When we talk about internet marketing, many people instantly seem to think that it is related to affiliate offers and building a website to host some Adsense ads. Sure, these things are what many people do to earn money on the internet, but they are not the only components of online marketing. If you have a local business, you can use the internet to draw more clients and above all, to get your business known in the community. There are various options for you to use to get the word out. Yesterday, we have talked about local SEO and your options for doing it. But search engine traffic is not the only way for you to get visitors to your website and clients for your business. Let’s examine a few other ways to get what you are looking for.

Getting Traffic

Whether you are pushing affiliate offers, or have your own, physical small business, you want traffic to your site. Traffic simply means visitors that look at your website. There are many ways to get this traffic: SEO (which we talked about yesterday), online classified ad sites, social media sites and targeted media buying. We will explore these one by one to see what the advantages (and sometimes drawbacks) are of using these methods. That way, you will be able to make a decision on how to advertise your business online.

Classified Ads Sites (Craigslist, Gumtree, Backpage, Kijiji and dozens more).

There are various sites which let you place a classified ad, which is similar to what you would see in a newspaper. There are some main, worldwide sites such as Craigslist, but there are also some local sites which could be geared towards people in your locality. For example, in French Canada where I live, the website Annonce123.com is very popular with people and attracts a lot of local traffic.

In order to maximize your chances of success and to take the highest advantage of the sites it is recommended that you:

• Post on all the sites. That’s right, both the national sites which have a section for your city and the smaller, local sites (if present in your locality). Posting an ad on these sites is free and takes 2 or 3 minutes. Remember, even if you only get 10 views a day for your ad, one of these viewers could be your next biggest customer. Say if you own a car rental place, the viewer could be a diplomat from Monaco on a temporary assignment in your city, who will rent your most expensive car for 6 months. Think of the money you will make with him. Sure, this is rare… but you never know… and if he doesn’t see your ad, well he never know your car rental business existed and use a competitor instead.
• Make you ad look interesting. Your ad should stand out and be engaging to the users. Thus, use a good title and also, make sure that you use proper spelling and grammar in the ad. Believe me, it helps.
• Use the “featured” or “upgrade” options if possible. Many sites, for a small fee of (varies from $0.50 to a few dollars) will let your ad be “featured”. This means that it will be either on top of all the other ads, or will have highlighting that will draw attention to it. If you have a few dollars to spare, use this option.

Tomorrow, we will examine social media sites and how they can be useful for marketing your local business on the internet.

One of the main attractions of advertising your business in the online world is that you are able to reach people all over the world. Anyone, from anywhere can visit your website and do business with you. However, for certain small businesses, this is not what they need, especially if they only do business in a certain local area. Therefore, for them, receiving visitors from all over the country and all over the world will be quite useless and will simply result in wasted time and wasted bandwidth on their website.

Think of it this way. If you run a local landscaping business, you don’t need people from the other end of the country seeing your website. It will be as useless to them as it is to you. The visitor will simply see that you don’t serve their area and then leave your site. For them, seeing your website would have simply been nothing more than a waste of time. But how do you target visitors that are only from the area that you do business in? There are many ways in which this can be accomplished. We will take a look at some of the techniques that you can use to make this happen.

Proper Local SEO

Sure, there are many different ways to get people to see your website. With dozens of different advertising options, many business owners don’t focus much on SEO, considering it too complicated to perform on their own and too costly to outsource to a professional firm. As you will see, both of these assertions are not necessarily true. In any case, even if you don’t expect search engine traffic to be your main source of clicks, doing some SEO work on your site is recommended, even if it is just the most basic type.

Basic SEO is not complicated at all for a local business. It simply consists of targeting the right keywords in the proper way. Therefore, you should optimize your content towards keywords that are more “local” than simply general keywords. So if you run a landscaping business in Boca Raton, Florida, you would optimize your content for keywords such as “Boca Raton landscaping” or “landscaping in Boca Raton”. By doing so, you will only be competing for rankings with local businesses, which is easier than trying to rank for the more general “landscaping”. Furthermore, a person doing a search for (product or service) + city is more likely to be in buying mode and seeking out a place where they can GET the service in your city. Even if they are not ready to make a decision yet and are just comparing prices, they are much more likely to contact YOU if they notice that your business offers the best value. On the other hand, someone searching for “landscaping” could simply be looking for landscaping tips and tricks and not interested in hiring anyone’s services.

But is it really hard to do SEO for local businesses and is it really costly to get help? These are topics that we will discuss in the second part.

Search engine traffic is one of the most important ways to be successful online. When people can find your blog or website just by typing into Google your keyword, that is a very powerful thing.

Google and other search engines love new content. It has been said that Google prefers websites that have new content on a consistent basis. So one of the ways to get to Google’s heart is to consistently update your blog or website.

New content is a powerful thing for many reasons, not just search engine ranking.

New content brings visitors back again and again.
New content means your RSS feed goes out, again and again.
New content keeps you engaged with your site.
New content forces you to continue promotion of your site, you’d hate for that great content to go to waste, wouldn’t you?

New content is one of the driving forces behind the next big part of organic, search engine traffic. In order to get that content to show up and rank in Google however, there are some things you have to do first.

Make your site SEO friendly, use good title tags and make good use of heading tags as well. Also make sure you submit your Sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools, this will help Google crawl your site more efficiently.

Getting backlinks to your site will also help your site start to rank higher and get crawled more often. What happens when the Google Bot gets to another site with your link on it, is it then follows it back to your. A lot of people call this “Google Juice.” Call it whatever you want, it is one of the most important parts of the organic traffic equation.

If you are just getting started on your website, be patient and make sure you submit your site to all of the search engines so that they can begin crawling your site as soon as possible.