Once you have your strategy, these are the top 5 online marketing tools for small business:

  • Marketing tool # 1 – Landing pages – These are one page web pages that are focused on capturing prospect information.
  • Marketing tool # 2 – Lead capture forms – These are forms placed on your landing pages that are typically connected to a back-end auto-responder system.  If you’re not building a list – you are not truly in business when it comes to internet marketing. Remember this,  the money is always in the LIST!
  • Marketing tool # 3 – Auto-responders – This is an automated tool that helps you build your prospect list by sending pre-written email messages at pre-determined intervals. Send an initial welcome email, then program the auto-responder to send additional emails based on the given topic for your users.  Users can and should easily un-subscribe.  It’s the LAW!
  • Marketing tool # 4 – Email Newsletters – These are periodic emails you send to your prospect and/or customer lists in order to continually position yourself as the ‘best choice’ and to strengthen relationships.  Call it branding your business.  Eco friendly too ;-)
  • Marketing tool # 5 – Video – Video is all the rage these days and rightfully so. With the low cost of high quality flip cameras and websites like YouTube, it’s now possible for any small business to totally DOMINATE the search engine results using online video.

Now, this list is by no means in any particular order, there are a ton of other common errors that can obliterate your site from existence in the online world, although for the most part they do work in concert. The important thing is to find what works for you based on your particular strategy and put it to work! Contact me for some very effective but crazy ideas.

If I was searching for your type of business in Google, what would I type in the URL? Would you show up on the first page ?  Second page ?

If not, the answer might be something simple… one of a number of comparatively quick, cost-effective enhancements that could make your small business website or blog 3x, 8x, even 20x more effective than it is right now is to make sure you’ve claimed and optimized your Google Places.

The rest is finding and making the right changes for your site like having effective title tags, alt tags for pictures, ect.

There are tools all over the web to “help” you with things like search engine optimization, site performance, and quality assurance, but who knows which work, and which focus on what you really need?

What you need is the simple truth on the handful of changes that would give you the most bang for your buck.

Here’s what you really need to know.

1. Findable – Optimized for visibility and clickability in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

2. Fast – So new visitors can get what they want quickly and easily.

3. Friendly – So repeat users feel welcome and keep coming back.

4. Followed – To leverage the power of social networks to extend your reach.

5. Fundamentally Sound – To make sure the all-to-often neglected basics are working the way they should.

Filed under: Internet Marketing

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