Small Business Internet Marketing

Hi Marshall and Gary here

Life is pretty hectic here at Small Business Internet Marketing.  It is amazing the number of small businesses that we come into help who do not have a website, or have a very poorly optimised website, or are having the most cost inefficient Adwords campaign run that you have ever seen.  These are generally a symptom of not having an internet strategy and doing things piecemeal.

Anyway, today it is about affiliate selling online.  As you are probably aware, affiliate selling would be one of the biggest drivers in the growth of the internet.  The fact that so many products today are available digitally mean that the owners of the products are happy to pay away large commissions to sell their product.  This is because once produced, the cost to provide the product is quite often only the bandwidth to download it.  In fact, most internet courses (you know – make $5,000 a week from home for 4 hours work) recommend that you do not deal with products that pay less than 60% commission.   Many internet marketing based offerings pay at 75% – have a look at http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm and search the internet category.

Continue Reading – Undisclosed affiliate selling – how to spot it

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

One of the reasons we run the Small Business Internet Marketing blog is that there are many people in the internet marketing space that want to make you an offer too good to refuse.  But as the saying goes “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is!”.  One example we look at here is whether a high search engine ranking for an article with the rarely searched keyword combination of Marketing for Online Business A Marketing Business Secret will really assist your business.

We believe that our blog offers unbiased and sensible information and advice that can really benefit small business owners, business consultants and anyone wanting to use the internet for commercial purposes.  Have a read though our older posts – you will hopefully learn a few useful internet concepts.

By far the most common “great” offers we see revolve around 2 themes:

1. Get your website built for free;  and
2. Let me drive huge amounts of traffic to your website by achieving high Google search engine rankings.

We have no problem with these offers – when all is as it seems and clearly laid out – but it rarely is.

Offer # 1:  Get a free website built

Continue Reading – The Free offers that cost you

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

Here at Small Business Internet Marketing, we are members or associates of quite a few different professional and accreditation bodies.  So we get to see a lot of communications and offers that flow around.

One that seems to be getting a lot of airtime in many organisations is the pushing of reciprocal links.  Inevitably, the message starts off with something like “Improve your Google ranking” and then goes onto to offer an exchange of reciprocal links.  Whilst we have nothing against reciprocal links as part of a well thought out internet strategy, we have a sneaking suspicion that most people do not quite understand how they work.

One of our earlier posts had a long and detailed explanation about the Google PageRank formula – see How Googles PageRank fits in. If you follow the maths, it is obvious that links from higher PageRank pages will definitely help with your web pages PageRank. 

But a couple of very important things seem to get overlooked in the rush for reciprocal links:

Continue Reading – Beware of the reciprocal link merry-go-round

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

All sorts of interesting bits and pieces exercise our minds here at Small Business Internet Marketing. It is said that inspiration comes from the strangest places. Well, talking about online marketing and internet marketing strategies is no different.

As I was driving my son to school this morning, I saw a learner driver in front of me. The company name on the car was something like AABEC Driving Company. I jokingly said to my son “I wonder if it is still the first driver teaching company in the phone book?” He, like all 16 year old boys, looked at me as if I was some kind of demented fool.

So I had explain the strategy of choosing a business name that was one of the first in the telephone directory (white pages) or was the first listing for the business type (yellow pages). You get it – the most “A’s” and “B’s” at the front of your business name, and bingo – you are first on the alphabetic list. It is one of the original “get your name to the top of the search pile” marketing strategies in the old world.

Continue Reading – Start at the top with SEO

Hi Marshall and Gary here,

We always try and keep you up to date with all that is happening in the world of small business internet marketing, and today we bring you an announcement from Google about it’s Australian Small Business Stimulus offer.

In short:

Google Australia has announced a business stimulus offer, designed to help Australia’s 1.88m small businesses. Google is offering a free $75 search marketing campaign, to help small business reach new customers and drive sales via internet marketing.

More and more Australians are researching products and services online and conducting comparison shopping. the growth in this type of consumer buying and researching behaviour is reflected in recently released online statistics.

Australian search growth by the numbers

* According to Nielsen NetRatings, Australians spend 16.1 hours per week on the internet, more than any other media.
* Over 11.9 million Australians use Google each month. (Roy Morgan, 10 December 2008)

Retail

* Shopping-related queries were 22% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Apparel-related queries were 34% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008
* Queries for Clothing labels and designers were 29% higher in March 2009, compared with March 2008

Continue Reading – Google Stimulates Australian Economy

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

At Small Business Internet Marketing, we focus a lot of our posts on how small business can raise their online profile. However, for many small businesses the profile of the owner(s) and/or key staff can be equally, if not more, important.

Personal promotion on the internet has been generally done through business networks like LinkedIn, although blogging and social networking are becoming significant but do require a lot of attention and time. We come across lots of new online products, service  and ideas; most we closely analyze and then discard – but some really grab our attention.

