Pareto’s Law – The Definitive Guide to Bigger, Easier Profits After you’ve heard the adage “work smarter, not harder” for the gazillionth time, you probably want to gag. Reading Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek, you’ll find it again; this time, swallow the gag reflex and pay attention.

It comes in the form of Pareto’s Law, the 80/20 principle (another teaching point that’s been around the block more times than a new driver in a Mini Cooper). Never mind. You really do need to learn this principle – and put it to use – if you want to boost the bottom line and still have time for a life.

Even just the title of Ferriss’ book should be enough to nudge your imagination. What would you do with a workweek that only lasted four hours or less? If it’s really a possibility – and it is – it’s worth taking another look at something that actually works, and not just looking, but putting it to use.

Here’s how it works: Pareto says you get 80% of your results (good or bad) from 20% of your input (what you do). In business, it can look like this: 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. That means that you’ve got a dead weight factor of 80% among your client base. They’re requiring an inordinate amount of work, and are only producing a small portion of your revenue. Translation: not good.

How do you put this principle to use to boost your profits?

1. Track everything.
First, you’ve got to be able to know which clients are the most profitable. If you’re not keeping track of this info, start. If you’re in an MLM selling health and beauty products, you need to know which clients buy the whole anti-aging line – on the autoship plan, and which buy the occasional mascara, if you call them… after seven attempts to reach them. It works the same way for every business – product- or service-driven, from haircuts to custom-built private jets. That same 20% of your customers are easy. They know what they want. They buy it from you. They’re happy. You’d better know exactly who they are.

2. Know that 20% like you know your own dog.
You want to be able to pick these customers out of a lineup because you know them so well. What makes them such great customers? What trends do you see? How do they like to be contacted? What are you providing that compels them come back for more? How did you find them? Where can you go looking to find more just like them? By taking the time to get to know them, you can learn a lot – it’s time well spent. Essentially, by learning all about these customers, you form a blueprint for your ideal customer. With this blueprint in hand, you take the first step in designing your customer base.

3. Be picky.
When you’re new in business, you’re so grateful to have anyone come through the door that you’ll put up with a lot just in hopes of making a sale. It’s not a good precedent to set for your business, but it happens. The trick is moving away from that as quickly as possible. Given the choice, why would you gather unpleasant, high-maintenance, penny-pinching customers who tax even your best customer service person’s patience? Instead, you could assemble a group of loyal, quality-driven, appreciative clients who value what you provide and make doing business a pleasure. It’s a matter of choosing quality over quantity, at first.

4. Get into cloning.
Well, not really. But you do want to redirect your efforts from how you used to do marketing and sales – anyone with a pulse – to attracting more who fit the blueprint of your ideal customers, and by spending more time and energy on the customers you’ve got who are already ideal. You can find more of these precious gems by asking for referrals, by going where they go and doing what they do, and by doing everything you can to provide exquisite service to them.

5. Systematize it.
You’re probably not in the position to just go willy-nilly firing clients who don’t meet your dream come true blueprint. But you can definitely make sure that your new clients are the ones you choose. Set up a ranking system so you’re able to keep track of your clients and their profiles. Customize your service so you spend the bulk of your resources on the most productive clients – while still providing excellence to your B-list clients.

It’s always possible that today’s 80%-er may become tomorrow’s best client – or they may introduce you to that dream client. Regardless, your goal is to provide excellence to all clients, while actively pursuing the ones that’ll make your life easy and your business boom.

An internet business isn’t something you want to jump into without any training – but with a bare minimum of tech skills, anyone with a computer, internet access, and a hobby or interest can build a business.

Additional Resources on this topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

You know that a blog is a wonderful way to keep your name out there and to promote your website and thus your business. What you don’t know is how to get the traffic to your blog flowing and flowing well.

There are many does and don’ts when it comes to blogging but rather than going though the entire list you should focus on the more important factors. The following tidbits of information will help you to not only ensure your blog traffic starts, but will also make sure that your blog traffic explodes:

Use the Right Blog Software: This is of utmost importance. When choosing the blog software you want to use you need to consider how you want your comments page to be, your archiving page layout, categorization, sub-pages, the works. While Wordpress and Blogger often do the trick you may want to custom make your blog. A good source of info in that department is OpenSourceCSM.

Host the Blog on Your Domain: By keeping the blog hosted directly on your own domain you are attracting attention, gathering links, gaining some much needed publicity, and increasing your trust and rankings on the SERPS. By not hosting the blog on your own domain and having it on a different primary site other than your own you are really moving backwards. Yes you will be garnishing attention, just not for yourself as much.

