New (and old) ideas for driving targeted traffic to your local site

January 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Getting real traffic to your site these days is a never ending battle that most people think is beyond their reach if they don’t spend thousands of dollars on search engine optimization or further fill the pot of gold that Google is building with their pay-per-click Adsense program. Obviously these techniques are a cornerstone of your online marketing program. But there are many more affordable techniques that can help you drive traffic and all it takes is a little elbow grease and maybe a few extra bucks.

I’m not talking about just any traffic though. What we want is LOCAL TARGETED WEBSITE TRAFFIC that drives real clients and customers to your website and your local business. In the ol’ days any link to your site was a good link and traffic was traffic. We all thought that it would reward us somehow. What we want today is high quality targeted traffic that generates results. What those results are depends on the site but regardless, the follow techniques will surely help any site owner affordably jumpstart their traffic and reap real results without spending thousands of dollars. The 10 items listed here are obviously not the only techniques, just some new (and different) ideas to add to your arsenal. Read more


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16 ways to improve your email marketing this year

January 25, 2007 | Leave a Comment

By: Chris Auman
Editor: Dr. Soumitro Das

I believe in the power of email marketing software if it’s used properly. That should include everything from properly setting up a double opt-in system, to effectively writing content that actually drives website traffic. Part of the mission of my web development and marketing company here in Ohio is to provide a vehicle for effective email marketing and to show how to use email marketing effectively. I’d like to start off the year by offering sixteen suggestions on how to improve your results. This is not a “best of” list or the final word on email marketing best practices, but a list of suggestions to jump-start your campaigns.

1) Improve your Opt-Ins - Converting clicks to customers.

Before you focus on any other issue, you need to build a decent list of subscribers. The idea being to eventually convert those subscribers into customers. So, what to do?

Promote your email newsletter in all your print materials and other advertising venues.

Send out press releases about relevant aspects of your product or service and then encourage people to sign-up.

Work hard to provide effective sales copy. Volumes have been written on the art of persuasion - use them and model your message off the masters! (This is a great place to start reading)

Provide incentives for signing up, but don’t make the offer too big or extravagant. It needs to appeal to your target audience, not freebie-hunters who have no interest in your services.

Read more


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Paid vs. organic statistics

January 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I found it kinda interesting the other day when I stumbled over some stats regarding which area of the search engine search results drive the most traffic. If I remember right, it was 70% organic vs. 30% paid. This made sense to me because my clicking habits are similar. I look at the organic search results first by default and if I don’t see what I want right away I’ll scan the paid or “sponsored listings”. Read more


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Promote your site locally with Google local

January 1, 2007 | Leave a Comment

By Chris Auman

So you say you want to advertise your local business but a full online marketing campaign is just too much investment for your small local business. What are your options? Try the Yellow Pages… Online! Now, I’m not suggesting that you call up the phone company to get listed on their website. Most yellow page sites are not even close to providing enough traffic to justify any extra expense. So what are your options you ask? Try Google local and Yahoo local.

Recently, Yahoo Local has rolled out an upgrade to their local search. According to John Battelle’s Searchblog he says “Yahoo Local has rolled out an update to its business model for local merchants, and it’s looking a lot like what the Yellow Pages do, only online, self service, cheaper, and, well, what I’ve been on about for a while - a step towards the online version of what the Yellow Pages really need to become.” Read more


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