When the internet first began to grow in popularity, it was generally thought to be a means of connecting people from around the world, to share data and information, and to improve communication. As these things became second nature, big businesses grabbed onto the notion of the internet and took it to a whole new level. Soon every major corporation had an online presence, and even the most traditional businesses were forced to embrace the new technology. With millions of people on the web every day, and the internet now a trillion dollar industry, it would be foolish not to try and harness this new technology to your advantage.

Businesses use to think that the internet could only be utilized by large companies with huge marketing budgets. In 2000, millions of dollars were spent on advertising in hopes of driving people online, to make purchases. However at that time the internet wasn’t able to accommodate such huge spending. Suddenly everything fell apart, and in the wake of the dot com crash, it seemed everyone would struggle to make money online.

Over the last few years, however, things have changed dramatically. Technology has improved, the internet has become more popular, and big businesses are now much better placed to harness the power of the internet. It is now the time for a new generation, that of the small business owner.

Everyone uses the internet and is familiar with search engines. Because of this, there is less emphasis on being a household name, and as long as you have a strong online presence, someone is going to find your business. As more and more people search for local businesses, rather than major chains, there is clear potential to dramatically increase your businesses income.

There are various ways you can do this, and we’ll look at the different marketing strategies that can be used to take your business to the next level. There’s a ton of consumers out there who want to find your product or service, and the internet is the best way for them to find you. If you can build a stronger online presence than your competitors, you’ve won a major battle and can look forward to a profitable future as your business grows.

Every day, new people discover the internet, and they could be right next door. Instead of only being used by college students and the younger generation, the internet is now a powerful tool to find almost any customer base you could think of.

Building an online presence

Your first port of call when building your online presence to build a website to showcase your business. This is where you set the foundation for everything else you do. It’s about proving to people that your business can be trusted, and the best way to do that is not to fill your website with boring copy and an uninteresting history of your company. If you look at big businesses, they have all realized this; they have to appeal to a number of different audiences. Therefore, they’ve created much more diverse websites that generally speak in a slightly more informal tone, in order to build trust.

As we can see from the graph below, building your website can have a fantastic effect on your potential customers.

Harnessing the search engines

The most popular way for someone to find a website is by going through a search engine. Google is the most popular, so it’s important to target their results more than other search engines. Here are some incredible stats about search engines that you may not know:

• 75% of Americans use search engines on a regular basis.
  
• 56% of all Americans use one every single day.
  
• 40% of all search engine searches are for local businesses and services.
  
• 54% of Americans regularly use the internet instead of the phone book to find local services
  
• 92% of all local searches will eventually convert into a sale
  

The whole search engine industry used to be about very short “keywords” that would lead people to finding the website they were looking for. Everyone use to simply type things like “web designers” into a search engine, check out the first few results and then make a decision.

However, these days consumers are becoming much better at searching with Google, so keywords have progressively become longer in order to return more relevant results. For example, instead of “web designers” which may give us some good websites for that keyword, we might be looking for something a little more specific. We might type “Best New York Web Design Company”. The reason we would do this is because we’re fed up searching through websites that don’t offer the services we are looking for. Instead of just searching for a product or service, people now search for a niche products or services in a particular area. This means that, instead of massive chains dominating the search results, small business websites are flourishing.

Local Internet Marketing is something that requires a great deal of experience and expertise. Without it, you simply aren’t going to know how to get found on the front page of Google when someone is searching for your product or service. The competition won’t be that fierce considering you will be competing for more specific keywords, but you’ll still need to be able to get in front of consumers to succeed. And once your website starts getting traffic you will need to be able to convert that traffic into sales.

With more people moving towards local searches, you’re going to need to target your Internet Marketing to specific keywords in your area. If you fail to do this, you’ll be competing with the major players in your industry nationally, and it’s a battle you almost certainly won’t win. The graph below shows the massive increases the local search industries.