Participate in Other’s Blogs: Whatever your interests are be it personal or business you can rest assured that there are others out there who will share your passions. This also goes for your industry. Take some time and conduct a search or two to find some worthwhile blogs and forums that already exist in your industry and see what they are all talking about. Be sure to leave intelligent comments when you can and if there is an opportunity to name drop for yourself then do so. Just be sure you are not coming off like a salesperson.

Write Tags for Two: When you are writing your title tags you need to remember it is more than just keeping them snappy and witty for those who have subscribed to your blog, or that you hope will in the future, but you have to write them in such a way that the search engines will like them as well. The perfect way to accomplish this is by writing the blog post first and the title tag second. In this way you will be able to scour the post to pick out pertinent keywords and phrases that you can then use in the title tag.

Begin with Silence: When you are looking at your blog or anyone else’s and you see a bunch of posts and most of those posts have a big goose egg under the comments section, what do you think? Dead blog or boring post? Whatever the case may be you may judge the blog by the number of comments as this shows interaction and really how popular the blog is. Well that is going to be what people think about your blog as well. To combat this you can disable the comments at first and wait until you have over 100 RSS subscribers or you are getting about 750 unique visits per day and then open up the lines of communicating. This will ultimately lead you to light, but steady activity in the comment department.

Don’t Recycle News or Thoughts: When you are first starting out you need to be more than original with your blog posts. Just because there is a big news story that deals with your industry, it doesn’t mean that you have to be covering it. Remember there will be hundreds, if not thousands of other bloggers who will be covering this very topic and many of them are already well established. Simply covering a news snippet in your own words is not enough. No one will be looking to your blog as a source of the latest news; at least not yet. Stick to all original thoughts and blog posts and wait until you are an authority within your industry before you jump on the bandwagon of news reporting.

Link and Link Again: It is far better to be over nice with your link giving then it is to be considered an under linker, especially in the blogging community. If you do take some thoughts or ideas from another blog be sure to give it honorable mention. Failing to do so will give you a bad reputation as a blogger and will only hurt you in the long run.

Hold off on Advertising: Nobody likes advertising but it has become a way of life online. However, until your blog is well established hold off on the AdSence for crying out loud. If you have no reputation and no following then over advertising will certainly put people off and you risk running off potential subscribers. This is not to say that you can never use AdSence, but you may want to wait just a bit before you do.

Make Your Blog Posts Sexy: Nothing will put a reader to sleep faster than line after line of plain old text. Try breaking up your text a bit with a picture or two. You can also use bullet points, italics, add different fonts, whatever. The point is that you want your blog to be both enjoyable to read and enjoyable to look at. Make the readers enjoy their visit and they will come back again and aging.

Give Them What They Want: Take some time to research what it is that everyone is pondering. What questions are being asked and what answers are being given? You would be surprised at the number of questions that are all over the forum boards that have no solid answers. If you become the authority and a go to place to find answers then you blog will benefit greatly.

Give Them Something Special: People who are into reading blogs love the idea of an open source world. Within your blog you want to give the readers something they would not normally be privy to such as pricing, trade secrets, and even the occasional rumor; so long as it is a harmless one. Just be careful and don’t go overboard. Know your limits before you begin to blog and you will be all set.

Be Consistent: If you want to build a following you need to be consistent with your posting. One post a day is ideal but whatever you start you need to maintain. Being sporadic with your posting will only be viewed by readers as a letdown and you will lose your audience. Perhaps the worst thing to do is to be ultra-consistent for months on end and then go on vacation for two weeks and not post at all. Does this mean that you are chained to your lap top for the entire trip? No, but if you are not going to be posting invite a guest blogger to do so for you while you are away. The end result will be your subscribers getting what they want and you getting a break.

Stick to a Brand: When you set out to create your blog you need to have clear cut goals in place. The first thing you want to accomplish is the building of your brand. If your blog is to be known for a place where readers can find answers to questions they have then don’t break that mold six months into your blogging life. Once you are established it is very hard to change without suffering major repercussions.

Blogging is a great way to get yourself out there but you need to remember it is no longer a secret for Internet gurus only. Everyone it seems is blogging these days both young and old. In order for your blog to make it in the ever filling pool of blogs you have to go about it just right. Using some ingenuity and some tenacity will go a long way in seeing your blog become the blog in the minds of many a reader.

For years it has been hotly debated as to whether or not Google would give brownie points to those who participate in their AdWords campaigns, which is a form of Pay Per Click (PPC). There are many ‘experts’ in the field who will tell you this is not the case and that there has never been an example of PPC adding to the validity or popularity of your organic rankings as the two are not one and the same. Still there has been growing speculation for some time now that Google does indeed give ‘special treatment’ to those who show them advertising dollar love and a recent study conducted by two NYU professors may have just proved the conspiracy theorists point.

