In todays economic state it has become even more difficult to get customers to purchase from you. Today it seems like just about everyone is pinching their pennies. This is especially true when you are selling goods that are considered frivolous and indulgent like jewelry. However, just because financial times are a little tough does not mean that you cannot find new jewelry store customers for your business. The reality is that jewelry is often a celebratory and cherished purchase. It is one that is often tied to emotion, and because of that people will continue to purchase jewelry even in the toughest of times. Your job is to figure out how to get prospective jewelry store customers to purchase your goods. Thankfully, this is not as difficult as it sounds. With a few easy steps you can dramatically increase your business.

The first thing that you must think about is what do you want your marketing to achieve? Obviously your goal is to get more jewelry store customers. However, that does not completely answer your question. you want to explore this question a bit further. Spend some time thinking about the type of jewelry store customers that you want to achieve. Are you looking for one time shoppers, or would you rather focus on building your repeat clientele? What is your price point? Knowing this can help you know where to advertise so that you can bring in those who can afford your pieces. Additionally, you will want to spend some time mapping out where you see your business progressing to in the coming years. Having a three and a five year plan is a good place to start. You should also spend some time creating evaluation tools for yourself so that you can map your progress toward increasing your jewelry store customers.

Once you have answers to these questions you are prepared to continue your research. You must take some time to discover which of the marketing options are the best fit for your company. There are many different marketing methods that you can choose from, but not all of them fit every business model. First you should take a careful look at what you have been using and just how effective it has been for you. Evaluate the financial investment that you have made and how far that has gone for your business. Use those findings to narrow down your choices. Additionally, you can always test out a couple of different marketing methods with a special offer to see how many jewelry store customers that you can gain.

There is a lot of competition out there for jewelry store customers to choose from, and to be a success you must show your customers why your business is the best one to frequent. To do this there are two things that you must do. You must show your customers what you have to offer them, and why you are the best vendor to buy from. To do this it is important to understand what your base clientele is looking for. One of the best ways to do this is to give a survey for your customers to find out what they are looking for and what is most important to them when it comes their purchasing decision.

You also want to focus on developing your current jewelry store customers. One of the best ways to build your business is to embrace and celebrate your best customers. Find ways to reward them for their dependable repeat business. Make their shopping experiences even more pleasant. The truth is that your best customers have friends who are probably just like them. If they have a great relationship with your business they are likely to recommend you to their friends who will hopefully become repeat customers for you.

One mistake that many businesses make is that they do not advertise at the right time. You want to be sure that your business is most visible when your jewelry store customers want to buy. For example, the week before Christmas is one of the largest jewelry buying times. However, most stores stop advertising during that week. Many businesses lose out on potential sales because customers simply forget about them. It is important that you take time to map out the best times for you to advertise and that you take advantage of those ideal moments.

Finally you want to be sure that you give your jewelry store customers the message that they want to hear. This can be accomplished by careful planning when it comes to the copy on your marketing materials. Again, that survey that you sent to your customers can come in handy. You should have asked them what was most important to them in their buying decisions. Use that information in your message. If your customers are interested in quality point out how your jewelry is of higher quality than your direct competitors. Or perhaps your customers are most interested in finding a price that they can afford. If that is the case you should highlight the value that your goods carry with them. Additionally, do not forget to embrace sentiment in your marketing message as jewelry store customers are often purchasing birthday, anniversary, and celebratory gifts.

Though times are tough that does not mean that your business needs to suffer. There are jewelry store customers out there looking for the best place to purchase from, and your business can be that place. However, that will not just happen magically. It will take some effort on your part, but that effort is worth the time and energy that you are going to put in. By putting in some effort toward correctly marketing your business. By deciding what you want your marketing to achieve, exploring which marketing options are the best option for your company, showing jewelry store customers why your business is better than the rest, celebrating your current customers, and advertising at the right time you will start to see an increase in your profit margins.

Plumbing entrepreneurs jump into the business because they have probably heard stories about how plumbers get an automatic and growing stream of customers calling them day in and day out. They also might have come across success stories on the Internet about hand-to-mouth plumbers striking it rich. These factors entice entrepreneurs to enter the plumbing business, but after opening their shop, they realize the hard truth – they do not have any plumbing leads, and therefore, no customers.