One that we find useful for small business is from Google who have recently released a new product that directly addresses how to raise your personal profile for a Google search. It is called Google Profiles and can be found at http://www.google.com/profiles.

Continue Reading – Raise your personal profile

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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.

You know how kids at school now days learn a lot of computer stuff. Most learn how to use FrontPage and generally knock a basic website at school as part of their education.

At Small Business Internet Marketing, we have run across this again and again. A small business owner tells us “I couldn’t afford to have a website built but luckily my neighbour’s son learnt how to do it at school, so he knocked one out for me”. They register their domain name (which is always the same as, or as close as possible to, their business name) and up goes the website.

When you go their website - guess what? It looks like it was built by the neighbour’s son. But that is not all, there has been no thought out internet marketing strategy of what the website is trying to do. There has been no work done on what keywords are important. No search engine result analysis has been done. The content on each page has been written by the small business owner at night over a glass of wine because the neighbour’s son says he needs some content tomorrow.

A common internet term for this type of website is a business card, or brochure, site. The website merely tells a visitor (should someone be lucky enough to find it), what the small business is and what it sells and who owns it. The only “capture strategy” for potential new customers is the email address on the Contact page.

At Small Business Internet Marketing, we feel like telling these small business owners that the website is actually hurting their business and that they should take it down and start again with an internet marketing strategy rather than a website.

But we don’t want to start fights between neighbours so we usually say “The website could use a bit of tweaking”.

Next post – How to get some visibility on the internet.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Some feedback we have got on our Small Business Internet Marketing blog is that our strategy is not new at all. After all, everyone is blogging. Even President Barack Obama has a blog (go to his blog if you want a look).

Well, interesting enough, not everyone is blogging. It is estimated that there are around 70 millions blogs in the blogosphere (don’t you just love that word). But only around 15 million of these are active – or to look at it another way, there are 55 million “ghost town” blogs out in the blogosphere with tumbleweeds blowing through them.

Even more interestingly, only around 5% of American businesses have a blog. The number for Australian business is so low that we cannot even find any stats on it.

But wait, there is more. According to a recent MYOB Small Business Survey, only 40% of small business in Australia even have a website, let alone a blog. Around half of Australian small businesses do have a domain registered.

Let us put that into numbers. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says that there are 1.9 million small businesses in Australia (defined as employing less than 20 people). So something like 1,150,000 small businesses in Australia do not have their own internet presence. By definition, this means that the same number do not have an internet marketing strategy.

This is why at Small Business Internet Marketing, we are excited we can help lots of small business owners learn how to set up a blog and post on their area of knowledge and expertise.

Next post – My business has a website built by my neighbour’s son.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Some people following our blog (we got another 2 friends since the last post – yay!) have pointed out that the internet marketeers strategy is generally claimed to be “no cost” – so why are we talking “low cost” for our small business clients. A valid question no doubt.

Two points to note here. Firstly the internet marketeers use as many free tools as possible so they can charge you themselves (you know the blurb “costs $19,950 but exclusively available to you if you sign up today for the one crazy low price of $395, plus a special bonus…”). Secondly, here at Small Business Internet Marketing we think that some of the paid tools out there are superior to the free tools, or are better structured. Always thinking of our clients!!

So we have spent a long time getting what we think are the right tools. We have then spent so many hours we cannot add them up, breaking all the steps of our internet marketing strategy down into small logical steps. We have found out the engineering term “critical path” where every interdependency is found and built into a program in the right place really has a place in our strategy. You know the time you come to do something and realise “oh, I had to do that other thing first before I could do this…bugger!”.

This expression has been heard in the offices of Small Business Internet Marketing more times that we like to think about.

So what we want to share with our small business clients is the benefit of finding out all the pitfalls and blind alleys that we have found – but making sure that they don’t have them! This is why we have broken down the strategy into many, many small easy steps. A bit like our “tasty bite sized pieces” approach we use on our Small Business Internet Marketing posts.

Next post – Everyone is blogging, why is Small Business Internet Marketing different?

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

A number of people who have followed our posts (yes – our friends are reading the blog!) have asked why are they so short. Well at Small Business Internet Marketing we know how busy our small business clients are and how little time they have to read information and articles (much like us, unfortunately).

So we do try to keep our post to around 300/450 words and about a maximum of 3 minutes reading. This way we know we can get a bit of information across each time – quickly and without labouring the point. Tasty bite sized pieces of internet marketing strategy is how we like to think about it.

So back to our internet marketeers from last post. We both thought “why isn’t anyone using this strategy for small business?”. When you think about it, it is tailor made. It is fairly low cost, it coaches the person how to do it, and it is all around getting a high visibility electronically in a certain sector.

For those of us who misspent our younger days watching cartoons, it was like the light bulb appearing above the head of a cartoon character when they had a great idea. Of course we don’t think that we are the first people to have this idea.