According to professors in Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang in a recent study, the presence of organic listings on a search engine such as Google definitely impacts the click-through rates of PPC advertisements and the same is true for the inverse. This was the first experimental study that evaluated the impact of advertising on search engines examining all three levels of participants, which are the consumers, advertisers, and the search engines themselves, in relation to both organic listings and PPC.

If this is indeed true that Google organic listings are without a doubt being influence by PPC then why do you think that is? Google revenue perhaps? When you think about it Goggle is would be very motivated to have websites that advertise with them be at a higher ranking on their search engine. If more visitors find these websites then more visitors will have a chance to see the advertising making them more effective and thus making the website owners more likely to continue to advertise with Google. Once again it looks as though the all mighty dollar may have spoken.

Of course Google cannot come right out and admit this, nor would they if they wanted to. Organic listings are supposed to only be about SEO and relevance where as anyone can utilize PPC regardless of how SEO-illiterate you are. But just because you spend more money on the advertising side of Google’s AdWords than somebody else, does that meant that you should get top billing in the SERPs? No it does not and for those who spend many months or even years trying to accomplish top rankings the old fashion way it represents an absolute nightmare.

While the evidence is thin at this point in time there are bound to be more than just one set of professors who are curious enough to dig deeper into the on goings of Google and if and when this story is broken, it will be a bombshell. Ghose and Yang plan on releasing a paper titled, ‘Analyzing the Relationship between Organic and Sponsored Search Advertising: Positive, Negative or Zero Interdependence,’ but they have yet to say if they will charge for it or not. So in Google’s defense, these professors could just be looking to get rich quick. Then again, they may be on to something big. Even if their story is bogus it is sure to draw a multitude of interest from outside parties looking to find some dirt on the search engine powerhouse.

However, messing with Google is like messing with the Mafia and requires nerves of steel. Because Google is pretty much its own entity they have no one looking over their shoulder and are self-governed so there really are no set of rules that they have to follow that are not their own. To add to that, Google is constantly changing its own ‘rules’ on ranking and SEO requirements and if you decide that you want to cross them then you may not have to sleep with the fishes, but your website’s rankings certainly will.

Only time will tell what the truth is when it comes down to Google and the mystery of the great organic listing influenced by PPC. Just keep in mind though, it is Google, so if they do end up being in the wrong, they simply have to change the rules once again and then they will be in the right. For Google, it is good to be king.

2009 is all but in the books and the New Year is upon us. With the New Year a new decade and comes new sweeping changes for all those that are involved in Internet marketers all across the country. As what seems to be an ongoing theme, the big topic for 2010 will center around search engine giant Google and their latest on goings.The world of SEO and online predictions for the year 2010 are plentiful and there are many articles and blogs abuzz with the ramblings of what is sure to come in this next decade.

Some of the more notable sites that are posting such predictions include SEOmoz.com, BigOakinc.com, and Webmarketinggoup.co.uk just to name a few. While many have their own unique perspective on what can be expected to happen in 2010 they all agree that Google’s new real time search will shake the foundations of Internet marketing.

With that, here are some predictions for the 2010 Internet marketing trends that are likely to come to fruition:

Stay or Go: This whole thing with Goggle now giving the most relevance to real time postings and other such nonsense as opposed to good quality content is sort of laughable. Basically in a nutshell, if you are the latest person to Tweet about a subject you will begin to see your rankings shoot up. This sure has all the makings of abuse doesn’t it? The biggest problem is that Google has not really said what is or isn’t going to be acceptable by the way of abuse. This opens up Pandora’s Box for all sorts of shady characters to come out of the woodworks. With all that some sleazy Internet marketers already do in order to try to gain a leg up on the competition with Google, this seems like a no-brainier that ranking by way of real time posts and the like will lead to SPAM galore. So the real question is will real time ranking stay or goes in 2010? More than likely, unless heavily regulated, it will fade faster than it appeared. Even more likely, Google will reform the current system a few times in 2010 and beyond until it only makes sense for them, but makes even less sense to the rest of the online world.

Tweeting will be Paramount: If you do not have a Twitter account yet, you better go out and get one. If Google’s new approach to ranking stays in full force then you better believe that every Internet marketer out there is going to take full advantage of such services of Twitter. If you do not have a Twitter account and stay active in the Tweeting game then it is an easy prediction that your rankings will fall faster than a lead balloon. You can additionally expect to have other social media websites such as FaceBook and MySpace begin to take a front seat in the world of the search engines. As content that is fresh becomes the stuff of champions (at least in the minds of the SERPs) then it only makes sense that these types of social media sites will see an increase in popularity and by contrast an increase in use. This also makes you wonder what will be the next big marketing social networking website to be formed. 2010 is sure to brining plenty of new social media sites that will try to ride the success of the new real time searching of Google and more than likely one or more will actually make it.

