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www.mybookkeepingbusiness.info How to Start, Run and Grow your Bookkeeping Business, session 1 preview. See what topics are covered in the online session of 90 minutes. Buy the full session at www.mybookkeepingbusiness.info

Small Business strategies to grow in tough times www.growthebusiness.org www.kirbyblandino.com

If you are not implementing internet marketing for small business strategies then it is important to have an understanding of the incredibly power of influence it can have to attract more customers and have a constant flow of fresh leads.

The impact internet marketing for small business can be huge compared to traditional marketing methods such as yellow pages ads, newspapers, radio and even television. As the internet becomes more and more a part of our daily lives with faster speeds and immediate access such as on our mobile phone it has become much easier and quicker for consumers to search the internet for information t5han it is to leaf though a yellow pages directory.

This is one of the major reasons why it is as critical as a small business owner to have an internet marketing campaign executed.

Internet Marketing For Small Business – Your Website

The first step to creating an effective online marketing campaign is to have a website that is optimized for the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. This is also known as SEO or Search Engine Optimization. In simply terms SEO is about getting your website to show up in the search engines when someone types in a specific keyword.

Some of the important elements of a well optimized website is:

Keyword Research and Selection - You can/should use tools like the Google Keyword Tool and Google Insights to help you determine what keywords are being searched most often that are related to your market

Keyword Placement – Once you have researched and selected your keywords that you going to target you then need to structure your website to include them in text, descriptions and tags on your site

Back linking – Are Inbound links pointing to a web page on your site, either from pages on other domains or from other pages of your own site. Backlinks are like “votes” and the more backlinks you have will help you website show up higher in the search engines.

Internet Marketing For Small Business – Social Networking

There are many different ways you can get your website/business in front of more people on the internet and one method that is extreme powerful is though the use of social networking sites like FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Blogs, articles and Forums just to name a few.

You can create videos, articles, participate in conversations with consumers in your market place, people go to the internet looking for information primarily, in many cases they are searching for a solution to their problems regarding your market.

If you can provide solutions to their problems you will gain trust and credibility as an expert in your field and these people will come to your website to do business with you.

Custom Accounting Services, located in Jersey City, is a one-stop solution for all your accounting needs. Custom Accounting Services works with small business owners helping to organize and use their accounting data to make profitable business decisions to minimize taxes, increase profits and maintain adequate cash flow. Other services, such as income tax preparation, business plan writing, cash flow forecast and business analysis are offered.

If you are tired of throwing out your strategies time after time (or you need to throw out the ones you’ve got and revitalise your business!), the phenomenally useful book “Rework”, written by the founders of 37Signals, offers some of the best advice on business strategy I have seen in a long time…  consider these five little gems (and there’s more Rework inspiration at www.onstartups.com) :

“Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service.” If you ever wondered where to find your twenty of so points of difference to your competitors, this is a fantastic place to start!

“You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you’ve done it.” The best way to answer your strategy questions is to put your toe in the water and get real customer feedback.  Don’t just imagine… test and measure!!

“Saying yes when you should say no leaves no bandwidth available for the great rather than the merely good.” What’s NOT in your strategic plan matters more than what is in some ways!!

“The longer it takes to develop, the less likely it is to launch.” Quick wins… quick wins… quick wins are the key to getting traction and profits quickly. I launched a product for BlissTribe before I had a website… I was testing the BlissTribe concept and playing with ideas… now I know it has great legs and is worth putting lots of time into!!

“A business without a path to profit is a hobby.” This is my favourite… I see this happening every day with new businesses… the funny thing is an hour or two spent on developing your business model (ie the plan of where your profits come from) will solve it!!

If you want some different perspectives on Accelerating Your Business strategically, the next Revive Playshop is for you.  21 June 2010 in Brisbane, Australia – miss it and you’ll miss out on insights that will make your business more profitable than you can imagine!!

Mark McClure talks with Charlie Calise and Ralph Simpson on small business strategies for branding., marketing and an overall advertising strategy. Three of the top sales and marketing minds coming together for one show!!!

Dan Lutchansky, CPA gained a strong reputation as a dynamic public speaker and teacher, inspiring many to start and successfully run their own small businesses. He has led public small business workshops, small business classes, and guest lectures. He has been a California CPA for 30 years including five years with two of the largest accounting firms in the world and thirteen years in his own CPA practice. In addition to duties as a CPA, Dan has held general manager and CFO positions, and he set a record for weekly sales for the Special Olympics while working with Dial America, the largest telemarketing company in the world at that time.

Let’s face it – the Internet is here to stay.