Lack of customers is very frustrating for any business, whether start-up or established. There are loans to be squared, salaries to be paid, and a family to look after. Plumbing businesses often throw in the towel because of lack of quality plumbing leads. In their frustration, they either close shop or buy lists of customers from Internet list brokers and then resort to telemarketing or email marketing. This marketing, if not done right or done in a hurry, can quickly add up the costs. So, what should be done? Here is a step-by-step guide on how a plumbing business, established or start-up can get qualified plumbing leads.

Guide to Generating and Exposing Your Business to Quality Plumbing Leads

Before you read the guide, please know that the majority of customers browse the Internet to locate professional plumbing services that charge reasonably. Very few customers consult the Yellow Pages.

1. Get a Better Business Bureau (BBB) accreditation. It implies that the plumbing business is honest, transparent and trustworthy. Contact them and a BBB representative will contact you with more information on how to get accredited. Once you are listed with the BBB, your business name and contact numbers are published. Any search for BBB accredited vendors shows up on the first page of search engines, exposing a plumbing business to local residents and national construction contractors.

2. Create a professional website. It should be simple, easily navigable and informative. Moreover, a website is like an advertisement that’s published 24/7. If the website can be easily discovered on major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, then customers will automatically start making enquiries. The website must carry a feedback/enquiry form and must prominently display the contact numbers. It is not expensive to create and publish a website – all that has to be done is to locate a professional service that has some track record of creating interactive websites for plumbing businesses.

3. Get a professional to perform SEO on your website. Onsite SEO includes strategically placing relevant keywords into content and into the HTML programming (title, meta and other tags). Keywords are mined by using the Google Keyword Tool and by visiting competitors’ websites, right-clicking on their web pages, choosing “View Source,” and then extracting keywords from the chosen file. Stay away from unethical SEO practices – these practices may bring in traffic over a short period of time, but end up blacking out a website for a really long time if caught by the search engine.

4. Register the website on directories, search engines and Google Maps. There are many directories, including niche Internet directories for plumbing businesses (for example: plumbingweb.com/, Emergency-Plumbing.com, APlumbers.com, and more). DMOZ and Yahoo are important web directories. The business must be listed on prominent search engines as well (Google, Yahoo, and MSN). Millions of users browse Google Maps to locate local businesses. The plumbing business must register with Google Maps to get direct and qualified plumbing leads.

Here is an important FYI: People will not just search for “plumber.” They will add in a locality or a zip code as well. So, the keywords used must be long and determined after careful research.

5. The next step is to create interactivity and provide helpful information. Plumbing businesses must open a YouTube channel (remember, YouTube is a Google company and results show up on Google’s search result page # 1) and post helpful how-to videos. For example: How to fix a leaky tap; Plumbing precautions to take while going on a vacation, etc. Helpful videos will automatically draw customers to the plumbing business. Plumbing questions on forums should be answered and the website link must be included in the signature. Helpful how-to articles should be written and distributed to article directories like Ezine Articles.

6. After setting up an interactive, professional and helpful website and starting Internet marketing, it makes sense to buy plumbing leads from a trusted company. Email marketing is cheap and Plumbing businesses can send personal, non-salesy letters to customers in their area informing about their existence and services. Emails must not be sent more than once in a month. Plumbing businesses can also distribute fliers in the localities they can cover.

7. Construction contractors regularly outsource work to plumbers. Though private sector construction is hurting because of the recession, government contracts are unaffected. Plumbing businesses must search for association of construction companies, become members, get the members’ list and send direct mail to every construction contractor. They should follow up their direct mail with an email. Construction Contractors make for solid plumbing leads because they outsource work in bulk.

8. Plumbing businesses can telemarket their services to Construction Contractors as well. It won’t cost much because one telemarketer can make about 5-7 calls in an hour, and the cost of a work-at-home mom who works for 4 hours in a day is not much. There are many Internet telecalling services available as well. Remember, that the service must not be outsourced to a developing country because the cultural and accent differences can actually lose business.

