact. Advertising on local online listings such as e-local listing is imperative to success. Don’t want to spend the money to have someone advertise your business yourself? You can do it yourself for a fraction of the cost (the success of which will depend on your knowledge of listing, SEO, PPC (pay per click) and search engine placement techniques. Check out local listing sites, such Yellow Pages online or Yahoo Local. Google yourself into a better position on search engines, do your research, know where you are going, or pay a professional company to advertise for you. But whatever way you choose, get yourself on the web and get seen! And with millions, even billions, of web content floating around cyber space these days, it is easy to get lost.

So, throw away your phone books. Get online and get seen!

Shopping and Radio. I remember the days when buying something simply meant running down to the local department store, walking up and down colorful aisles full of merchandise, finding what you want, paying for it with real money, and going home. To make the drive to and from the store more interesting, one listened to the radio, but otherwise neither the twain met (elevator music notwithstanding)!

Then came the internet. Okay, so it made shopping for certain items a little easier on your car or your feet. Slow internet connections made listening to the radio a necessity. What else was there to do while the modem hissed and growled and the web page you finally found came up one pixel at a time? Still, radio…internet. Neither the twain met, although the gap between the two was closing.

Now, the radio and the internet have not only met, they are making love! And the resulting offspring are Podcasts. Everyone with an online business in the Twenty-First Century should not only be familiar with these babies, but should probably adopt one. Or at the very least, pay attention to them, play with them, even nurture them.

One such way to “Maximize Your Exposure” on the Internet is through a site I came across recently, and am totally hooked on, called Blog Talk Radio. You can learn business strategies by listening to the many podcasts already taped onto the site, or you can add your own podcasts, exposing yourself…errr…your business to everyone who visits and listens to your baby. You can Play, Download or Share any of the Podcasts on the site. And so can everyone else.

Putting blogs in verbal form is not only entertaining for your customers, but also informative and, for those who might be Keyboard Challenged, it is simpler to speak the information than to type it. You can tell customers about your business and why they need you, about products you offer, local sites to see, or just about anything else you think your target audience will want to listen to. It’s better than radio! It’s personal and it’s focused. It will give your customers something to talk to their friends about.

So, take a breath, clear your nasal cavities and your throat, and talk your business into high ranking spots.

Maybe it’s the nostalgia factor, but come the end of summer I always want to go back to school. Of course that doesn’t mean I go out and buy some #2 pencils and a shiny Trapper-Keeper, those days are long gone. What it does mean is that I take a moment to step back and see what last year taught me and then get geared up for all of the cool stuff I’m going to learn in the coming year.

As a part of the review-what-you-learned-last-year process, I came across an article by Andrew Shotland that I had bookmarked predicting the trends in Local Online Advertising for 2008.

One piece of the article on Factory-Output SEO services predicted:

Scalable SEO Will Become A Product There are numerous start-ups working on automated SEO solutions and on “scalable” SEO services that can be sold in cookie-cutter fashion to small businesses. While SEO will remain for the most part a highly customized, manual process performed by experienced professionals I do believe we will start to see more low-cost entry-level services that will provide a tangible benefit to those who can’t afford the kitchen sink job. This will lead to even more work for skilled SEOs who will acquire more-educated customers who have had a taste of SEO and are ready for the big time.

I have to agree that this is becoming a bigger option for local businesses that have a very small budget, but still want to make an impact on the search engines. SEO businesses that market scaled services to small local companies have become a larger market segment. Providing submissions and monitored services to YahooLocal, Superpages and Yellowpages is a great option for Local businesses that don’t have the budget for a turn-key SEO package but who need to get their business’ name out there for the world to find.

Andrew had some other great predictions that are interesting to look at now that 2008 is winding down.

Now go sharpen your #2 pencils and buy a new ruler.

Kate Kaye on ClickZ wrote a succinct piece on CondeNet’s new online advertising strategy. In her article she describes CondeNet’s new strategy of online advertising to vertical market paths rather than specific sites. Basically this just means that, instead of selling a chunk of ad space on Style.com, a beauty product company can purchase a block of space across multiple beauty and fashion sites. In a consumer market that is fractured across hundreds of magazine sites, it’s a smart move for multiple reasons.

In lieu of selling individual magazine sites, the company’s new sales approach pairs sales execs with particular content and advertiser verticals including food, travel, fashion and lifestyle, and teen. In the past, one sales group sold Style.com, Men.Style.com, and teen photo site flip.com, while another hawked Epicurious.com, Concierge.com, NutritionData.com. For example, someone selling “beauty” will offer it on Style.com, Glamour.com and Allure.com. One brand bought what Salomon called “the healthy footprint,” advertising on Self.com, food and recipe site Epicurious.com and nutrition information and tool site NutritionData.com.

