E-Mail Marketing – is still one of the most popular and effective (no doubt why it is so popular) marketing activities that businesses take part in.

E-mail marketing is, in its purest form, a form of direct marketing that is extremely targeted and track-able.

Since this is an electronic form of delivery and marketing, a business can track stats such as; the bounce rate, the open rate, and the click through rate.

This type of near real time information allows businesses to perform split testing and market tracking and know within a very short time information on which headlines (subject lines) get the highest open rate, which links inside the emails get the highest click through rate, and ultimately which combination of headline (subject line) e-mail content result in a sale.

As you can well imagine, this type of information is extremely powerful for a business on both the front end and the back end of their sales funnel.

Electronic Word of Mouth – or by today’s verbiage Viral Marketing is a very popular method for marketing and/or branding yourself and your business. Today there are thousands of vehicles that a business has at their disposal to ratchet up the Viral affect of their business, product, or service. Using a general Internet term, these vehicles would be referred to as social media.

Today, the social aspect of the Internet is growing at an exponential rate with platforms such as FaceBook, MySpace, and Twitter.

Although these platforms may have initially started out as a way to interlink groups of people socially, it did not take long for businesses and marketers to take advantage of the immense market reach and SEO that these platforms provide. And it’s not only the reach, it’s the unbelievable swiftness at which a business can have themselves in front of a target audience creating a buzz that spread with a viral effect.

Search Engine Optimization is the process whereby businesses and website owners work to improve not only the volume but the quality of traffic that comes to their site via the search engines… and remember we are referring to organic traffic not paid.

SEO is marketing by leveraging an understanding of how the search algorithms work. Now, having said this, the key word here is ‘understanding’ because no one knows precisely what the exact formula is or how the components ultimately are weighted by the search engines.

SEO is really a culmination of on page and off page grooming of each page of a website that makes them ultimately more attractive to the search engines.

To understand this, think in terms of who the customers are of the search engines. They are the people who type in the searches. So, if you’re a search engine, in order to attract and retain your customers, you must deliver the best, the most on target, the most relevant results… else you lose your customers.

So one of your website’s (pages) job is to offer up keyword driven, relevant content that make the search engines look like a hero in the eyes of their customers. If you do this, you’ll be rewarded with higher search rankings, which means your website will be in front of more and more people searching.

Tweaking and grooming the code, the look, and navigation of your website’s pages in order please the search engine spiders is known as on page SEO.

Off page SEO, in a word, is garnering as many quality backlinks to your website and internal pages as you can. A backlink is where someone else’s website puts a link on their site that points back or links back to your site.

Having said this, backlinking isn’t about quantity so much as it is getting quality backlinks from high ranking similarly theme or niched website. Google and the other search engines view these backlinks as social votes for your web page.

As much as it can be, this is a very democratic process and it allows even the smaller websites to compete across the board for organic traffic.

Keep in mind though that this although is important, it is still a high level overview. Google considers hundreds of factors in order to determine the ranking of pages in their search results not the least of with along with backlinks are the relevancy of the page, and the keyword/keyword phrase just to name a couple.

Although Search Engine Optimization isn’t really straightforward or a precisely calculated practice, it does not at all mean that one can ignore it or devalue its importance. It needs to be noted that although some firms may indicate that they can guarantee a high ranking, the reality is that they cannot. Are there best practices that can be employed and deployed in order to give a website page the best opportunity… yes… but guaranteed… not so much.

The point is that a business or website owner needs to be careful if they are considering hiring a service. Make sure that the methods they use to promote your website are completely above board with the search engines (Google). Google or any search engine doesn’t liked to be fooled or spoofed into delivering rankings and traffic to a website, and if your website is doing so, it runs the risk of being de-listed in the searches and at worst, your account shut down.

At LocalBusinessOnlineAdvantage.com we take a more long term approach with methods that have proven themselves over the test of time. We understand that your business is in it for the long haul and you need the type of online market strategy that stratifies your customers, and the search engines that deliver your traffic to your website.

It’s direct, tightly targeted, and focused… e-mail marketing next…

SEM or Search Engine Marketing – is the fastest growing form of online marketing. It’s really not a form… it essentially is the driving component behind most all online marketing.

The bottom line is… outside of paying for your website traffic, if you want pages of your site to appear on the first few pages of the search results of the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo)then you must engage in and become proficient at SEM.

Getting your website (more accurately your web pages) in the top pages of the search results delivers to you by the search engines more market awareness and branding than all other advertising combined.