These were some of the practical, deep down-in-the-trenches methods of getting qualified plumbing leads. Though the economy is in a recession, the demand for plumbing services is steady. Foreclosed homes too will gradually get taken and their old plumbing fixtures will need replacement. Garbage disposals, gas pipes, bathroom equipment, fixtures, and water pipes are not dependent on the economy. They need regular plumbing care. So, a plumbing business must get its act together, set up a website, market it well (as above), and watch plumbing leads and business grow.

With hundreds of millions of folks logging into Facebook everyday it’s obvious that it won’t be going anywhere soon. As a Small Local Business Owner there are certain actions you can take on Facebook that will give you much better traction. In order to become successful there are certain daily actions you will need to take. The keys to the castle will be yours if you can learn how to market the right way Using Social Media.

What You Need To Focus On

List Building – Use Social Media to build your mailing list and engage your prospects. Once you build a healthy list you have a cash on demand database of hungry prospects that are itching to do business with your company.

Own Your Own Blog – When I say your own blog, that is exactly what I mean. You need complete control of your blog. Never get a free blog, it must be on a domain you own and control. Plus who is going to take you seriously if you are hosting a free blog? I’m not comfortable with the idea of giving someone else control over any aspect of my business, and Jeff nor myself will ever recommend that any of our clients do this either.

Your Small Local Business Prospects that are using Social Media these days are looking for information about a particular business before they make a decision as to whether they want to use it or not. For example a prospect might be looking for a Bankruptcy Attorney. They might trust an attorney with an active Facebook Page that’s constantly engaging with their target audience than an attorney with a Facebook Page that hasn’t posted on it in 20 months. It doesn’t matter which attorney is “better”. It’s all about using the web to build trust with clients and once you truly understand that this is the only proper way to use Social Media you’ll be set for life.

You should always aim to drive people from your Social Media Pages to your company blog. Once they get to your blog you will use it to create multiple calls to action with them. One good example of this would be to offer them a 50% off coupon for subscribing to your email list. You can place a nice Opt-In Form on your blog to make it real easy for people to get on your list.

There’s also a WordPress Plugin called the WP Greet Box. This will give you the ability to show your visitors an ad at the top of each of your blog posts. This is a perfect way to drive traffic from your blog to your website.

You should get accounts at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter just for starters. There are WP Plugins and other software that will teach you how to integrate all these services properly. For example each time I make a blog post, it also gets placed on our companies Facebook Fan Page and our Twitter page. This is a concept called Social Media Integration, and it multiplies your blogging efforts by giving you a Social Media Presence at the same time. Doing this right now will put you 10 steps ahead of the competition.

But if you wait 2 more years before you do any of this you may not be able to get the required traction necessary to stay ahead of your competition.

If you own a Local Business you might tend to think that all you need to do is get a blog set up, state your opinion and publish it on the web in the form of a blog post. While you can certainly do this and it won’t hurt, there are certain techniques you can implement to ensure you get the best search rankings possible.

Keyword Density Factors

When writing content for the web, whether it goes on a website or a blog, you need to write it a certain way for it to be the most effective. You should go after 1 keyword phrase for every blog post you write. For example if you own a Hair Salon in Carlsbad, CA., a good keyword phrase might be Carlsbad Hair Salon. When writing for example you can refer to your salon as Mary’s Carlsbad Hair Salon verses just Mary’s Hair Salon. Writing just Mary’s Hair Salon won’t pull up results for folks searching for a Hair Salon in Carlsbad, CA.

Many times what I like to do is write my blog post on paper and proofread it first. I make sure the keyword phrase I use is in the title tags, meta tags, keyword tags and is “sprinkled” in the content at least one time for every 100 words of content. So if I write a 1,000 word blog post that keyword phrase will be mentioned within that post 10 times or so. It might be mentioned 7 times or 12 times, but it will be somewhere in that 1 percent keyword density range.

It’s amazing the high percentage of Small Local Business Owners who don’t even have their own blog yet. Keyword Research is the topic for an entirely different article, but with your own blog you can start killing your competition by writing blog posts around long-tail keywords that represent the type of business you run and where you run it.

Blog Post Syndication

There are two different schools of thought on this, so I’m not going to try to convince you which one is correct, but what we do and what has worked for us in the past is that we will write a relevant blog post. We will leave it on our blog a few weeks until google finds it. Then we will take the same article and submit it to all the top article directories. This will build lots of extra backlinks to our blog with the author bio.

