If a significant amount of your monthly revenue is derived by doing business with customers from your local area, then it’s critical that you take the necessary measures to make sure you Get Found Locally.

Google Places Listing

The first thing EVERY small business owner should do it create and optimize a FREE Google Places Listing. Local Search Marketing is the new key to the success for Main Street businesses. It’s not a question of IF business owners use this information, but when. The longer they put off getting listed, the harder it will be to rank at the top of Google’s 10 Spot. When I first created my local business listing on Google they called it, Google Local Business Center. This was about 6-7 months ago. Lately, Local Search Marketing has become so popular and so competitive, it’s become a “must-have” marketing tool for every small business owner.

Google Places Marketing Tip #1 Use “Longtails”

Two of my niche markets are Local Search Marketing and Local Search SEO in the Los Angeles metro  area. Using a few learned marketing tricks and techniques, my site gets listed at the top of the Google 10 Spot in both of these niche market.

Local Search Marketing has 98,743 results and Local SEO Search has 2,744 results

Local Search Marketing on Google

Why it Makes Sense to Target Longtail Keywords First

Whether you’re launching a brand new site or building momentum for an existing site, to be competitive in the marketplace you have a lot of network effects working against you. More often than not, your competition has years of conversion data, an older trusted site, tons of content, and thousands of organic inbound links. Trying to beat them for the most potent high-value “single word” keywords is a long shot at best and you will likely fail. Longtail keywords are usually a lot easier to rank for. If you can pick off mid-tier phrases and rank at the top of the search results then you can build a revenue stream from them, which can be reinvested to further buy market share and distribution.

Local Search SEO on Google

According to Recent Studies

• 97% of Consumers use online media to research products and services in their local area. (Kelsey Group)
• 83% of Local Searchers will follow up with a phone call or visit to the listing that stands out best. (ComScore)
• 90% of searchers won’t look past page one of the results page. (Google)

What’s more, Google knows exactly where a customer is searching from and serves up the most relevant results nearby. Businesses need to be on top of that list, because when you are, your free organic traffic will increase exponentially.

Google Places Marketing Tip #2 Use Coupons

Adding a Coupon to your Google Places listing will help improve your “action taken” click count and your bottom-line (profit) as well. When a potential customer sees that your business listing includes a coupon, it tends to up your listing position and CTR.

Google Places Marketing Tip #3 Create Citations

Citations are defined as “mentions” of your business name and address on other web pages, even if there is no link to your website. Think of citations in the same way you do backlinks: they are like getting VOTES for your website. An example of a citation might be an online yellow pages directory where your business is listed, but not linked to. It can also be a local chamber of commerce, or a local business association where your business information can be found, even if they are not linking at all to your website.

Top Tier Citation Sites

• Bing
• Yelp
• Kudzu
• City Search
• Yahoo! Local
• Merchant Circle

Google Places Marketing Tip #4 Trust but Verify

There are a lot moving parts involved in creating a successful Google Places listing. The metric for measuring a successful listing is whether your listing consistently ranks at the top of the Google 10 Spot.

Knowing how to properly design, build and publish an optimized Google Places listing, how to perform the necessary results driving keyword research, how to the nuances of a high ranking 10 Spot listing and having the  right tools to do this front end work, takes time and acquired skills.

SEO Local Search on Bing

Before you entrust a Consultant with this important Internet Marketing task, a quick test you can perform is to simply verify whether or not the Consultant’s own site ranks at the top of the major business listing sites. Google Places commands nearly 80% of the local search activity, so doing this due diligence can be done in a matter of minutes and well worth your time and effort.

• Google Places
• Bing
• Yahoo! Local

Contact Me if you would like to discuss in more detail, how to optimize your Google Places listing so that your business listing will rank at the top of the Google 10 Spot.

One task that many Internet Marketers shy away from is creating content for their blog and websites.

Creating content can be a difficult process. It requires researching the niche, researching the topic, writing, editing, formatting, publishing, and more – all to create just one article. But good content can be a POWERFUL boost to SEO. Without it, you are missing out on a great potential source of authority. Writing good content is easy with the Publish Content Module

In this video on SEO, Dr. Anthony Fernando will take you through the Publish Content module in detail, showing you how to streamline your content creation process into three easy stages.

1. Research

Ensuring your content is high quality and likely to be read is the first essential step. Anthony will take you through an efficient strategy for topic selection and research.

2. Writing Your Article

Next he will take you through the writing of your article, including using Publish Content’s tools to optimize your content.