When speaking of getting your pages ranked at the top of the search engine results, this is referring to the organic search results. An organic search result is whereby a searcher finds websites via the unpaid listings that come up
and not via the paid advertising links that populate the sides of the page.

Per Per Click or PPC as it is known is an advertising tool used by businesses and websites where they pay a determined amount each time on of their ads is clicked on. In other words, they pay for this traffic to land on their chosen page. The fee that the advertiser pays per click is determined by a bidding process. The amount of the bid necessary to garner a good position in the presented list of ads is determined by a number of criteria driven by the keyword that they want to bid on.

This is very simple, quick mention of the PPC process. Pay Per Click is indeed much more involved and complex, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on the organic searches.

When comes to search engines there are still really only three (well actually only one)that dominate the market share, and they are Google, Yahoo, and MSN (now Bing). In fact, there is one that dominates even this short list… Google.

Numbers vary, but even today, it is estimated that Google’s share of the search engine market is in the neighborhood of 70%.

With the search engine being the engine that determine the ranking of web pages which ultimately determines the amount of traffic that comes to a site, suffice it to say that it is a crucial strategy to make the search engines happy with your website and pages.

Enter Search Engine Optimization next…

In a very short span of time, this thing we call the Internet and online marketing has matured into a very powerful marketing platform and has/is changing the way we conduct our business.

In fact, the Internet now gives any business access to literally a world wide marketplace. And not only that, it does so very quickly and very economically. You see, the Internet is, at it’s core, blind justice for all business. It no longer requires a business to have a massive advertising budget to reach a market beyond its local boundaries. The size and/or location of a business are no longer a determining factor when assessing the competition in the world of online marketing.

Today, a rapidly growing number of companies are not only rethinking their overall marketing approach, but they are reallocating their advertising and marketing dollars to the online marketing segment.

This type of move is not without trepidation for many businesses simply because online marketing and the benefits are unfamiliar territory.

One of the greatest benefits to online marketing is its ability to level the playing field. Even small businesses these days can expand their market reach from local to national… even international if they so desire in a very quick and cost effective manner.

It’s not like the days gone by of print, radio, and television (particularly radio and television) where a business had to be large enough and have a large enough budget to achieve this type of market penetration.

An not only that, since online marketing is essentially electronic marketing; almost every activity can be bench-marked, tracked, and monitored in order for business to get on the fly feedback which allows them to make real time changes and improvements that deliver almost immediate results concerning their ROI.

So what are some of these online marketing activities?

Although this is a bit of a loaded question as there are numerous methods and sub-methods, let’s take a look at a few… search engine marketing (SEM), e-mail marketing, and social media marketing.

Even though this may not look or sound like a long list, don’t be fooled; there is a myriad of activities and tasks that surround each of these.

Let’s take a little closer look at search engine marketing

Tracking – is something that the electronic marketing arena has given to business, yet it’s amazing how many never use tracking to its full potential or even at all.

Internet marketers have known for years that many times the only single difference between one who wildly succeeds and the ones who fail is simply that the one who succeeds is constantly testing and tracking results.

For a business, not to do this is quite frankly, inexcusable.

The metrics and statistics that the world of online marketing can deliver to you and your ROI are absolutely invaluable.

Through tracking, a business can know almost immediately whether their marketing campaign is on the right track or not. And not only the entire campaign itself, but all of the individual components of the sales funnel as well.

With the numbers that are involved here, simply tweaking a headline on a sales page, an opening paragraph in the sales page, the subject line of an email, the opt-in box on a sign-up page, etc, a business can almost immediately pick up additional percentage points in their sales conversion rate… and just think if you improved all the components above in your sales funnel by just 10%; the overall cumulative effect rate would probably at least triple your revenue stream.

Tracking and acquiring such valuable information can give you the fire power you need to constantly out perform your competitors not matter whether you provide simple online services, or you have a complete full service warehouse. Plus, understanding the behavior and the needs of your customers can put you out front in the marketplace by launching new services, and products that your audience has indicated their is a passionate need for.

In conclusion…

There is absolutely no doubt that the time arrived for businesses to re-think their marketing strategies… even more so for local business owners. No longer is just running a perpetual ad in the Yellow pages to acquire new business going to cut the mustard.

Businesses must take advantage of every dollar of profit that is available both from new and existing customers. At this point in time, online marketing isn’t something you should be thinking about; it something you need to be deploying. The online market potential is just to vast (and growing vertically) to ignore if you want to remain competitive and even outpace your competitors in today’s business landscape.