An author biography is a short statement of who you are and what you’re offering on the internet. You are allowed to place two hyperlinks back to your website or blog in your author bio. I usually send one to a landing page to collect leads and the other to my main site for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reasons. The other thing I like to do with an Author Bio, which is a great strategy for Local Business Owners, is to send one link to the main page and the second link to an inner page or the actual blog post. If you’re a Small Local Business Owner and pay one of your employees to make just one blog post per day, this is a great use of their time if you are paying them by the hour.

There are tons of other methods you can use to get links and more customers, Jeff and I tell all our clients if you just follow the one blog post per day rule in addition to what we do for you, your competitors will be so far behind you within a year or so that they won’t have a clue on what they will need to do to catch up to where you’re at now. They will always wish they would have hired us to get them started before you did.

You really can’t find a better place to list some of your unneeded items and generate some extra cash than Craigslist. The problem with Craigslist is that if you don’t list your item a certain way you are going to have trouble selling it. There are some common sense tips you can employ when writing ads for this service that will greatly increase the chances that you will sell what you’re trying to sell.

Draft An Awesome Eye-Catching Title

Once a visitor lands on your Craigslist page you only have a few seconds to grab their attention. Make sure the title is as descriptive of the product as possible. Would “Beach Cruiser For Sale” peak your interest more than “Red Laguna Beach Cruiser With V-Bars & Shimano Brakes” be more enticing to open? It’s common sense when you think about how, however these days common sense isn’t always so common as it use to be anyway.

Implement Images Into Your Ads

Since Craigslist lets you post up to 4 images without charging you, why not just take advantage of this? Personally I would much rather purchase a product from someone that had an image in the ad so I know what I’m about to purchase. On the other hand, if you are a Local Business trying to get more clients, consider uploading pictures of your office or sending them to your website. Sending Craigslist visitors to your website is a great way to build your business due to the local nature of Craigslist.

Check For Grammatical Errors

Never submit your ad if it contains grammatical defects or if it contains fragmented sentences and so forth. Use free spell checkers as well as internet dictionaries to look up the definitions for words which you are unsure how to spell or are unsure of exactly what they mean. Always lean toward the side of caution when promoting to the masses.

Let Prospects Contact You By Phone

Jeff and myself use a 1-800 voice mail system. What we do is we post our phone number and let people call us since we can’t always depend on people contacting us through the generic email address Craigslist provides to everyone for free.

Stay Cool And Adhere To Craigslist Guidelines

For the most part I’d say Craigslist is pretty laid back. They have their own way of doing things and as long as you use their service for the right reasons you shouldn’t run into any issues.

Whether you own a pizza shop in Atlanta, GA. or a Mexican Food Restaurant in Oceanside, CA. you will find the same challenges every other local business owner has. And this challenge will be to do whatever it takes to entice customers in your area to eat at your restaurant instead of your competitors. Other than making great food which I’m sure you have, here are some great tips that will help your local restaurant business tremendously.

1.) Capture Each Of Your Customers Contact Details

If you want your restaurant to be the King Tut Restaurant in your locale, make sure to give each customer a customer satisfaction card along with their bill. Each customer who fills this out will go into your online follow-up database. Make sure you ask for their Name, Email, Phone, Mobile Phone and complete address at a minimum. These cards don’t have to be fancy, but they should be CMYK and done by a professional printer. Also to increase the response rate offer something free like a soda next time they come in for filling it out.

2.) Build an Internet Mailing List

As an incentive to any subscriber who chooses to join your mailing list, offer a deep discount or something free to get them through your doors for the first time. An example might be a 25 cent coupon to redeem a soda. This way it doesn’t cost you an economic loss to give them one but they think they are getting a steal. If you live in a mid sized city chances are the majority of people in your city don’t even know you exist or they get so busy in their daily lives that they just pass on by your restaurant without giving it a second thought. Your job as the marketer is to make everyone within a 15 mile radius give your restaurant a second thought.

3.) Offer Weekly Raffles

Allow your customers to drop their business cards into a fish bowl right by the front cash register. Offer them a weekly drawing and give away one free meal for two each week randomly to just one lucky person. This will allow you to keep building your internal mailing list larger and larger. The benefit of this is that you can now start getting creative with your offers and start offering specials to incentivize more people to visit on slower days.

