Most local business owners don’t realize how utterly invisible their business is to the vast army of web surfers out there. You can have the most beautiful, elaborate and informative website in your entire niche, but if your potential readers and customers don’t know it is there it’s not of much value.
So at least half (and probably more) of your online resource allocation (time and money) should be spent promoting your website, blog, and social networking profiles. Let people know you exist and the chances are pretty good your online investment will start to pay dividends.
A lot of online promotional techniques take a good deal of time. For example, participating in conversations on Facebook can help you build a lot of contacts, but it can also take a lot of time.
At the other end of the spectrum, running an online advertising campaign – Google Adwords Pay Per Click for example – can cost a ton of money – often with questionable results unless you really know what you’re doing.
Article marketing is a cheap alternative
Writing and publishing articles can be a cheap and relatively effective alternative to help you build an online presence. Here is how article marketing works:
1. Articles, as opposed to press releases, should not be written as promotional pieces for your business. They are supposed to be “informative” rather than “promotional” in nature.
2. Informative articles can be submitted to article directories like Ezinearticles.com and will be published there when approved.
3. Of course you can also publish your articles on your own website(s) and blog(s). It is good to continually add new, informative content to your web properties, but that does not achieve the specific objective you are trying to achieve with article marketing. The purpose of article marketing is to get exposure beyond your own websites.
4. If you are the owner of a local business your articles should be written about some interesting topic of interest to your local target market. For example if you own a restaurant in Punkydoodle’s Corners your article should be about something your prospective clientele might be interested in.
5. Generally speaking if you are promoting a local business your article can be about either your location (Punkydoodle’s Corners in our example) or your niche (food preparation, dining out, etc.) This general rule applies to just about any local business.
6. Writing about your location is important because it will be of interest to your localized clientele. But probably more important it will be relatively easy to get ”search engine traction”. The search engines like Google will find your article and add it to their index of web resources about Punkydoodle’s Corners. When people search for information about your location, your article has a chance of coming up in the results.
7. To get this kind of traction your article does not really need to be directly about the exact niche you are targeting. For example your article could be about the history of Punkydoodle’s Corners, or the origin of the name, or the way the local farmers come into town every Saturday night. It doesn’t really matter, as long as it is interesting, has a catchy title, and is about some aspect of either your location or your type of business.
8. It is important to keep in mind that everything you publish on the web has two target audiences. People and search engines. Of course people are always your ultimate readers. But your reach will be greatly expanded if you can get the attention of the major search engines.
You can get that attention by “optimizing” your content for the search engines. And for local businesses who are pursuing a local target market the best way to optimize your web content is to make sure you focus on your location names. If you make it obvious that your article is about Punkydoodle’s Corners your article will get indexed that way. So when people do searches for various aspects of your location your articles will come up in those searches and you will inevitably get hits.
How does this promote your business?
But how does this give your business any promotional value? If you write about the history of Punkydoodle’s Corners how is that going to bring customers into your restaurant?
The short answer is, you get exposure for your website by adding information about yourself (the writer) and your business in the “About the Author” resource box at the end of the article.
This answer might be a bit weak for local business owners used to running ads in the Yellow Pages or the local newspaper. But the simple fact is this is how you gradually build a strong “presence” for your company.
You build a presence not only in the minds of your prospective customers, but just as important, in the indexes of the search engines. As you add more resources linking back to your websites the strength and “authority” of your sites is increased in the eyes of the search engines.
So not only will you get significant exposure through the articles themselves, but your own website will gain in “authority” and come up higher in the search engine results for your most important keywords.
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You raise a number of very interesting tips. Really worth a read. I have passed your website onto friends
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