Posts Tagged ‘promoting your business on twitter’

It’s no secret, the world is changing and more people are using the internet to search for local businesses than they did just a few years ago.  In fact thanks to Yahoo’s ability to track local searches, their numbers show local search was up 76% in 2009.

In years past, small businesses have had a difficult time competing with larger companies who have millions of dollars to spend for advertising.  Now with the power of the internet, small businesses can gain market share for pennies on the dollar when compared to print media.  This allows for even smaller businesses to compete with larger businesses if they understand how to use the technology that is available to them.

The internet marketing industry is going under some big changes at the moment.  First of all, with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, people are spending more time chatting online versus meeting with friends in public places. In fact, according to Facebook, there are more than 400 million active users and more than 35 million users update their status each day. With this many people using Facebook to update their location, many businesses like restaurants and clubs are getting free advertising via Facebook posts and other social mediums.  That doesn’t even count the businesses who already have a Facebook fan page.

Of course using social media marketing is only one point of discussion for small business.  When a small business gets a link tweeted from twitter, or a link posted from Facebook, the link better lead to a good looking and informative website, and if not a free link can turn from great to not so great in seconds.

Websites and people have one thing in common and that is you only get one chance at a first impression, so you’d better look your best when first impressions are made weather it’s you or your business’ website a customer is viewing.

Of course like anything different people have different opinions regarding what a business website should offer.  Some business owners want to fill their website with pages and pages of information, statistics, and more.  Other business owners want lots of pictures and creative content which may include slide shows and moving graphics.  These two examples are basically the two extremes where website design is concerned.

There are several major areas it is necessary to research in order to do well in the online marketing industry.  An internet marketing company should have a good understanding of what people want to find on a website when they visit.  It’s also important to know how a user’s eyes move about the screen, meaning what section of the monitor a visitor will see first, where a user is likely to spend most of his or her time looking, and where the user is most likely to look last.  A good internet marketing company must also keep up with changes in technology (I.e. smart-phones, apps, iPads, etc.)

In summary, marketing a business via new technologies shows much promise for small companies working to compete with larger corporations, but in order to get the most out of this move to the online world a business must keep up with all the new information, or hire a good marketing company who does.

Tell me what you think.  Do you like lots of pictures on sites you view, or lots of information?

Earlier today, I received a call from a gentleman looking for another company.  When he found out we built websites, he said “Well hey, maybe you can help me with something”.  He went on to explain he needed possible help with his website and asked me to send him some information.  It sounds like we may even get a client from a wrongly dialed number.  That’s pretty cool.  The following is the email I sent to him and in short it’s a little about what we do and why what we do works.  I hope you like it.

I talked to you on the phone a few minutes ago.  Attached you’ll find information about what we do and why we think it’s important.  Because you already understand the importance of having a website, I think you’ll like what we have to say about what we do and you will appreciate working with us.

You hit the nail on the head when you talked about people in California costing you so much in advertising because they are clicking on your pay per click links and yet people there don’t even purchase from you. We know it’s important not just to drive traffic to your website, but the right traffic to your website, meaning buyers.  Anyone can claim they’ll send people to your website, our goal is to send buyers to your site, people who are looking for your product and who are in your area.  I know if you chose to work with us you will get buyers to your site instead or browsers and without having to pay per click. It’s what we do best.

Below are links to a couple of our websites you may like.

http://osagecountygov.com This is a site we built for Osage County Government.  They have audio, video and text. We will show you how to add this to your site.

http://specsopticalonline.com This company website features a PayPal Shopping cart feature you can add to your site to take orders and to allow buyers to enter their credit card information right there on your site. We can show you how to add a Paypal shopping cart to your site and update it too.

http://scottcitypizza.com This site features a cool little slide show on the first page, and has links to the business’ Twitter account and to a Facebook fan page we created for the business.  If you would like, we can show you how to use these social media networking sites to drive traffic to your business as well.

All in all, we are great to work with because we can create for you a beautiful website and show you how to drive traffic to that site using search engines, social media network sites, and YouTube.  During the Tour of Missouri, a bicycle race held in Missouri this last summer we used these tools to drive around 20,000 page views on our Tour.Missouri.Me website in one week.  I hope you will give us the opportunity to help you do the same.