4.) Buy 10 and Get One Meal Free Punch Cards

Some restaurants are giving our punch cards these days. Each time the customer visits your restaurant and purchases food the manager or employee punches out one of the numbers on the card. Once all 10 numbers are punched out, the customer will turn in this card next time they visit the restaurant for a free meal. I’ve seen quite a few Oriental Buffet’s doing this very successfully.

5.) Offer Free Magnets To Customers On Their Way Out

I’ve only seen a few local business owners do this and I’m not sure why since these are so powerful. You can purchase 500 of them these days for $80.00 so why not give them out. Customers might forget about business cards buried in their pockets but they won’t forget about magnets, they will see your business each time they get food out of their refrigerator. Plus people like collecting magnets so why not use that opportunity to place your offer in front of them?

6.) Offer Extras like HDTV and Pool

The cost of HDTV has gone way down over the last few years when they were very popular. You can get them now for just $200 to $300. The benefits of offering TV to your customers while they are dining in your establishment is it will keep them there longer which means that they will on average spend more money while they are there. You don’t have to let the customers pick the channel of course. If you run a sports pub you might play ESPN. Or if you run most other types of restaurants you can play CNN or some other news stations. News Stations tend to be neutral and cater to all audiences and genres. If you have room you should include a pool table, foosball table and arcade games. These are also known to keep people around your restaurant longer which means more revenue for you. And in many cases these items themselves pull in additional revenue.

7.) Decorate Your Walls With Happy Customer Photos

Another cool idea for creating more of a home feel to your restaurant is to take pictures of people eating there with their permission of course. Then tape or pin these pictures to one of your walls or every wall. Doing this goes a long way in creating that community feeling and giving your restaurant credibility among the local residents which is where a vast majority of your business will come from. You can even add captions at the bottom of these pictures or on the wall right under the pictures. Some people even fasten these photos or glue them on the wall diagonally giving the collage or wallpaper effect.

8.) Create a Facebook Fan Page

Most of your customers whether you realize it or not are looking on the web to find you before they visit you to eat. This means that you need to be on Facebook and have your own Facebook Fan Page.

There’s many other ways a local restaurant owner can get leads like using Mobile Marketing. Get your Free Consultation and Website Analysis and we can help your business implement all of these things.

Everything these days is about gaining momentum. Today we’re going to talk about 10 things you can do as a Local Internet Business owner to start gaining serious momentum for your business. What you decide to do in the next few months could make a difference in how your business does over the next 30 years. Since you are already in direct competition with similar businesses in your local area, you might as well take advantage of this free article to make some moves to propel your business to a new plateau.

1.) Get Your Local Business Listed on Google Maps

If your business like most these days depends on people finding out where you’re located and calling you then Google Maps is where you want to be. Make sure you get your business listed on Google Maps as soon as possible. The longer your business is listed here the more credibility it will have.

2.) Get Listed at all the Yellow Pages Style Repositories

People think that there are just the Internet Yellow Pages or Superpages out there but the truth is there are at least a dozen websites out there like these. These directories will also give your business a chance to land on the front page of google. Most of these sites would rather sell you a paid listing rather than giving you a free listing. However if you search diligently you’ll eventually find the right place to add your free listing.

3.) Get Listed on the Top Review Websites

Websites like Yelp, CitySearch and about a dozen others will give your customers the opportunity to submit a written evaluation about your business. There is a high probability that your website won’t be added to these review sites if you don’t manually add it yourself. What’s even worse is that if you don’t add this information yourself these websites may add it incorrectly. Anytime you find a review site you can add your business to you should just do it.

4.) Start a Blog For Your Company

Starting a blog that represents your company is one of the smartest things you can do. You should write at least a couple posts per week and link to your products and services. You should also link out to other websites that speak well about your company as well as link to Company Press Releases, etc.. Another thing you should do with your blogs is internal linking. In other words randomly internal link from one blog post to another. These internal links have just as much value as external links. Also periodically link out to a website that has major authority in your niche. Doing this will help Google trust your site more so they won’t think you’re hogging all the action.