If you’re looking for the easiest way to increase revenues in your small business, internet marketing is the answer. So let me explain the 7 reasons why your small business needs Internet marketing immediately.

The first reason is that with the internet you can be where people are looking. There is a statistics out there that 81% of customers are going online first to find out more about a business.

People aren’t using the yellow pages anymore. They are using the internet instead of the yellow pages. If you are not on the internet and, still in the yellow pages, then they are not going to see you.

Also the internet can also deliver sales-ready leads. Whereas with the yellow pages, people might just be curious about your business… when they search for terms on the internet to find your business, about 96 or so percent of the terms that they are going to use are terms indicating that they are ready to buy your service or product.

The Second one is spend time, not money. Internet marketing strategies require more of your time and less of your money compared to traditional marketing. The great thing about this is that you can outsource this to people. They don’t require quite as much money as traditional marketing in most cases depending on what you want to do. And the good thing about it is that they are a lot more targeted and a lot more effective than traditional marketing strategies such as billboards or TV ads or even radio ads.

Third – everything is measurable, which actually goes back to the last point. This is why the internet is so effective. You measure things such as advertising in the offline world but it’s a lot more harder and most people don’t really know how to do it. It’s a lot more harder to setup. In the internet it’s very easy to setup, very easy to track and you can test everything and see which creates the best results, then redo that process again.

The best part of this is that not only can you test and see which strategy your doing works, but you can actually test every single piece of that campaign and create different tasks and find the best one that works. So for example if somebody comes on a page and there’s a headline with a little opt-in form where they can opt-in to get more information or for a free report or for a free consultation or things like that, you can test different offers on that page.

You can test different design layouts of the page. You can test different headlines on the page. You can test a whole bunch of different things. So it helps you get better results faster.

The fourth reason is constant Improvement. This is actually a little bit of what I was showing you on the last slide. Since you can now measure things you can now improve. So once you setup a test and enough results come you can actually figure out like Headline A converted 30% better than Headline B. Well now you just bumped your profit up by 30% just by doing that. You can deliver more opportunity sales on a small budget. What that means is basically that you can get more sales without spending as much as money. In other words, your return of investment is a lot higher using the internet .

Fifth reason is that it’s extremely targetable. You can optimize your marketing efforts for any niche taking into account demographics, psychographics, location and a lot of other considerations. So for example let’s say you live in San Diego and you’re a plumber. You can actually search and only target those people that actually searching for San Diego plumbers.

They are not searching for Cleveland plumbers or Philadelphia plumbers , they are searching only for San Diego Plumbers and they’re gonna go to your website and see that you’re a San Diego plumber and see what you can do. So they are very very very targeted.

Another one is around the clock marketing. With some offline advertisements like a TV and things like that, you can do around the clock marketing. But the problem is ,if you don’t have internet presence already, people are not gonna call your office at 3:00 in the morning when they see your ads and you can’t talk to them. But with the internet you can actually create campaigns that are complete automated.

For example you can actually create campaign where somebody would see your ads on the internet, and they would go to a page and sign up.
You can set it up that as soon as they click that submit button to request more information from you or to sign up for a 30 minute consultation or whatever you can to give away, they can actually get a mobile text from you saying like “hey this is so and so… thanks for signing up .. I’ll get in touch with you in the next 24 hours” or whatever you want to put on that text message. So it’s around the clock marketing.

You are talking with your customers and they can interact with you no matter what time no matter what day. May it be Christmas day or middle of the day when your taking a nap after you ate Christmas lunch or Christmas Dinner. It doesn’t matter, you can do round the clock marketing.

Your product or service can be found by consumers even while you are sleeping. You can literally get leads into your business while your sleeping. Wake up in the morning, check your email and find out you just got 3 new leads and maybe even 1 became a customer while you are sleeping. That is the power of the internet.

The seventh reason is cheaper market research. What do you think it cost to spy on your competitors and see what they are doing? See what prices they have. See what kind services they have. Either you have to do this yourself which actually takes away time you can make money on your business or you can pay somebody to do this.

Well with the internet all it takes is a couple of clicks and you will see boom boom boom. You can literally spy on your competitors . You can find all services they have. You can find out there prices, their marketing funnel and everything else.

You also know what your customers think about you and where the industry is going. If you are following trends, the internet is the biggest trend that ever come to the history of marketing. Not only the internet itself but also mobile marketing. Using telephones and creating apps for cellphones. and things like that. Doing voicemail broadcast and text message broadcast, things like that is the current trends of today.

If your not in there then one of your competitors is gonna be in there no matter where you live. If your not going getting into this stuff, one your competitors is going to before you and they put such a leg up on you that it would be really really hard to come back from that loss.