R.I.P. Yahoo: Okay so Yahoo isn’t going to totally die, but they are going to be absorbed for the lack of a better word by Bing. This will lead to a two search engine world. What will probably be seen once the meshing of Yahoo and Bing takes place is a 75 percent market share by King Google and the other 25 percent going to the newly formed entity of Yahoo and Bing. This should be good news for the new entity as Google has clearly established it dominance in the search engine game and subsequently left the two little guys to fight and scrap for whatever searches were left over. Now that the two lowly guys are forming one less lowly guy they can begin the arduous task of trying to wrestle away some of Google’s market share. Because they no longer have to bicker with each other for the scraps of Google they can focus on new and innovative ideas that will hopefully for them lead to more searches.

As the Waters Grow, so too do the Piranhas: With all the changes going on the world of SEO and Internet marketing as a whole you can bet that businesses online marketing budgets will go up exponentially. But as the number of dollars being spent goes up so too will the number of shysters and rip off artist internet marketing companies. 2010 will bring with it the most amounts of swindlers that have ever been seen and in order to protect yourself you need to be sure that you are going to go with an Internet marketing company that can be trusted and that has been around the block a time or two. But more than that you will have to be sure to go with an Internet marketer that has both an open and innovative mind. If you go with an Internet marketer who is stuck in his ways you will simply be throwing your hard earned dollar out the window. Find someone who is not afraid to conform and even experiment when it comes to getting your website known.

Searches will Become Sticky: Bing and Yahoo have really been stepping up this approach and Google is hotly in pursuit. As people conduct searches all of the big boys will aim to answer their queries within the search engine itself instead of sending the visitor off to a random site. This means that even though the search amount may in fact go up on the search engines, the amount of visitors to specific websites may go down. Why does a web surfer need to go to a third party site when Goggle answers all their questions as soon as the search results come back? This represents great news for the search engines but not so great news for the rest of the online community. To that effect it will be more important than ever to perform a PPC campaign that will see your advertisement in the top pages of the SERPs. If the web surfer is getting all the info needed from the search engine result itself you will still have an opportunity to catch their attention and perhaps inspire and impulse click.

Conversion Rate Optimization gets its Due: Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is drastically underestimated when it comes to your return on investment, or ROI. However, using software that utilizes CRO will ultimately help you to determine through testing what will eventually build you a better ROI. This type of information is proving itself invaluable and as the New Year approaches, so too will the notoriety of this technology.

Building Brand Imaging is Vital: With the advent of personalized searches it will now be even harder for new companies to unseat the kings of the SERPs. Because people will now have website suggested for them by the search engines in accordance to their surfing habits, 2010 will represent the year of brand imaging. If your brand image is not clearly spelled out then you may miss out on many or all of the suggested search opportunities that the search engines will be dolling out. While this will not directly affect SEO it sure will affect the way that people need to approach building and branding their good names. It has always been true that if nobody knows who you are then nobody will find you and that statement now carries with it a lot more weight. Now in order to be found you have to have your image clearly spelled out otherwise even the best looking website with all the SEO bells and whistles will be rendered obsolete.

Non-Conformists will Parish: The bottom line is Google is a demi-god and does what it wants. Internet marketing is s tricky game, no doubt, but it is one where you can ill afford to stay stagnant. If you decide that you will not do what Google wants then you can rest assured that your placement on the SERPs will suffer greatly. However, if you are one of the few who can not only conform, but also reform your way of thinking then you will be in for a pleasant 2010 and beyond.Nobody has a crystal ball but there are some predictions that are just easier to make then others. Probably the easiest prediction to make with regards to 2010 is that the world of SEO and Internet marketing will change forever and will never again be what it was in the past. That said, another no-brainer prediction is that those who follow the pied piper that is Google will be lead to the SERPs promise land and those that do not will be lead astray.Like it or not, Google is the dominant factor when it comes to being found online and if you can’t play by their rules, then you probably can’t play in the wonderful world of online recognition. Ultimately the search engine monster is going to do what is best for its bottom line as that is what capitalism is all about, but that doesn’t mean that your website can’t continue to prosper in 2010. You simply need to be sure that you convert your old way of thinking to Google’s new way of thinking or you need to have someone to help to do so. One thing is for sure; 2010 will certainly be an interesting year online.

