Archive for March, 2009

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

You will have seen a number of our Small Business Internet Marketing posts talk about internet marketing strategies (after all, it is part of our name). But we think it is also worthwhile to consider the wider issue of internet strategies. Internet strategies need to be considered and decided upon before racing into internet marketing strategies.

Let us give you an example. One business we know has had a website site up for the last few years. It was a typical corporate “brochure” style site – looked nice and told you what you needed to know about the business.

However, one day they decided to analyse why they had an internet presence and how this worked with their marketing. They knew all their work was coming from personal contacts and the invaluable word of mouth. So the website did not really help finding sales leads – what it did do was present their credentials and bona fides in such a way to give potential clients the comfort factor that the business was big enough and experienced enough to deliver whatever they were seeking.

So their site did not have a direct internet marketing sales function.

Continue Reading – Differing Internet Marketing Strategies

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Much has been written about the algorithm that Google use – much of it unintelligible to the everyday internet user. A comment from “softplus” on a post in the excellent SEO site SEOmoz.org is:

How about reciprocal factors? For example: if the competition is high (threshold or range): use the age-factors; otherwise ignore age. With a sigmoid-type function it’s easy to do (given range or threshold) and it is the perfect model for the famed sandbox.

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing we do not pretend to fully understand this but we are inquisitive and ask “Why does the algorithm matter?”

Well let’s go right back to square one- to the Google corporate website.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

One of the Google founders, Larry Page, said:

The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want.

So if someone is talking about a search engines complex algorithm issues, take a deep breath and just remember what it is all about – returning the most relevant results for a search query. And remember the opposite of relevant is irrelevant – so Google will try to ignore (or punish) anything it believes is irrelevant (or deliberately misleading).

Continue Reading – Google and its Algorithm

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Year after year the internet becomes more predominant in attracting the dominant share of the marketing spend from small business. For the first time ever, in 2008 we saw the worldwide advertising spend on the internet surpass all other mediums

As small business demands greater returns for their advertising dollar and move more and more of their advertising spend to this medium, the internet is quickly becoming crowded and highly competitive.

Over the past 2-3 years costs for pay-per-click advertising (PPC) have more than doubled in most markets as the competition hots up for the popular keywords and phrases across all sectors.

The difference between a number 1 ranking and a number 10 ranking on Google can mean the difference between 60% of total search traffic for a particular keyword or phrase right down to 1% – this is what we mean when we talk about high visibility. This variance in the volume of visitors to your website based on your ranking could mean the difference of hundreds or even thousands of leads to your business every year.

Whether your website traffic comes via PPC advertising, banner ads, links, search engines or a raft of other channels, the challenge facing all businesses marketing on the internet is to convert as much of this traffic as possible.

Continue Reading – The Conversion Challenge