Not only will CondeNet gain additional advertising revenue for their less-popular sites, companies with products to promote won’t be juggling for space on one site alone and get lost in the shuffle. Utilizing the space on the not-as-well-known mag sites will bring in new customers that might never see the product otherwise.

This entire plan is indicative of how consumers use the context and information on internet now. Instead of having one or two magazines that they subscribe to every month, consumers grew used to having 4 or 5 magazine sites that they visited. Over time their searches on health, beauty, fashion and especially travel netted them with search results for mag sites that would have never been popular enough to grace their coffee table a generation ago. As a result, the consumer market is too fractured to reach for a company advertising in only a couple of the most popular magazines and sites. This same principal holds for local advertisers trying to reach consumers in smaller markets. There is a broad range of sites for every local region, and it may just pay to take a lesson from CondeNet’s strategy. In order to reach a broad base of consumers, advertisers have to market across a broad base of sites that cater to their target.

The Mobile Marketing Association has announced that it is looking for public feedback regarding its global mobile marketing guidelines. According to the MMA, the guidelines will be available until September 5th for public review and comment.

The MMA states on it’s site that they are opening up the comments for their guidelines to the public because they are attempting to build public acceptance and awareness and build industry standardization practices.

Okaaaaay, but what is the MMA? According to their business site they are:

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) is the premier global non-profit association that strives to stimulate the growth of mobile marketing and its associated technologies. The MMA is a global organization with over 650 members representing over forty countries. MMA members include agencies, advertisers, hand held device manufacturers, carriers and operators, retailers, software providers and service providers, as well as any company focused on the potential of marketing via mobile devices.

An association that essentially includes the entire spectrum of the mobile market as members has access to a lot of data. Not only the companies that make the phones, but the carriers, the companies that sell it, the engineers that create new software for it and the advertisers that want to use it all. That is an impressive amount of access to information to that will drive the mobile industry. Coalation of data is something that smart advertising execs like to see.

To that end, the MMA website has some interesting case studies on Branding, SMS campaigns and specific companies who targeted specific audiences in the mobile market. I enjoy reading about new marketing ideas but what I really love is seeing the results of the campaigns to find out what worked and what didn’t. It’s all there in the case studies.

If you are involved in the Mobile Market, look into the MMA website and see what kind of information you take back with you.

Because we get a lot of mail from companies asking what they should expect from hiring an SEO consultant, we thought it merited it’s own post.

Remember that this list is by no means a complete one of what you should expect from a professional SEO consultant, but it is a basic start.

What you should expect from a professional SEO consultant:

• You should expect optimization efforts that are ethical and reflect the moral compass of your company. Your hired SEO consultant should promote white hat SEO tactics that reflect the professionalism and integrity of your business.
• You should expect that your SEO consultant create and maintain a listing of keywords for your site based upon the data that you and your company have provided. Your SEO consultant should then move forward and add to that listing with keywords that are gained from queries pulled from careful analysis based upon your target customers and competitors.
• You should expect your SEO consultant to submit your site to all major search engine directories and those more specialized engines that are relevant to your business.
• You should expect your SEO consultant to maintain all of your business listings within those search engines to ensure accuracy.
• Your SEO consultant should be expected to complete a site analysis of your current site and then correct and optimize it using correct methodologies for titles, meta tags, keywords and site mapping.

Google is finally beginning to use the DoubleClick technology that was purchased at an astronomical price of 3.1 billion dollars. While the changes aren’t implemented yet, a plan was put forth giving more detail as to what advertisers can expect with the merging of the two.

Google plans to add functionality for advertisers such as frequency capping and reporting as well as conversion measurement capabilities that were not there before.

Many advertisers and businesses have been wondering just what Google was doing with the DoubleClick venture since all has been quiet, so to speak, but this announcement will probably act as a balm for businesses wondering what, if anything, the merger will do for them.

Part of the announcement detailed that advertisers will be able to put a cap on the frequency of specific ads shown to specific users, as well as be able to track how many times a user has seen an ad. This is a great function because really, if a user has seen your ad for months and never responded to it, that user is probably a dead end for that ad. Why bother to keep shoving the same ad on the same person, increasing your costs for no gain?

According to the Google press release about the proposed changes:

Today we’re announcing some key enhancements on the Google content network (partner sites for which we provide advertising) that will offer a better experience for users and better value for advertisers and publishers. These enhancements are the latest result of our integration with DoubleClick and our commitment to making advertising on the Google content network more efficient and accountable.

If you’d like to read the specifics about the changes that will take place, read the whole Google press release here.