How to Utilize these Powerful Web Tools to Funnel Traffic to Your Primary Website or Use them as a Stand Alone

Is your website pulling in the kind of targeted traffic you thought it would? Maybe your e-commerce site has way too many products on it and choosing which products to promote over the others is proving too much. Enter the wonderful world of mini sites, funnel sites, and one page sites.

Call them what you will, but these very simple and concentrated one page sites will literally act like a website on steroids and help you to achieve your main objective when it comes to online marketing; increasing your targeted traffic and increasing your bottom line. Gone are the days when all you had to do to promote your business was to spend your advertising dollars on TV, radio, or in print with the newspaper. Now the world in which we live is a digital one and because of the major search engines like Google, the rules of advertising have changed forever.

I wrote about this back in September of 2008 and the game, while it has changed a bit, has only changed more so to the digital side. In order to effectively get your business name out there and be successful you have to funnel a steady flow of traffic to your main website so that visitors will buy what you have to offer. But you also have to balance that with a healthy mix of interest so that those same visitors will want to spread the word about your business.

There is no better way to accomplish these goals than to have a strong single keyword rich mini site, funnel site, or one page site. When done correctly, these product specific sites will be custom made to target the exact traffic you want from the search engines and the best part is that these leads will come ready to buy. All you need to do is follow the process outlined in the Action Guide and begin to build yourself a super optimized one page site based on the most profitable aspect of your current business.

What you will find is that you will ultimately begin to build up a trust and rapport with the visitors that go to these mini sites and once a trust has been established you simply use the content within to divert them to your main site to show them the product or products that you want them to be buying. In other words, you are acting as the Pied Piper and leading them exactly where you want them to go. Think of it as being an affiliate marketer for your own products.

Now this should not be confused with the phrases doorway, gateway, or bridge pages. Why? These days those types of sites or pages are considered SPAM and what faster way to online death is there than SAPM? These types of tactics may have worked in the past, but Google and the other big boys of the search engines quickly grew tired of their manipulation of the rules and so the rules changed in relation to optimization all together.

In order to be successful with mini sites now there are a good number of factors that should be considered and to be successful you need to:

Grow Niche Oriented Traffic: By owning your own free, targeted, and motivated traffic you can grow your business and use your niche oriented traffic to fuel traffic for your primary site.

Diversify: If you are a small business owner you have to protect your income and build your equity by monetizing your traffic. Use new and improved models to help you diversify into other areas.

Build Equity: By building your list of qualified traffic via resources such as e-zines you will not only build trust over time, but your list will grow and grow. The end result is an increase in your online equity.

Increase Conversion Rate by Pre-Selling: Yes you can get a good number of visitors to your website by advertising, but that isn’t nearly as effective as getting the visitors to your site via an in-context link. In fact, the conversion rate can be 20-fold if the visitor is pre-sold and thus clicks onto your website versus just clicking because they were lured by advertisements.

Build Confidence: You can create a rapport between you and your visitors using quality, authoritative content. This will end up making you an authority in your given area of expertise.

The bottom line is that you have to have these funnel sites in order to constantly feed pre-qualified traffic to your current corporate or e-commerce site. Remember, the traffic you generate with these one page monster sites are yours and they are not dependent on a huge amount of money that needs to be spent by way of advertising. What’s more, your funnel sites will continue to grow over time producing more and more traffic which will ultimately mean an enormous gain to the all important bottom line.

Getting people to think about change and think outside the box is often times very difficult. That’s because by and large people are creatures of habit. They get used to things a certain way and are as stubborn as a mule when it comes to changing. This can be a big mistake when it comes to Internet marketing. Sure there are the old tried and true methods, but just as with anything in this technological day and age, Internet marketing is constantly evolving and changing and sometimes the most effective methods are not the most popular.

Sometimes people fear change and instead of trying to evolve they will simply stay warm and safe within the confines of what they already know. In other words they will stay in the box. The problem with that is everyone else is also staying in the box and some of the old tried and true methods for Internet marketing are becoming less and less important and the only way to move up on the search engines results pages (SERPS) is to first become brave and then creative.

Why is this important? All of the major search engines such as Google have what are known as algorithms that they use to determine where to rank your website. These algorithms are made up of certain factors that Google and others want to see in relation to your website such as proper keyword density, relevancy, backlinks, and so on. Here’s the rub; the algorithms used today are different than the ones used two years and and five years ago and on and on.

The reason that Google changes its algorithms has to do with trends. When too many people stay in the box or use the more common Internet marketing trends, Google has to come up with different ways to determine who deserves the best rankings. This is where it is imperative that you are working with an Internet marketer that not only knows all the methods that are currently being utilized to improve your rankings such as article marketing and submitting to social networking sites, but is also in touch with the latest techniques that may be the next big thing in the eyes of the search engines. Though techniques may always help you out in the search engine rankings, a good Internet marketer will know which techniques are trendier and less effective than others.

