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To stay profitable in today’s economic climate small business owners need to use every possible tool available to them from systematizing their business to improving their marketing. Many of the traditional tools such as Yellowpages and print advertising are no longer working as effectively as they used to years ago. This means that the savvy business owner needs to educate themselves on how marketing has changed so dramatically. In essence, consumers and businesses are no longer using Yellowpages  or many of the print media such as newspapers, magazines, etc. as much as they used to. Usage trends will also depend on demographics such as age, area, income, education, etc. It is therefore important that you know the profile of the demographic that you are targeting, it does not matter if you are a surgeon in Columbus Ohio or if you do house cleaning in Minneapolis. One of the major differences is that more and more people are using the Internet. In fact studies have shown that even print advertising leads to an increase in the number of Internet searches. The reason for this is that when people have shown interest in a print add, over 40% of them will decide to go and check the company out online or to do more research. What this means to you as a business owner is that it is really important to have a good Internet presence – even if you are doing print advertising. If your clients or customers can not find you on the Internet the chances are they will end up doing business with your opposition! Having a presence on the Internet does not necessarily mean just having a web site. These days there are many ways to have a presence from a Google Places page, through to Social media pages like Facebook, and even videos and Press Releases or Articles. The more times you show up on the Internet for your key search terms the more business you are likely to get. Showing up is also only the first step, once you show up this will start generating traffic but traffic does not help. Getting leads does. This means that this traffic needs to be converted into leads – people calling you or requesting more information about your products or services. Unfortunately very few web sites do a good job of converting traffic and even less have any way of actually measuring the performance of their web sites or Internet marketing.

This is unfortunate however it is one of the big reasons that you, as a small business 0wner, need to understand the basics of how Internet marketing works. Now obviously this is a technical subject and can be very confusing. What adds to this complexity is the fact that it is also changing on a constant basis. What worked a few months ago will not necessarily work today and what is working today will likely have to be changed in a few months time. For me the most important issue is that you have some way of measuring how effective your Internet marketing is. How many leads are you getting? What is a lead worth? What are you paying for a lead when you take all the factors into account? If you know the answers to these questions then you will also be able to figure out if you are getting a return on your investment. If you are not, then it is time to change things up. Given how quickly things on the Internet is changing you should also be extremely wary of being locked into a long term contract. If things change and you are no longer getting the kind of results that you need you should not be locked into having to pay for it. The model of having a long term contract is really only for the benefit of the company providing the service. Back in the day it made sense as it was not possible to remove your ad from the Yellowpages half way through the year. You were committing to the entire year. On the Internet this is not true. It is possible to change or remove things pretty quickly and easily so there should not be a need for anything more than a 30 day commitment. Having said that, you should also not be expecting instant results. Building up an Internet presence can take time – often three to six or even nine months. This does not mean that you should be getting no results for this period, only that your results should be improving as your Internet presence improves.

It is also really important to understand that the best leads are ‘search driven’. What I mean by this is that the best time to get a lead is when they are looking for your product or service. So if someone is searching for ‘replacement windows cleveland‘ or ‘house cleaning west palm beach‘ you know that they are serious prospects looking to buy. This is very different from trying to catch their attention while they are browsing their Facebook page.