3. Publishing Your Article

Now the most important step – getting your article in front of your readers. Here Anthony shows you how to directly upload your new article to your WordPress Blog from Publish Content.



Summary

The Publish Content feature that comes with the Market Samurai tool is one of the many reasons why Market Samurai is preferred by many top notch Affiliate Marketers.

Social Media Networks continue to grow at an astounding rate:

• Twitter doubles in size every 90 days

• Facebook adds 350,000 new people every month

An Identity is stolen every 3 seconds. For these reasons, it is critical that you provide your visitors with a bullet proof way to protect their identity while visiting your site.

Providing a secure authentication routine your visitors can use to protect their identity will become an important element to your site’s structure, credibility and as time goes on, it will likely become a “must have” component for your site to get any Google love with their search engine bots.

Visit myOpenID to obtain your own authentication credentials using myOpenID for your website. The sooner you enable your visitors to protect their online session while visiting your site, the better.

Twitter Followers and Facebook Friends and Fans are much more likely to follow you on Twitter or become a Fan when you share with them fun, fresh, interesting and relevant content. Watch this YouTube video to see how easy it is to publish interesting, fun and meaningful content to your Twitter and Facebook accounts with 3 quick clicks of the mouse, once you connect the Bit.Ly sidebar java applet to  your Firefox browser and link them to your Twitter & Facebook accounts.

This Social Media Marketing Video Tip will show you how easy it is to share good stuff with your Facebook Friends and Twitter Followers with a few clicks of your mouse.

Note If you’d like a step-by-step PDF on how to set up the Bit.Ly sidebar java applet with the Firefox browser and connect them to your Twitter and Facebook accounts so you can dupe this routine, click over to Contact Neil enter SMMT22 in the Subject area and I’ll send you a detailed “How To” PDF so you can copy this routine.

All the Top Internet marketers earn a small fortune from their LIST of subscribers and YOU should too. Whether you have a Review site, a Sales Page or a Robust Content site, your visitors will typically convert to a sale at 1% or 2%. However, once they leave your site, they may never come back again. The majority will leave without buying. As a matter of fact, statistics show that most people require between 7-8 contacts before they will make a non essential purchase.

But, if you have a good Opt-In Box, it will convert at 30 to 40%, sometimes more. Which means you are capturing 30 to 40 subscribers for every 100 visitors. These are subscribers who are giving you permission to contact them in the future.

Marketers Mantra “The Money is in the List“

The idea is that you MUST collect the names and emails from as many of your visitors as you can so you can stay in contact with them. These subscribers become your “List”. This is your #1 asset in Internet Marketing.

Top 5 Steps of Listing Building

• Collect names and email addresses on your site using an opt-in box

• Send your subscribers follow up messages via an autoresponder

• Your messages include your affiliate links to products

• Some of your list will purchase products through your affiliate links

• Viola! . . . you earn an Affiliate Commission (i.e.) you make Money!

For those who are not experienced php code programmers, creating a professional looking opt-in box can seem a little daunting. Fortunately, there exists COTS (computer off the shelf) tools that make creating an Opt-in Box fast and easy.

I recently clicked a link from one of my Twitter followers taking me to a Word Press plug in that not only creates a Professional and Powerful Opt-in box, but the system give you, the webmaster control over the Opt-in Box look & feel, but also the frequency and sequence of delivery, so you visitor’s are not put off by this powerful List Building tool. The good news is, its 100% compatible with Word Press and doesn’t require any programming skill whatsoever.

With this new Opt-in Box tool, you can get a Free version (add supported) or go with the Pro version for many more advanced features and remove the “powered by” logo in your Opt-in Box.

SUMMARY

The Money is in the List. Without question, your LIST is your single most valuable asset you have as an Internet Marketer. Building a List is a lot easier today than its ever been (if you have the right set of tools and processes) in place. Direct linking to a Merchant’s sales page is NOT the way to go (as many programs out there preach). It’s not serving you well to give your Affiliate Merchant the one thing we all need to ensure our long term success in Affiliate Marketing, that being the name and email addresses of your LIST of qualified active Buyers.

How To Turn ANY Website into an Instant Capture Page

In my next post, I will show you a powerful new tool that will let you create a Capture Page from any website on the Internet, whether you own the site or not!

I recently attended the Social Media Money System webinar. I was one of 12,000 people on this call. My objective for being on the call was to learn more about these FOUR things:

What is Social Media Marketing?

What are the Best Social Media Tools?

What is best Social Media Marketing Software?

How can I use Social Media to help Promote My Business?