Every trend that exists today once started out as an innovation from an Internet marketer who had the foresight to see a good thing coming. It is these marketers who will constantly push the envelope and try new techniques that will first be ultra effective and then eventually phase out and become the latest trend. But these innovative marketing minds will simply continue to refine and experiment different techniques and the success they will enjoy over other Internet marketers who are stuck in the now will be vast.

Anytime you are considering an Internet marketer you certainly want to be sure that they are working within the Google’s webmaster guidelines. However, you also want to be sure to get an Internet marketer who is afraid to play with the “Gray areas”. After all, it is these Gray areas of today that will become the White Ideas of tomorrow.

The bottom line is that Google and the other major search engines will not sit still for very long before they shake things up a bit and neither should you. Really you either play by Google’s rules or your rankings will suffer for it. In order to gain a leg up on your competition you have to be sure you are working with an Experienced Internet Marketer who doesn’t care about the popularity contest that is currently going on with Internet marketing and who isn’t afraid to step outside of the box to help ensure your online success.

Written by Mark Bove’ , increaseyourtraffic.com

No matter what type of business you have your success relies heavily on people being able to find you online. One of the most undervalued, but effective ways to accomplish this task is with the power of the local search. Today there are many sites that have evolved to allow potential customers in your area to find your local business including Topix, Superpages, Yelp, and many more. Many of these sites are no longer just for listing a business name and address and many of them have maps and interactive features that allow for users to generate the content, also known as user generated content or UGC for short. This content includes reviews and comments about the local listings.

These types of online sites have seen a surge in growth over the past few years and the old faithful Yellow Pages is either flat or actually losing ground. Yes online local searching is fast catching up to the traditional methods. This makes sense as all the Yellow Pages can offer you are a name, a phone number, and an address. The online local search sites however can provide you with an entire wealth of knowledge including how good the local business is and what you can expect if you deal with them. These reviews are not written by pros, but by actual past customers.
So why are local businesses so excited about this? The fact is that when people conduct this type of search online they are very close to making a buying decision. They are not just simply doing a broad search but in fact are going to be conducting a very specific search as they have already more than likely conducted all of their research beforehand.

Getting your local business involved really couldn’t be much easier. Most of the local search sites are free to use but will charge you up to $25 to upgrade your local business lisitng. If you are the only business of your kind in your community you can probably get by with just the most basic listing. However if you are like most local businesses, you have plenty of competition and it is probably in your best interest to pay the extra money if you can to allow your local business to be set apart from the rest.
Be sure that you visit the sites on a regular basis and see what people are saying about your local business. If you do get a complaint try to address it as such. Remember that word of mouth far outweighs even the most costly advertisement and there is no bigger word of mouth than the one that belongs to the online community.

Another plus associated with many of the local search sites is that people can now access them right from their mobile phones. This technology allows a consumer to enter their zip code and the product they are interested in and they are then sent a photo of the item, a brief description, prices, store locations that carry the item with directions, and a store phone number. If that doesn’t get your local business blood pumping there probably isn’t anything that will.

Now many of you that have had a website for some time now have probably been bombarded with e-mail solicitations from different online search companies promising you the world. Naturally you are probably a bit skeptical and with some of the fly by night companies that are emerging you have good reason to be. What you can do though is stick with the bigger names and work your way forward from there.

The only drawback that lies with the local search sites is that there is no “standard” way to do the listing and you really need to get creative in order to stand out. This may be time consuming but you will see that it is definitely worth it in the long run.

Here are some things to remember as you begin your local search site adventures:

• Ride the wave of others: Do a local search in your area for a business that is similar to yours. The ones that are always coming up first are the ones you should be looking at in terms of content. Now you certainly don’t want to copy them word for word, but you do definitely want to get some ideas from them.
• Make sure your info is accurate: Many of the local search sites will derive their information about your local business from places like Amacai, InfoUSA, and Axiom. It pays to first visit these sites and be sure that all of your information is correct.
• Geo-Target for best results: Be sure that you optimize your website pages accordingly. Your keyword listings should always include the location of your local business. You will also want to include your address on your website for the search engine spiders to find.

Local search sites are not only here to stay, but will more than likely continue to see the amazing growth that they have enjoyed in recent years going forward. If you are a local business owner you will want to take full advantage.

Picking a Product

* Analyze your product. Are you interested in it yourself?

* Analyze your market. Is it oversaturated? Is it growing or changing?

* Is it easy to order your product from the web? Or are you selling commodity dog food that is expensive to ship?

