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.

What is affordable?

Let’s look at it from the web design company’s point of view. The first thing you have to be able to do is understand the customer’s idea. You have to be able to understand what it is the customer wants to have happen. What is the end action that the website owner wants the website visitor to perform; purchase a product, fill out a form, call, or some other type of action?

Being able to build a website that is able to show the website visitor that his or her life would be more productive, more profitable and happier if they owned the product or service you are selling takes a dedication, understanding, and passion for building websites that make money. Finding someone that is able to that is rare.

This person would be someone that spends most of his or her time locked away in a room doing nothing but studying and testing what works and doesn’t work on a website. Pulling them away from their testing long enough to get them interested in your website isn’t going to be an easy task. This is a person that understands in great detail why certain photos need to be used in certain places on the site and how colors affect the end user. Chances are they are already working on and testing sites that do over a million a year.

The reason most of the sites they work on do over a million a year is because they have the recipe for building and designing websites that make money. If you spent most your waking hours testing, tweaking and fine tuning, a websites; traffic, design, content, colors, offers and fonts, what do you think the end results would be?

A website that makes money!

The reason it’s difficult to find this person is because most of their time is spent on one website. So…what would be an affordable price to have this guy come work on your website project for the next 2 weeks and be at your full disposable?

Anyone with a little DW and FF or PS skills can put you a nicely designed website together. But with 98% of all websites unable to produces and income, can you really expect to get a return on your investment by trying to save money on how much you spend?

This is a continuation from my website for kids post.

The first problem I want to address is the current websites that are ranking for Geeks on Steroids name, while at the same time increasing traffic to Geeks on Steroids. I’ve already got Google Analytics on the site; I need the increase in traffic so I can start testing stuff.

I’ve already gone through the top 50 results and made a list of the number of sites I currently control that rank for Geeks on Steroids.

I will now start building back links to those sites using Geeks on Steroids as the anchor text for the backlinks. Of course I will mix in a variety of different anchor text like click here, Geeks On Steroids and so on and so on. At the same time this is happening I will start creating profiles on sites like Tumbler, WordPress, Squiddo, Blogger, YouTube, HubPages, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Each account will of course use the name Geeks on Steroids as its profile name and Geeks on Steroids logo as its profile photo.

The neat thing about people, is that we all have personas. A persona is who we are when we’re around other people. When I’m talking to my brother I’m a different person then when I am talking to my husband, my kids or my friends. We create personas for each person we interact with in our lives.

Here’s why this is important!

I am not a writer! I hate writing. And I have a terrible time thinking of something to write and to make it worst I have a terrible pain in my left hand that goes up to my elbow every time a finger touches the keyboard. And I can’t write. More than half the time I don’t proof read my stuff because I know I will find too many mistakes and it will take too long to correct. When I do proof read I don’t even know what I was trying to say half the time.

But I love to talk!

I enjoy making people laugh as well as making them think. I love interacting with people. The problem is when I step on stage and feel like everyone is looking at me I fall apart. However, if I focus on one person and no one else, the whole blog is designed for helping that one friend in need. I am going to create a blog for each of my personas, for when they are communicating with a different person in my life. This allows me to build and direct my blog to one specific type of person. It also allows the persona, the person I am, when I am around this person, to be the poster.

I can even make personas of the person I wish I was, when I was around a particular person.

By doing this I can create 10 different blogs that are all run by me. I’ll have total control of all the personas and blogs that those personas post on. We will create profile pages for each persona on Tumbler, WordPress, Squiddo, Blogger, YouTube, HubPages, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. All these will link back to one profile page for each website that says something about Geeks on Steroids and explains about the website and who it was designed for.

It might sound a little confusing but as I set everything up you should hopefully understand better. But the idea is to take over the top 50 results in Google and block anyone else from being able to rank there.

This has been a tough year for us.

We have not been feeling any of the recession at all, up until the middle of this year. It’s one of the reason I decided to start posting on this blog, to try and increase traffic, readership and hopefully sales. But even with my daily posting my traffic continues to drop.

It’s a scary moment for any business owner. When you start worrying about how you are going to make payroll come Friday.

