“IT CAN’T BE TRUE?”

Read on and find out!

I’m still shaking my head in disbelief.  As we’ve said many times before here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we constantly use our own sites as crash test dummies for many of the latest online marketing techniques.  We also put ourselves through hours, weeks and sometimes months testing the barrage of new products that hit the market.  More often than not we trash most of them as quickly as we initiate them and put it down to good ole testing for the cause.

However, we’re glad to report to you a web traffic technique that is working an absolute treat.  As usual we’re fairly sceptical of any product or service that can claim they will send you 1 million (yes that’s 1,000,000) FREE visitors to your site in as little as 30 days…. Yeah RIGHT we thought. 

I was almost ready to hit the delete button when I thought…. Ah what the heck…. give it a go….. I’ve got a spare five minutes.  Well…. I’m here to tell you, I’m glad I decided to push on a give this program a go because its kicking butt.

Now before we all get overly excited, we have not yet received our GUARANTEED 1,000,000 visitors and nor have we increased our sales by 4000%.  What I can tell you though is we are not only experiencing significantly increased visitor numbers to one of our sites, but a rather pleasant spin off.

Let me give you the low down.  Instead of drving the traffic directly to the homepage of one of our existing websites or blogs, we decided to isolate the traffic and set up a squeeze page consisting of a free offer.  This not only isolated the traffic stats from just this source, it also allowed us to test the conversions on our offer.  This is where the pleasant little surprise turned up…… the free offer is converting at 11.67%.  

Now I’m not sure what sort of conversion percentage you are used to for your own offers, but this is out of the ball park for us.  Now remember, the traffic that is coming to the squeeze page from this system is not targeted in any way – it is not the result of a Google search or link traffic from a related page.  All sorts of products and markets are represented so the offer has to be strong to get this sort of result.

What is the special offer I hear you ask.  It is simply a no strings attached FREE lifetime membership to our eProfit Formula online training site.  What we are obviously getting in return is a list of people who are taking up our free offer that will be open to receiving further correspondence and product offers from us in the future.  In short we are building our list free of charge…. and quite quickly I might add.  Anyone who knows their marketing will tell you that you have to build your list. 

So how does this all work?  We’ll give you a quick overview: 

The system is absolutely free to join.  The FWebtraffic site promotes 6 different text adverts at a time.  When you sign up to use the system, you’ll be given a link to a customized page that contains your own text advert on it in the top position (#1 of 6).

Now, when other people want to sign up for the 6Links system and place their own advert on the site, they will first have to click on your advert (plus the other 5) and view your website for at least 15 seconds to get a special code that they need in order to use the system.  They then add their advert in the top position, and yours will be moved down to the #2 spot.

And this is where the viral nature takes over, and how your traffic and visitors grow in numbers.

Every time someone else wants to use the system, they first have to click on each of the 6 text adverts, and visit your site. And then your advert gets moved down to the next position, all the way to position 6. Every time your advert gets pushed down to the next position, you will have thousands of extra people all promoting your advert, without you having to do a thing.

It is so simple and better still its free traffic. 

The secret to making this system work is two fold. 

First you have to get out there and promote it.  The easiest way to do this is simply do as we have, either send out an email to your own list or write a blog post about it and you’re away.  You don’t need a huge list to start off with, you only need to get 10 people to sign up and you’re off an running.  10 is a good start but what you really want to do is keep promoting so your traffic numbers keep growing.

To make things even easier for you to promote your site, FWebtraffic has created all the tools…. banners, text links and emails all at your disposal.

Secondly, traffic on its own is useless, you need to make the visitor to your site take action…. and in this case quickly.  What we would suggest is once again setting up a squeeze page with a special limited offer, capture your visitor’s data via an opt-in form and use the exercise to build your list.  Build a relationship with your new visitor over time and convert them into a customer.  By all means try and sell them right there and then, but we think you will get better results by building value into your offer over time through regular correspondence to your list.

For an example of our squeeze page visit www.e-profitformula.com Feel free to sign up for the offer – it is open to one and all.

Now for the best bit…. here is the link to FWebtraffic and an example of one of the supplied banners.

Still skeptical?  Well we don’t blame you.  All we can tell you is that it is working a treat for us and most of our clients are seeing similar results as well.  If you’ve got a spare five minutes check it out – you won’t be disappointed.

We’ll keep you up to date with our results.