So this is what Small Business Internet marketing is all about. Provide our small business owners with the tools to build their own blog in their own area of skill (which inevitably is the same area that their business operates in) to get a high visibility electronically.

So we set about creating a strategy for small businesses around this. This has involved becoming extremely proficient in many areas such as building blogs, keyword search tools, search engine optimisation, video and audio posts, etc. We don’t claim to be gurus – but we aren’t dummies either. Most importantly, we listen to want our clients want and tailor our marketing strategy around this – no multimillion ad campaigns for our clients!

Next post – Do we mean low cost or no cost.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

The last 2 posts have discussed how we needed to come up with a low cost, high visibility internet marketing strategy for our small business clients.

As we looked around at what was out there, we invariably ran across the “earn $5,000 a week from home without working” blasts from internet marketeers. Whilst we would both like to do this, we were more interested when we noticed a striking similarity between our thoughts for an internet marketing strategy that we wanted to do with our clients, and what the internet marketeers are offering.

Basically, the internet marketeer tell their clients to find a micro-niche area of interest to the internet search market (driven off the back of some nifty information that is now made available by Google and other search engines), to set up a blog on this topic, to optimise the life out of the blog, each post, the back links (generally driven by some type of social networking/bookmarking Web 2.0 strategy), find content using news and RSS feeds. Once all this is done, them the affiliate selling links are put up on the blog to “earn the $5,000 a week without working”.

Don’t get us wrong, we are sure that some people make good money out of this strategy. However, we are equally sure that many internet marketeers make very good money through selling this to the internet unsavvy (if there is such a word).

However, what we liked was the tags that generally came along with the marketing blurb from the internet marketeers – “no cost”, “low cost”, “using free internet tools”, “get up and running in a week” – you know what we are talking about. These really “fit” with our small business clients who are wanting an internet marketing strategy that they could do for not much cost.

Next post – the light bulb appears.

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here.

Last post we discussed why Small Business Internet Marketing was created – the need to help small business get a presence on the internet. We quickly realised a lot of our small business clients could not afford to have a website built for them. We say couldn’t afford for 2 reasons – one was cost, but the second more importantly was the lack of any marketing strategy behind the website or blog.

The most depressing comment we see again and again from small business owners on website builder’s testimonials is “Our customers love how it looks”. Well that is great – but isn’t its main purpose to find new customers for the business. The existing customers know how to find you, and what you do – all you are communicating to existing customers is existing and new products (plus brand awareness).

As we searched around for answers for clients, we became attracted to the flexibility, low cost and authority created by a blog. Whilst many website designers love to tell clients about content management systems and how a client can maintain the website once built, we wanted to go one step further. We wanted to give our client the tools to build and maintain their own blog so they had control and could set-up a new blog if desired whenever they want.

We have found that the internet tends to be populated by two types of people – those who know everything and can tell you how to change the HTML coding behind a website to make it do wonderful things, and then those who have a computer and use Google to search the internet and that is about all. We found that the majority of our small business clients fell into this second bucket.

So to all you super internet savvy people out there, our blog will appear to be very basic. And do you know why? Because it is! We want to help small business owners to use the internet to help their business – to become seen electronically and convert this into new customers. We want to hold their hand for the tricky bits but we want to coach small business owners so they can do it themselves. That is why we called it Small Business Internet Marketing.

Next post – Learning from Internet Marketeers

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary

Hi, Marshall and Gary here

Welcome to our new blog called Small Business Internet Marketing. The blog has been a labour of love to get up and running but it is an area of business we feel extremely passionate about.

We both run our own businesses that concentrate on providing practical advice and assistance to small business. We are both Associates of the Institute for Independent Business (IIB), which is a not-for-profit research, training and accreditation organisation. Since 1984 the IIB has been providing invaluable information and access to assistance to meet the needs of independent businesses. If you want to know more about the IIB, go to http://www.iib.ws/.

In the course of helping the Managing Director/Owner (or MDO as we call them in the IIB) with their business, we noted more often than not the business had no presence on the internet - no website, no blog, no advertising, no nothing. In fact, the only way you would ever find them electronically is through advertising aggregators like Hotfrog, TrueLocal, AussieWeb. Whilst these directories are good websites, they do not give a strong presence to just one small business out of the thousands of businesses listed.

We also frequently deal with clients who do have websites. Whilst most of them look great, seldom do any of them have a marketing strategy to support them. Therefore, the time and effort and money that has gone into developing these sites has gone to waste and the owners of the business became disappointed and despondent as the website did not work in attracting sales.

When you think about it, this scenario isn’t surprising as it is like putting your company brochure on the counter of a local takeaway shop and expecting it to generate sales.

This made us think…. there must be some way to help small business address these problems with an internet marketing strategy.

So, the Small Business Internet Marketing blog was conceived.

Next post – Why a blog?

Your business buddies

Marshall and Gary