Building a captive audience

When local customers start searching for products or services in their area, they will most likely be very clear of their intentions. They are generally ready to buy. One of the most powerful parts of internet marketing is the ability to build a relationship with someone without ever having spoken to them directly. By building a website that is tweaked and optimized daily, you can be sure to reach a wide ranging audience, all of whom will be interested in your products or services.

As we can see from the graph below, the internet is an incredibly effective way of selling your product to a potential customer. Never before have businesses been able to communicate so well with their potential customers.

Being found on the internet

People use the internet in very diverse ways, and you can’t possibly hope to capture every single person who might be looking for a product like yours. However, you can make it extremely easy for people to find your business by being all over the internet. With all the different ways of receiving information, there are limitless possibilities for marketing your website on the internet. Whether this is in the form of social media marketing, search engine optimization, or videos you’re sure to find people who are looking for your product or service.

Internet marketing is about being “found” online by people who are looking for your products or services. They will be looking for what you are selling, so you have to make it as easy as possible for them to find you. And once they find you, your website needs to be set up to convert them into a paying client. Done correctly there’ll be a flood of people wanting to do business with you.

Conclusion

As we can see from the graph below, the internet is dominating the way that people find local businesses. The graph shows the breakdown for the primary source of finding local business information:

As we’ve seen throughout this article, the internet is taking over as the way we do business. If you embrace it now, your business will survive and probably flourish even in the most difficult times. All of the data and statistics should tell you everything you need to know, and given that local search has only become truly popular in the last few years; it is likely to grow even more in the future. While there are lots of ways of building an online presence most websites still fail to succeed.

People who make money with their websites don’t do so by stumbling around online. Making money and losing money are a direct effect of the path you follow.

I’ve been thinking about redoing my pricing on Geeks on Steroids. By putting the prices on the site we cut down on having to do so many needles estimates.

By having the prices visible on the website we should be able to cut down on both the number of emails and phone calls from people who have no intention of buying at this moment and are only interested in getting prices.

This is the first stage in what I want to do.

Did you know that if someone was looking to buy a new car and they found a car they really liked but if it was out of their price range and you told them they could remove features and drop the price, it would be extremely difficult for them to remove the items once they had seen them on the car?

It creates a feeling in them of losing something and many people would rather figure out how to come up with the money to pay for the car rather than lose something they feel like is already part of the car.

Here’s what I want to do!

I want to show a kickass awesome video of a brand new website.

Under the video I want there to be an awesome colored photo of a website with arrows coming of the photo along with a description and our prices. The customer on the right hand side of the page gets the total price for everything and then they are able to x off anything they do not want to lower the price of the website.

They can then continue to mark off items until they get the price they are looking for.

It should be a lot harder to mark off items then it is to add on items. But to be sure I want to split test this against the exact same website design with the only difference being how prices are determined.

“Websites That Will Double Your Business!”

Ever wondered why so many people give free information away in exchange for your name and e-mail address?

In 1966 Freedman and Fraser did some research. The first thing they did was to ask people if they could put a big ugly sign in their yard. The sign said drive carefully. Out of all the people they talked to 20% of the people said okay.

The second test they asked people to put this little sign in their car that said drive carefully. Three weeks later they went back around and got 46% of the people to agree to put the big ugly sign in the yard.

The third group was first asked to sign a petition and then three weeks later the same person showed up and asked them to but the sign in their yard. In that group 76% of the people agreed to put the sign in their yard.

So why the big difference?

Each one of us has personas. These are the people we are, when we are around other people.

My persona with my wife would be different than my persona with my kids. My persona with my kids would be different than my persona with the people I work with.

We create personas of ourselves depending on who were around and where we are. Personas are created subconsciously. But each has values and ideas that you them, and those values are real.

So when someone approaches you and ask you to do something small that is outside what your persona would normally, do you are more likely to agree then if they asked you to do something big. This widens your persona and subconsciously changes it a little.

Since you signed the petition you are now someone who cares about people driving safely in your subdivision.