The moderators were two well known guys who (if you keep score by dollars & cents) are Rock Stars! The statement was made that by the end of this 90 minutes teleseminar, I was going to know more about Social Media Marketing than 99% of the people who actively participate in the Social Media wave.  In retrospect, I’m not so sure I know more than 99% of the people out there, but I did come away with some good info I can use to improve my social media persona and just as importantly, how to contribute to my social media network in a meaningful way.

THE DO’S and DONT’S OF SOCIAL MEDIA

I took copious notes during this 90 minute call, I hit the screen capture button more than thirty times and after reviewing my notes, I documented a few dozen key lessons from this event. In some ways, the things I learned NOT to do were as valuable as learning what I should be doing. For example, I learned that Social Media Marketing is NOT about posting a Click Here Affiliate Link every 30 seconds on Twitter. I learned that it’s critical to establish a casual and mutually beneficial relationship with your Twitter followers and your YouTube Fans loooong before you try and get them to “Buy My Stuff” or subscribe to your newsletter.

THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PLATFORM

There seemed to be an over simplification of what the key Social Media platforms to be involved with. The main speaker kept referring to his concept of the “Triangulation” of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube all pointing back to his Money Page (his Word Press Blog) when in reality, the social media platform includes a few dozen properties. The diagram below shows just how expansive the social media platform really is and it will probably be twice as large one year from now.

TOP 10 SOCIAL MEDIA SITES

Twitter

Facebook

YouTube

USTREAM

Flickr

DIGG

Stumble Upon

My Space

Squidoo

The speakers gave us a couple of very useful social media tips and tricks when it comes to getting major exposure to your quality social media content. I won’t list them all in this single post, but what I can tell you is that making a fun and informative 4-5 minute video and posting it to YouTube with your website link coded into the description is something you should do on a regular basis.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING BRANDING

If I had an extra $3,000 lying around, I would have signed up for the MASTER MIND program that was offered. Not only would I have gotten access to the DVD video training and the one-on-one  coaching, but this Platinum Package provided a customized “Branding” of all my social media properties with the same look and feel. That’s why McDonald’s doesn’t one day decide to paint a new Franchises store Purple. It’s important to have your Facebook page have the same “branding” as your Twitter background you’re your YouTube Channel.

SOCIAL MEDIA TRAFFIC (Embed & Comment)

Keep this in mind when posting to your Blog. Make sure you “push” your content to ALL of your Social Media properties (see the list above).

Besides using your RSS feeds, I find the “Share This widget to be a very effective social media marketing “promo” tool. As a matter of fact, let me shamelessly invite you to use Share This right now!

Simply click the flashing “Share This” icon below this post and if you like this content, send it to any of the 30+ social media sites listed. You might ADD this widget to your Blog site if you haven’t already done so.

Lastly, it would be GREAT if you could Leave a Comment about this post (be it good, bad or ugly) just tell me what you thought and if this was a good read for you or not?

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING TOOLS

In my next post, I’m going to include a video on How you can simply “mouse over” a Bit.ly link on Twitter or any social media site to quickly determine whether or not its worth investigating further, using a free Firefox add-on. This one technique alone saves me a ton of time culling through the hundreds of Tweets I read  every day from a bunch of very smart social media marketing people.

1. Age- Everything you say and write, including slang, allusions, word difficulty, and topics should be adjusted to meet age appropriateness.

2. Gender- Despite the dual roles men and women tend to fill, most individuals can be segmented (and sold to) based on gender-specific interests or needs.

3. Location- Values and culture tend to vary based on demographics. Having a clear understanding of regional difference will improve your targeted messages.

4. Education Level- Similar to age appropriateness, education levels should determine how you address your prospects and what benefits they will find in your product or service.

5. Income- The needs and wants from one social class to another should be a guide to the types of products and services you should be selling them.

6. Marital Status- The values, needs, and desires of married persons greatly differ from those that are single. Marketing family messages to single persons (and vice versa) can lose the deal for you.

7. What Keeps Them Up At Night- This is the most important one. You’ve got to know your prospect’s fears, worries, concerns, excitements, hopes and dreams. When you know the conversation inside your prospect’s head, you can enter it, speak to it, and build a relationship that leads to a customer.

Another way to make GOOD MONEY is to Broker a Trade Deal on Alibaba.com

If you want to learn how to do this, watch these Alibaba How To Videos

[ Note ] If you want to dispense with the hassle of having to worry yourself with any of the above ~ Click here to visit PPCNinja website!