5.) Jump on the Social Media Bandwagon

Make sure you have accounts at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube as soon as possible. It’s only a matter of time before your competition does. Actively participating in Social Media activities as a local business will substantially raise the trust and credibility of your business with your customers. It will also allow you to announce coupons and specials to your customers in real time.

6.) Post in Internet Forums

Most niches these days have Internet Based Forums associated with them. These forums don’t have to be locally based either. The key to making these work for your business is to join these with the intention of creating posts and helping people. Most forum moderators will allow you to post a signature file after you make a certain number of quality posts, for example 20-20 posts. Preferably find forums you know are being spidered by the search engines.

7.) Optimize Your Main Website

This means doing tasks some people hate like Meta Tag Creation and implementation, content keyword phrase optimization and making sure there is enough content on your website for Google to take it seriously.

8.) Add Personal or Screen Capture Videos

A video is content just like this article is considered content. What I’m trying to say is that videos can rank for targeted keyword phrases just like content can. So make it a point to create as many videos as you can for your business. Then upload them to Youtube and at least a dozen other video repositories.

9.) Add Your Site to Web Directories

You can spend as little as $1.00 to add your website to some pretty powerful Web Directories. Make sure you submit your site to all the relevant free directories you can track down. What’s cool is you’ll only come out of pocket one time for almost all of these places.

10.) Build an Email List

This topic has been discussed for years yet so few local business owners are doing it. No matter what type of business you run think of offering something free as a PDF file like a coupon. Any local internet business could offer some sort of coupon as an intentive for someone to subscribe. Make sure your website visitors subscribe to your newsletter before they receive the coupon.

Ironically I haven’t even tapped the surface regarding things you can do to help your Local Internet Business get the exposure it deserves. But these tips are a good start and we know dozens of other ways to drive even more local traffic to your business. Sign up for our Free Consultation & Free Website Analysis to put you on the path to domination.

Domino’s Pizza is not too big to realize that they need to increase their local marketing efforts as well. In a recession it’s not hard for a bigger company to take the foot off the gas when it comes to local marketing efforts, but Domino’s has promised to step things up in spite of the economic recession we’re in. Sometimes when the going gets tough, the tough need to get moving which is what Domino’s intends to do here by using this opportunity to spend even more to gain local market share in every area their franchise has a presence. What’s even cooler is that more and more local franchise outlets are starting to employ social media on a local level as well which will allow each store to maintain a closer relationship with their current customer base.

Facebook and Twitter and two of the most popular social media sites restaurant owners should be using these days. There are plugins that will post every twit to your facebook wall and vice versa. Make sure you understand this technology and are using it because if you don’t you can easily get left behind in the next few years. Just having a brick & mortar presence for your business isn’t enough these days. Imagine getting up in the morning and posting your latest deal on your facebook page. Everyone who visits your facebook page will see this ad, and 82% of all customers are now searching on-line for what they want.

Make sure you get your Free Consultation & Website Analysis and see what we can do for your business today.

Okay so you want to know how much free Organic Search Engine Traffic you will get depending on which top position you have in the Search Engine Results Pages or SERPS for Google. So you’ll understand how this works lets take a nice even number like 100 and assume that a particular keyword phrase gets 100 searches per day. If you are in Position #1 you can expect 42 unique visitors or “clicks” per day to your website. Jeff and I have this memorized and we’re posting this for the sole purpose of educating our clients.

Position #1 – 42%
Position #2 – 11%
Position #3 – 8%
Position #4 – 6%
Position #5 – 4%
Position #6 – 4%
Position #7 – 3%
Position #8 – 3%
Position #9 – 2%
Position #10 – 3%

You can see how important it is to get in the top 3 positions in Google. However any top 10 position will get you leads and is better than no position, especially if you are involved with a business that pays you thousands of dollars per client. Even being on Position #9 on Google can get you an extra client or two per month, and if each client is worth thousands of dollars to you, imagine how much this can add up to each year. And remember all these traffic and client dynamics represent JUST ONE keyword. Think about what can happen when we start trying to optimize you for 5, 10 or 20 keywords per month. Hopefully you are starting to see the power in this.

And this doesn’t count how many word of mouth client referrals you will receive or the increased traffic effect that doing this for your website month after month will achieve for you. Once you achieve these top organic search engine rankings they are pretty much permanent for each keyword.

