Internet Marketing for Small Businesses

By Steve Albright

A small business owner faces many challenges and headaches running the day to day operations of their company. This includes everything from managing employees, tracking finances, developing advertising strategies, and tons more.

However many small business owners are not taking advantage of one of the greatest advertising resources at their disposal. This refusal to modernize and take their business to the internet is having drastic effects on their profits.

Despite countless research studies proving the effectiveness of online marketing, it has mostly been larger firms who are taking advantage of internet marketing.

The internet offers some amazing and practical advantages for small business owners. In fact the need for internet marketing experts has skyrocketed creating a new industry of SEO, Web Design, and Marketing specialists.

However one of the best things about internet marketing is that you do not need a team of specialists to successfully market your business online. Once you learn the basics of internet advertising you are in a much better position to help yourself than anyone else simply because you know your business from top to bottom.

This means that you know your customer profile and can effectively market your products based on their search patterns and consumer needs. The beauty of internet marketing is that you effectively choose who sees your ads based on the search phrases they type into Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

Here is an example of how internet marketing is superior to standard advertising methods. Lets say you have a pool cleaning business and you take out billboard space at a busy intersection to advertise your services.

This is a perfect example of untargeted adverting which is wasteful and not effective. At best lets say that if 1 out of 1,000 people who have a pool sees that sign, you can expect less than 5 percent of those to remember your business name and follow through booking an appointment.

The more intelligent way of advertising would be through internet marketing. You write out a short two sentence ad for your businesses website and bid on relevant keywords. In this example you would want your ad to show up for search phrases like "Pool Cleaners in Chicago," obviously you would customize it where your business is based.

Now as opposed to traditional advertising, with internet marketing you have two incredible advantages. First off, one hundred percent of the people that see your ads are in the market for your services. Second you only pay when someone clicks on your ad which greatly maximizes your ad cost to sales ratio. As you can see if you are not using internet marketing as a part of your small business marketing strategy, not only are you wasting money but you are also missing out on thousands of targeted customers.

Further you can always increase your conversions by improving your advertising text. Another benefit to using internet marketing over traditional methods is that this can be done without wasting money. All you have to do is edit your ad and resubmit it, a half hour process, something that can not be done with a billboard or magazine advertisement.

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