Marketing your business online is one of the best decisions you could ever make, especially in this day and age of mobile Internet-capable devices. It seems that everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, a tablet computer in their backpack or purse, and at the very least they all have computers back home or at the office. Young kids, teenagers, the middle aged and the elderly all get online these days, and, according to recent statistics, about 80% of those Internet users are turning to search engines like Google
to find local businesses. To be clear, potential clients are out there searching for a business just like yours. Whether or not those potential clients can find your business is another story altogether.
Building An Online Web Presence
In a moment, we are going to be discussing a few online marketing efforts that you can begin putting in place right now to see immediate results. By results, we’re referring to website traffic, the new visitors that land on your website. Our goal is to turn all of those website visitors into new leads for our business. We want those individuals who are using the search engines to search for the products and services we are offering to pick up the phone, send an email, submit a message via an online form or even engage in live chat. For that to happen, you need a website. Your website will act as your Internet marketing base that all of your other marketing efforts will send traffic to. Your website is where you will send your leads that will potentially become clients.
Capturing Your Leads
Once you begin to drive traffic and leads to your website, you will want to develop a way to capture those leads for future marketing. If a person lands on your site and doesn’t contact you for a consultation, you may be able to entice them into a consultation later on if you’re able to keep up with your marketing efforts. For this, an email list does quite nicely.
Building A Targeted Email List
You are going to be sending highly-targeted traffic to your website. If you can get some or all of those individuals to subscribe to your email list, you’ll have your own private marketing audience. Essentially, you’ll have an entire pool of potential customers. If you can keep your list happy and you can provide them with valuable information that they begin to look forward to, a bond will begin to form and that’s when people tend to become long-term loyal customers.
Valuable Autoresponders
The email marketing platform you choose will provide you with a chance to program ‘autoresponders’ to go out at pre-specified times. These autoresponders are nothing more than email messages that you will send out to your email subscribers. The goal is to have your subscribers look forward to your messages, as we’ve mentioned, but doing so isn’t that easy. To write effective autoresponders, you need to know your audience inside and out and you need to know what problems they’re facing. Your autoresponders should then seek to help them find solutions to their problems.
Your autoresponders should speak to the heart of your readers and should let them see that there is light at the end of the tunnel. The problem could be as simple as how to change the brakes on a car or as complex as how to grieve after a parent has passed. Any business can be marketed via autoresponder, it just takes knowing the audience and your business to pull it off. It also takes plenty of practice. You’ll get an idea of what works and what doesn’t by the numbers of people who unsubscribe from your real stinkers. Learn from your mistakes and you’ll only get better. In fact, this should be a lesson for all of your other online marketing efforts.
Blog, Article And PR Marketing
If you want to drive more leads and earn more clients from online marketing, construct a website and set up an email subscriber list so that your leads can opt-in when they arrive on your site. We’ve covered that part. Now we need to drive targeted traffic to your site. Hopefully you’ve done your keyword research and you have five to ten good, solid keywords that are highly searched for, but that don’t have a lot of competition. Once you have those, start writing.
Your website 
should have five to ten high-quality articles related to your niche. Again, appeal to your audience’s problems and seek to solve those problems. Make your writing as good as you can. If you can’t write or you hate writing, outsource it. In this day and age of valuable content, you can’t afford to skimp. Once your website is filled up, start writing blogs, articles and press releases. Five of each will do to start. Publish the blogs on your website, the articles on any free article directories you can find and the same with the press releases.
Use your keywords as anchor text and have the articles and PRs point back to relevant articles on your website. This will get your website, blogs, articles and PRs indexed in the major search engine. Then, once traffic starts heading your way, you’ll be able to capture them as email subscribers. If you can market to those individuals and you can get them to keep their subscription instead of opt-ing out, you’ll earn more clients than you know what to do with.