* What can you do to be unique in the market?

* What creative and original ideas can you add to your site?

Picking a Domain Name

* FOR NEW SITES: Ponder your domain name choice. Depending on your brand strategy, it should either be highly brandable or have your primary keywords in it.

* Make sure your domain is easy to say over the phone and is memorable.

* Consider buying different domain names for each targeted language or niche in your market.

* If you have additional ideas and the matching domain names are available register them at market price, because if someone else buys them first it might cost you a few thousand dollars to buy them later.

Domain Registration & Hosting

* Choose an ICANN accredited registrar.

* Register a .com as soon as possible. If the .com is out of reach then register a .net or .org.

* Register a country’s top-level domain if your primary market is local in nature.

* Choose a host that supports the technology you will be using (ASP or PHP, etc.).

Keyword Selection

* Use keyword tools and customer feedback to find the most targeted keyword phrases for your site.

* Develop grouped themes of keywords that reflect the different sections of your site.

* Use an Excel spreadsheet to organize your keyword ideas. Keeping them within a grouped theme, choose different keywords to target each page.

Page Optimization

* Put your chosen words for each page in your page title tags. Make sure your page title tag text is unique to each page.

* Write a description for the meta description tag. Make sure your description is unique to each page.

* Use only one H1 header per page, and target similar keyword phrases as the ones you targeted when writing the page title.

* Use subheaders H2 and H3 on your page when necessary.

* Use bulleted lists and bolding to make content easier to read.

* Make sure your text is written for human consumption—not bots.

Home Page Optimization

* Make sure your home page builds credibility and directs consumers to the most important parts of your site.

* Target your most competitive keyword on your home page or a page that is well integrated into your site.

* Link to major theme pages from your home page.

* Link to your home page from every sub page.

Site Optimization

* Use text-based navigation.

* If you already have, or insist on using, graphic navigation, use descriptive alt text on the images, and link to every primary page from your sub pages in the footer of the sub pages.

* Use descriptive keyword breadcrumb navigation.

* Make a site map if you have a large site.

* Check your link text to make sure it’s descriptive whenever possible.

* Link to resources outside your own site that improve each user’s experience.

* Deep link to related articles and content from your page copy.

* Rely as little as possible on the site navigation. Instead, guide your visitor through your site with links in the active content portion of the site.

* Use external CSS to minimize page load time.

* Avoid duplicate content issues. Ensure that each page has significantly unique content that does not exist on other pages on your site or other sites.

Registering With Directories

* Register your site with the major directories – Yahoo!, DMOZ, and Business.com.

* Register your site with a couple better second-tier directories – JoeAnt & BOTW.

* Register with a couple local or niche-specific directories – from ISEDB.

Link Building

* Make sure your site has something that other webmasters in your niche would be interested in linking to.

* Create content that people will be willing to link at even if it is not directly easy to monetize. These linkworthy pages will lift the authority and rankings of all pages on your site. Think of remarkable content production as cheap advertising.

* When possible, get your keywords in the link text pointing to your site. Use product names and article titles that contain keywords in their offical names.

* Register with, participate in, or trade links with topical hubs and related sites. Be in the discussion or at least be near the discussion.

* Look for places to get high-quality free links from (like local libraries or chambers of commerce).

* Produce articles and get them syndicated to more authoritative sites.

* Participate in forums to learn about what your potential consumers think is important.

* Issue press releases with links to your site.

* Leave glowing testimonials for people and products you really like.

* Start an interesting and unique blog and write about your topics, products, news, and other sites in your community.

* Comment on other sites with useful relevant and valuable comments.

* Sponsor charities, blogs, or websites related to your site.

* Consider renting links if you are in an extremely competitive industry.

* Mix your link text up whenever possible.

* Survey your vertical and related verticals. What ideas/tools/articles have become industry standard tools or well-cited information? What ideas are missing?

When you perform a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign what you will notice is that certain keywords work straight away and others will need special nurturing through optimization in order to be successful. The problem persists with figuring out how to know it is time to throw in the towel and scrap a specific keyword or keywords. Before you do give up on a keyword there are several factors that you need to consider before making the decision to let it go or keep it. After all, if you can save the keyword, why not do so?

Time is on your side

The most important factor to consider is how much time you have actually allowed for the keyword to do its job. If you are the type of person to choose a batch of keywords and give them exactly a day to work, you are going to miss out on a wide variety of opportunities. You need to allow your keywords ample time to do their jobs. In order to make an informed decision as to the effectiveness of your keywords you selected you need to know how many clicks that word is getting and how much you are spending on that keyword.