When you asked to put a sign in your yard you are more likely to do so because you care about the neighborhood, you are involved.

When you signed the petition you started expanding your persona.  

The other thing that happened was that the person had built a relationship with you before they asked you to put the big ugly sign in your yard. That small relationship more than doubled the results.

By creating websites that build relationships with our website visitors, we can build a business.

Web Design Rating Systems

There are actually more ways to set up a rating system for your website than you might imagine.

And of course some are better than others.

For example, a site that doesn’t put the rating information on the product page and causes the consumer to have to click on the product to see the rating system, is not using this system as well as they could.

By waiting until the second screen to show the rating information you risk losing the customers attention. You want to make sure website visitor get to the rating information.

Of course the more reviews you have the stronger the impact on the website visitor.

There was a study done in 2007 as to whether recommendations influenced website visitors decisions.

The researchers were interested in whether recommendations would be equally influential for products and experiences. They used a digital camera shop for the product for the product condition and they used a tourist destination for the experience condition.

A product that was recommended sold 20% more volume than in if there was no recommendation.

For the travel destination that had a review sold 10% more than a destination with no review.

If there was a picture along with the review then the travel recommendation increased to 20%.

Of course, another way to do this would be to show the percent of people that buy that product from that page.

Say 74% of the people that visited the page bought camera A, and 7% bought Camera B and so on and so.

Now keep in mind they were talking about good honest reviews.

What you don’t want to happen is to alert the third-part of the brain.

So this only works if the information and reviews are good, accurate and real reviews and not fake or phony.

Many times when working on a solution that I am unable to find an answer to, I will either take a nap, a bath, or relax with some friends. Because I know my subconscious mind continues to work on the problem even though my consciousness mind maybe on to something else.

We are not aware that our subconscious mind is still working on the problem. Yet our mood, feelings and the way we think are all affected at this moment.

Neuroscientists believe that our five senses are taken in over 11 million pieces of information every second. And our conscious mind is only process about 40 of that 11 million.

Our unconscious mind process all the incoming data from our environment and instantly decides whether it is good or bad.

It also tells our conscious mind what to pay attention to.

Our unconscious mind is smarter and faster than our conscious mind.

There was an experiment done where participants were given a game to play. They had to click on the X.

The game followed a complicated mathematical formula. The more the participants played the game the quicker they became. This was because their subconscious mind was learning the mathematical formula.

This was evident in the fact that their times were improving and they knew where the X was going to appear as it was appearing.

However, when the participants were asked if they knew the mathematical formula they are not didn’t know it but claimed it didn’t exsit.

This proved that the subconscious mind understood the formula and was telling the conscious mind where to click and what to do to help it perform better. The conscious mind did not know nor was it aware of the mathematical formula.

How do we know the subconscious mind knew the formula?

Because when the formula was changed scores dropped back to where they were when the participants first started playing the game again.

So…do you really believe that you, your friends or co-workers really know what causes them to make a purchase or to no make a purchase.

We could believe that we went to a website and purchased an item because of the cost of that item. But the truth could be the difference in a red background and a light grey background.

We don’t know why we made that purchase. It was done with our subconscious mind we have absolutely no control over that.

About five years ago my husband and I bought a farm. I thought I really enjoyed taking the husband and kids to the farm. However I notiched I would get short tempered, angry, and irritable when it was time to go to the farm.

The truth of the matter was I did like taking the kids out there. We didn’t have the security we have at the house and I wasn’t comfortable sleeping out there with my kids.

But all that was going on in my subconscious mind. My conscious mind was saying yes, I like going to the farm.

The truth, I didn’t enjoy it!

But I thought I did?

For some reason my conscious mind decided it liked and even enjoyed going on those trips.

So…there’s no way someone can come to your website and tell you that they bought a product because you have a blue background or blue buy now button or for that matter anything else about your site.

There is no way the website owner can tell you what’s going to work or is not  going to work without testing that website, fine-tuning it, figuring out what works and what doesn’t work.