Make sure you get your Free Consultation & Website Analysis and see what we can do for your business today.

Because of modern technology we are changing the landscape regarding how we market our services on the internet today. Back in 1998 there were limited traffic and promotional resources, and you were pretty much on your own to figure out how to use these, especially since internet video wasn’t at a minimum back then. In fact 13 years ago only the Internet Elite were producing videos, now middle school students are getting tens of thousands of views to their youtube videos. Maybe you’ve heard of the Panda Update and maybe you haven’t. What this means is that thin affiliate content sites are getting the boot with google or at least losing a lionshare of their traffic. Sites that are generated with many long-tail keywords around a certain product or service are getting slammed hard. When I was a kid my Dad told me there was no such thing as a tunnel that was completely dark, especially if you brought your flashlight and some extra batteries.

What my Dad meant by this was when one door closes another one always opens, sometimes even wider than the first door that just slammed shut in your face. While using SEO for affiliate websites might become more vexing in the future to create, Local SEO is about to explode and for a few reasons. Before we get into the reasons lets briefly define Local SEO so we’re on the same page. At least our definition of this term are companies who are in direct competition with local companies in their area but have an internet presence online. What makes these companies different from companies that compete globally? Companies that complete globally are in competition with people all over the world. However local websites are only in competition with people in their city or county. The reason for this is all the competition and customer acquisition is obtained from customers within driving distance to this enterprise.

It is typical for a Local SEO Company to compete with anywhere from six to 100 different companies. It might sound like a lot but on the internet that is nothing. The reason I say this is because websites who compete globally or against websites located all over the world compete with thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of websites. This doesn’t mean that an SEO Company trying to help your internet business rank doesn’t have to know what they are doing. I’m just pointing out that there is a lot less work involved in ranking local SEO sites since you’re only competing with SEO Professionals in your immediate area. And there’s a good chance they might not be very good at what they do if they even exist at all. The reason I say this is because SEO is still a relatively new science. I’m not gonna say it is the hardest discipline to master but it does take some understanding of abstract concepts.

Local Internet Businesses that are working hard to stay on top of their game just don’t have the time necessary to tackle link building, social media integration as well as keeping up with Facebook and all the changes that are constantly taking place with video sites like Revver, Google Video and the list goes on. If you as a local business owner were to take the time to learn this you could, but it would take at least a year to get up to speed. Then you would have to stay up on these changes which is a full time job. Jeff West and myself (Brian Garvin) have made it a priority to stay on top of these changes because it’s what we love to do and professionally this is all we do. If Jeff and I wanted to become Doctors, Lawyers or Accountants we would have started going to school for that at least a decade ago, but SEO is what we do and is what we love. And we agree with Zig Ziglar that you become successful by assisting others in getting where they need to be.

Another concept that many will never get when it comes to SEO is that when you’ve spent the last 45 months or so like Jeff and I have studying SEO and competing in the global environment, you start to get very technically proficient and start learning what it’s like to fight an uphill battle. Making the shift from Global SEO Marketing to Local SEO Marketing becomes very easy and competing with other Local SEO Businesses on behalf of your client is similar to taking candy from a baby. Something else you’ll be happy to hear is that Google now favors Local SEO Businesses, in fact they love them. As a general rule the sites have been around a long time, and they aren’t trying to artificially manipulate the search engine rankings. By this I mean they aren’t using Black Hat SEO tactics to try to trick google. Jeff and I only deal with White Hat SEO, which is totally ethical tactics that will get your local business noticed to the rest of the world.

The great thing about SEO Marketing, especially for local businesses is that if your SEO Campaign is executed correctly not only can you dominate your competition in your specific local market, you can do it legally and ethically still. While the Google landscape for affiliate marketing and bad content is causing millions of pages of content to be moved to Google’s supplemental index, good quality content still remains right where it should be, at the top of the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages). So the Panda Update will not affect Local SEO Businesses, as long as the content you generate for your website is unique and original and is at least 500 words long. However to be safe I’d recommend going at least 750 words for your content for each article. The other thing Google likes to see when it comes to backlink building is a variety of links from many different sources. This is what takes time and expertise to keep up on, since all these places are constantly changing their submission rules and rules for keeping your links on their sites. However once you get links on these sites they usually stay forever.

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