Shortly after starting Geeks on Steroids I turned the running of the business over to my husband Gregg. I was pregnant at the time and have spent the last 4 years raising my two kids. This means I’ve been out of the business for the last 5 years, other than a little posting here and there on forums and blog. To make it worse shortly after I got out of the business an x-employee posted lies about my business, me and my husband online. His thought was that somehow writing bad stuff about us was going to help him start his own web design business. About the same time that was going on a web designer in the porn industry sent Gregg a threating email claiming he would sue us if we didn’t remove the contact form from our website, because he invented the drop down email forms. Gregg told both of them off and both unknowingly headed online where they begin making up lies about us. They meet each other and immediately believed the other was a real client and begin getting all excited as they changed names and hit the forums, blogs and other sites.

In the meantime, Gregg had taken over running Geeks on Steroids and had totally misunderstood how to run a business. We were selling websites for nothing, so if the website has a problem we start losing money. The only way to make money at those prices is doing them in bulk. This means that we need to have about 30 jobs going on and need to be selling new jobs daily, while pushing finished jobs out the door. Gregg is the only one on the phones and he is dealing with new clients, potential clients, old clients and complaints. As you can imagine Gregg feels that every second of his time is important to him and it’s important to the business. If he’s tied up on the phone not only are you holding up the speed at which your website can be finished but you are also keeping him from working on other important things either for yourself, us or another client.

The problem with these types of time restraints is that it makes it impossible to spend the needed time addressing the client’s problems. You are always rushing from one task to the next and are no longer able to do any task correctly.

Rushing an already upset customer off the phone only makes that customer more upset. You see the problem created by the x-employee and then porn designer put us in an extremely delegate situation. When a customer calls with a problem and Gregg loses his temper he escalates that problem and then an already upset customer goes online to see if anyone else has had a problem with the company. Normally that would be the end of it, but when they find something and can leave a post and blow off steam on a topic that already exist it’s hard to resist.

For example one of the first problems we had was with a client from Apple Valley, California. We built and designed her website. Everything was ready to go online but she couldn’t remember the domain name she had purchased, nor where she had purchased it. Greg called and spoke with her and tried to explain to her, but when she did not understand the problem Gregg lost his temper. Gregg has since been trained on how to talk to people. But this lady ends up on the same forum with an x-employee who’s pretending to be an x-client. And since he knows not only everything about our business but also knows everything about this lady, he can lead her anywhere he wants her to go.

Chances are this lady would have never posted anything but because she was upset and was joined by the x-employee with her frustration, she did post. A couple days later we refunded her money, she went back to the website and asked them to remove what she had written, and they refused.

Now I’ve got a friend that just contacted me and she’s got the exact same problems I do. Starting in June her traffic and sales dropped off.

That was about the same time Geeks on Steroids traffic dropped off. She had some contractors that did some work for her write bad stuff about her. This stuff is currently ranking for her name. She’s having the exact same problems I’m currently having with Geeks on Steroids.

But there’s another problem I’ve been having with Geeks on Steroids. When I blog I am all over the place from conversion, search engine optimization, shopping carts, website designs, and the list goes on and on. As I go into the New Year I’m going to be totally changing Geeks on Steroids. I’ve decided to spend next year writing a step by step post 5 times a day on all the things I am doing to get Geeks on Steroids to get it back on track. They will all be written for my friend in hopes of getting her website to making money along with my own.

So let’s getting started on the New Year, because I’d like to break a million this year!

I spent the last two weeks writing some pretty awesome content; hopefully you’ve seen it here on the blog. I wanted to see how much of an increase in traffic I would get if I posted to the website every single day.

Geeks on steroids has been around for about 10 years. It is currently getting some decent traffic but nowhere near what I would like for it to get. Because of the age of the website and the amount of work done on the site in the past I would think the results from my daily posting would be greater than or equal to the average website. However the increase in traffic was so small that I hardly paid attention to it. By posting a couple times a day I was able to increase website traffic by about 10 visitors per day and that was posting to LinkedIn, Facebook, and twitter.

Needless to say I will continue to post what I am doing here as I attempt to raise traffic to the blog.

The next thing I want to try is commenting on other people’s blogs.