Study your keyword-level quality score

All keywords are not created equally and what you need to be focused on is whether or not your keywords are achieving a good click through rate (CTR). If you have certain keywords that are achieving your CTR goals and others that are not, you need to figure out why the underperforming ones are doing poorly.

If you are using Google AdWords to perform your PPC campaign then you can study your keyword level quality score. In the case of AdWords, a score that is under six is one that requires attention.  What are some ways that you can improve this score?

Review your ad texts: Does your ad texts contain the troubled keyword?
Review your landing page: Does your landing page contain the troubled keyword?

This may seem like a silly inquiry, but you would be surprised at how often this is actually overlooked. If your ad texts and landing page do not contain the keyword in question then the relevancy will be knocked down and so too will the performance of the keyword.

Average position and bid

Certain keywords will perform just fine as a “bottom feeder” which typically finds the keyword at the bottom of the first page and top part of the second page in the search engines results page (SERPs). On the other hand some keywords need to be in the top three to five in order to their jobs properly. If you find that your keyword is not doing well at bottom feeding status then try increasing the bid to better the position of the keyword.

Negative Keywords

When the first steps don’t succeed it may be time to take a look at negative keywords. This is done with AdWords by performing a search query on your keyword to see why those keyword are underperforming. What you may find is that you may be getting traffic from search queries that have little to nothing to do with your site or services on your site. Use the information you find and begin to craft a negative keyword list. You may be surprised to see how much a well crafted negative keyword can improve an existing keyword’s performance.

‘Tis the season

Another reason that your problem keyword may be underperforming is the season. Certain keywords can do better or worse depending on the time of the year that they are being used and using a tool such as Google Insights for Search or Google Trends can help you better understand how your keyword is performing throughout the year. You can then see when is the best time of the year for you to use your keyword.

When all else fails

If you try these techniques and your keyword continues to give you fits then it may be time to throw in the towel and start over from scratch.  Just be sure that you are positive you never want to use a keyword again before you totally delete it from your AdWords account. You can always “pause” a keyword and have it there to be revisited at a later date if you so desire.

Just be confident that you have exhausted all avenues of making your keyword work before you give up. Remember a successful PPC campaign sometimes takes a bit of time to work and the same holds true for the keywords within it.

If you have never started a PPC campaign, the good news is you should have significant chances of making more money in this over a hand of Blackjack. There are some things you will need to do first and just as with anything else, all it takes it time, patience and an attention to detail. Learning how to properly place and utilize a PPC campaign takes some practice and here are some things to look out for.

First things first, PPC stands for Pay Per Click. They way a PPC campaign works is relatively simple; an ad is placed on a website and when someone clicks on it, the website gets paid a certain amount of money from the person or business who placed the ad. Normally this is a very low amount, around $.05 or so a click. This is how many websites make money if they don’t directly sell something.

There are PPC programs that do a great deal of the targeting for you. Take for instance Google’s AdSense. This program takes the content of your PPC ad and matches it to websites that are related to your product or service. Using this type of program takes a lot of the guesswork out of the whole campaign; however, it’s not always that effective and sometimes, it’s just plain wrong.

You need to pick some long tail keywords for your ads. These are words that are more specifically targeted to your product. With consumers looking more and more specifically for items these days, using this type of marketing can really pan out.

When you write your ad, you want to make use of these long tail keywords and keep the ad simple and to the point. The more information you can get through in a very short space, the less the ad will cost and the more you will entice a potential customer.

Make the offer interesting because, let’s face it, in these economic times, people are being a little more restrictive on what they spend their money on. People want value for their dollar, more now than ever so make sure they feel they are getting a better value from you than anywhere else.

Another thing you will need to do, is take a close look at your competition. You need to know what they are offering and how they compare with you and your company. If someone can go to another company for the same thing you have, but they can get it for less, well, you should know where this is going and it’s not into you bank account.

All of this relates directly to how closely you pay attention to your PPC campaign. If you just throw ads out there and forget about them, you won’t get much in return. You have got to be all over it until your brand is an advertisement in and of itself. If you don’t understand that last thing, think about a place to get coffee. Whatever brand you just thought of is what that previous statement means.

Blackjack is a game of chance and odds. The best players study the odds and know where they stand at all times and this holds true for a PPC campaign. As long as you know the odds of a site actually bringing you business, play that odd if it’s in your favor. If it isn’t, stand pat and look for another site. Having a system that is automated is good as a constant backup, but, the real money and progress is made by those who know when to hit at 17 for the big win.

For more information on PPC and SEO tools to manage or support a PPC campaign visit:

https://tools.shoemoney.com/

or

http://www.seomoz.org/tools

or

http://tools.seobook.com/