Until next time

Your Business Buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi Marshall and Gary here

As you will know if you have followed our blog, getting a high ranking in Google exercises our mind regularly at Small Business Internet Marketing and we are always on the look out on how to improve a ranking. We generally use our Small Business Internet Marketing blog as a bit of a crash test dummy to road test various strategies.

One internet marketing strategy that we have been using for the past few months that has really worked for us is Google’s Local Business Centre. What this basically does is provides more like a Yellow Pages type of listing on a Google search query result based on a geographic modifier. In simple words, if someone searches for your business and then adds your location, Google picks this up and returns a result based on information you have supplied via the Local Business Centre facility of Google.

Let’s have a look at an example. Here is the search result for “small business internet marketing” on Google.com.au for “web pages” results. We have removed the higher ranking results for presentation purposes but you can see that we rank number 10 on this basis (we bounce between 3 and 12 on this search, I just ran it again and we came in at number 8). OK, now let’s change the search to “small business internet marketing Brisbane” on the same basis. You can see that we have moved to #1 ranking, but now also get a Google map locator plus a more prominent listing. This has been derived from our Local Business Centre information with Google, we are not listed in the Yellow Pages so it has not come from there.  So if you want to use this for your small business website or blog, you will need a Google account (as we always recommend, you should have a Google account regardless). When you sign in, go to “My Account” and then click on “Local Business Center”. Click on “Add a new listing” and then fill out the form and keep following the steps. Once completed, you will see an entry that looks like this:  That is it. Wait a day or so, then test by doing an appropriate keyword Google search plus a geographic modifier for where your business is located.

We cannot guarantee that it will get you to a number 1 ranking, but it certainly helps. It also helps if you put the location name prominently on your site and coding (we use the meta description, meta keywords and page description to put “Brisbane” in).

The Local Business Centre also has some other funky features. You can offer e-coupons to visitors, visitors can write a review (maybe from a friendly source?) and it gives directions on how to get to your physical location. It is also likely to have site statistics available as well sometime soon.

One of our overarching principles is that if you want Google to like you, use as many of the tools that it provides. Logically it provides these tools to be consistent with its mission statement of returning relevant results for search queries, so by using them you are helping Google in its quest and, most likely, improving your results.

Of course, this does not replace the 7 principles of good on-page SEO that we detailed in an earlier post  – it just adds on top of it to help your ranking.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

We often find, quite rightly, that small business owners are married to their company name. This makes absolute sense to us at Small Business Internet Marketing.

There is a saying along the lines of “small businesses are often started with dream or a fight”. In other words, the owner wants to sell everyone else the dream (perfect flowers, hot rod cars, you name it) or started their company after becoming disillusioned where they worked (you know – “the boss is an idiot, I could do this far better” type person).

Because of this, their business name has a lot of personal resonance to them. This is even more so the case when it is eponymously named – as in a fictional Bob Smith owns a company called Bob Smith Auto Electrician.

So it is a natural reaction for owners to want a domain name for their website or blog that is as close as possible to their business name. Nothing wrong with this, but often the domain name then takes them into to some awfully crowded web space.

It is OK if someone searches for Bob Smith Auto Electrician, and then finds the website and gets whatever information they were after. But we suspect the searcher had to know that Bob Smith Auto Electrician did actually exist before doing the search – not as result of the search.

So if you can find a domain name that is in a reasonably well searched area by Google users that is consistent with what the business does, and doesn’t have huge competition – it is a great start to an internet marketing strategy.

Next post – blogs and domain names
Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Often in our Small Business Internet Marketing posts, we mention getting high visibility on the internet.

What we are talking about here is having some marketing strategy to get your head above the rest of the competition. We never ever say that this is easy. There are very large companies whose whole business is solely around doing this for their clients. However, this is not a justification for not doing it.

In Australia, some 16 million people use the internet. Around 95% of these people use the internet to find product and services online. Google accounts for a whopping 88% of all searches done. So the math is that Google can lead over 15 million customers to your electronic door – theoretically.

So obviously any strategy to increase you web traffic tends to centre around Google. In our category of Understanding Keywords we talk about having to know what people are actually searching the web for, and what particular words and phrases they are plugging into Google.

Knowing this information is a great start, but you have to convert this knowledge into more visitors to your website or blog. For a small business owner, the appeal of the web is all about getting more sales – so converting the visitors to something more than just visitors is just as important.

Next post -domain and business names.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary