MarketingBeyond

Online Small Business Strategies and Resources in Hard Times

This morning's Wall Street Journal brought new hope to online small businesses. Holiday revenues only dipped a mere 2% while brick-and-mortar retailers experienced 20-40% sales declines year-over-year. With prices down, 2009 may be a great year to start an online business.

Small businesses--those under 500 employees--are the cornerstone of the American economy. They hire half of all private-sector workers and generate 60% to 80% of net new jobs. Best yet for our dour economy, small businesses create more than half of non-farm private gross domestic product (GDP). Bottom line: Small businesses will play a significant role in pulling us out of the global economic crisis.

Before jumping into the deep end of the pool and raiding your declining 401K, however, do your homework:

Write a business plan--an essential--that addresses these important requirements:

• Your niche market (describe your target customers in detail)
• A description of your products and services (use online research tools; Google Trends is great)
• Your first year's budget, including a start-up business loan if necessary. Consider these essentials:
  • Affiliate Internet marketing (paying others to market your services or products)
  • Web design services ensuring your website receives high search engine organic traffic
  • Web hosting of your site (s)
  • Internet marketing services, such as pay-per-click advertising on Google, Yahoo and other search engine advertising sites
  • Sales lead generation. As prospects and customers visit your site, it's essential  you capture their names and email addresses for further contact. Remember it takes five to eight impressions before people buy most things. If you continually build an email list, you can contact people interested in your company's products and services. 
  • An email list management company. For under $20 per month, companies like aWeber Communications will manage your lists. Then communicate with your list through regular contacts using promotional emails and newsletters.
  • Consider taking an an Internet marketing course. Many are low cost and help you  understand online business effectiveness. Super Affiliate Handbook, while focused on affiliate marketing, covers the basics for online small businesses
• An Internet marketing strategy. Ask yourself how your product or service is different from others online. Then differentiate your company. You can't be all things to all people and you'll make more money in a narrow segment of a hot market.

For other informative articles and additional resources, check out our new site: ICS Web Marketing: Small Business Strategies.

Traffic Travis: Best Tool for Optimizing Your Website and SEO

For years, I've struggled with SEO. I've bought several books on the subject, played with GoDaddy's web site optimization tools, paid Network Solutions a lot of money to optimize my corporate website and more.

Lots of money. Lots of effort and my websites have never ranked in the highest realms of the search engines. I'm a blogger and consultant and like to spend my time writing, giving advice and, hopefully, making money. However, since I don't have an IT person on my staff, optimizing my websites has played second fiddle. Most of my first page Google and Yahoo hits are due to writing great content and hoping legitimate bloggers will link to my posts.

Then I discovered a solution that has greater utility than Google Adwords' keyword tool. It's called Traffic Travis, an Affilorama product, that's free, although the company offers a premium edition at low cost.

Traffic Travis has several components, including keyword and PPC tools. The downloadable Windows' program (sorry Mac folks) analyzes web sites, rates them to keep search engines thinking very highly of you and much more.

If you've struggled like me with SEO and want a tool that any reasonably smart person can use to generate more traffic to your site, try it out. Again, there's a free version that produces up to 200 keywords. If you like the extra stuff found in the premium edition, you can buy that version of the program later. Or, if you'd like to try the premium version for five days (only $5), please do.