Local Internet Marketing For Offline Businesses – Targeted Traffic The Right Way

Posted on October 31, 2010 by admin

Local Internet Marketing For Offline Businesses – Targeted Traffic The Right Way

Most offline businesses have jumped on the bandwagon of internet marketing as they have discovered the value of cheap, targeted advertising compared to more traditional advertising mediums. Not only that, but it offers many offline companies a much wider customer base than they could previously access offline.

Just think about it, as little as a decade ago if you wanted to sell something in another city or country you would have to open a point of sale locally, which was certainly not cheap. Most businesses couldn’t dream of expanding abroad due to costs, however the internet opened the doors to small offline businesses as well, allowing them to compete with the big fish.

Worldwide online advertising is not always suited to every type of business, especially some types of offline service providers. For example, a restaurant will never be able to service more than the local area and therefore it doesn’t make sense for its website to target the whole web. This is where local internet marketing comes in.

In this case, the SEO plan is designed to target only people interested in the local area. This can be done with the use of geographically targeted keywords, maps and many more.

The advantage of focusing on local internet marketing is that costs are usually much lower than if you were to target the general public. For example, “cosmetic dentistry in Toronto” will not cost as much per click as “cosmetic dentistry” and will only target people interested in a cosmetic dentist who is in Toronto. On the other hand, a search for “cosmetic dentistry” will bring up a very long list of cosmetic dentists all over the world.

Local internet marketing is an excellent option for offline small businesses that provide local services where their type of business does not allow them to expand globally. Plumbing, landscaping, dentistry, electrical and even cleaning services are all such businesses. On the other hand, web development companies or e-book publishers do not have the same limitations and in their case they should focus on global internet marketing.

One extremely useful way to take advantage of local internet marketing is with maps. The large search engines offer a map service where companies can register their offline address. This has multiple advantages but the main one is that it establishes credibility because people can see the physical location of your business. This also has a positive impact on the ranking of your website but, unfortunately, it is a technique that is often overlooked if an offline business owner or marketing department don’t learn from the online pros who market online daily.

Local internet marketing is an excellent way to reach extremely targeted offline customers for a much lower cost than if you were to market to the entire world wide web. However, you need to do a little more investigation regarding which keywords your PPC campaign should target and maybe even get some professional internet marketing consulting to show you how you can design and track your campaigns.

The beauty of internet marketing is that you can see virtually in real time how effective your campaigns are and tweak them accordingly. However, you do need some professional advice until you learn the ropes and can handle it yourself. The numerous free ways to drive traffic, however, are an easier task for offline businesses to master.

Search engine optimization, article marketing, podcasting, video marketing, blogging and other online marketing systems are all free, all drive targeted traffic and all can be learned in short order by offline business owners, salespeople, marketing departments, service providers, legal and medical professionals and entrepreneurs of every stripe. Don’t be stuck languishing at the bottom of the search engines or forced to shell out hundreds or thousands each month – learn how to market offline businesses online today!

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Professional online marketers use many different strategies to increase website traffic, brand their company worldwide, improve their search engine rankings and make money online. Now your offline business can use those same strategies, techniques, tips and tricks thanks to the new how-to tutorials found in Local Internet Marketing Empire – be sure to download YOUR copy today!

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Use Online Coupons For Offline Traffic In Retail Marketing

Posted on October 6, 2010 by admin

Retail marketing professionals are using the Internet more and more for business branding, to provide customer information such as store location, store hours and to show the products they retail, but in general offline retail businesses have been slow to catch on to using online coupons to build offline traffic.

There are a number of reasons why your retail marketing should already by using online coupons, such as little or no cost, added retail customer retention, increasing the lifetime value of each customer, introducing new products to your customer base, stealing traffic from local competitors and attracting new customers to your retail establishment.

One of the main fears that stop some retail stores from using online coupons is the fear of coupon fraud – that people will print numerous copies and either use them themselves or give them out to all their friends. So what? What is the purpose of using coupons, any coupons, as part of your retail marketing strategies? To get more pedestrian traffic to your retail store, right? So if online coupons bring customers back to your store more often to use the additional print-outs, haven’t your online coupons done their job? And if it brings those friends to your retail outlet, once again the coupons have fulfilled their purpose.

You do need to be careful of other types of coupon fraud with them, such as altering the coupons or trying to use numerous coupons at once. The latter is solved simply by putting the standard ‘Maximum One Coupon Per Family Per Day’ or a similar disclaimer on each coupon, while the former is avoided by making sure each cash register in your retail stores has a copy of any current online coupons displayed where the cashier can easily compare them.

Finally, as with any retail marketing initiatives designed to increase traffic, be sure to build your offers so that your profit margin, while reduced on a per-item basis, remains high on a per-sale basis. For example, limit your online coupons to offers like ’10% Off When You Buy 3′ of an item that normally sells in ones or twos, or ‘Save $25 On Orders Of $100 Or More’ so that your maximum discount is 25%, but drops as the value of the order increases.

Get more marketing advice from Doug Champigny at Articles and Content.

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Offline Businesses – Business Networking On Social Networking Sites Online

Posted on October 2, 2010 by admin

Offline Businesses – Business Networking On Social Networking Sites Online

©2010 Doug Champigny. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Offline businesses have always understood the value of business networking, and often offline business networking is a company’s main source of meeting new suppliers, finding new products and services to promote and getting referrals to new targeted leads. But never before has business networking been as simple or as far-reaching as it is with today’s social networking sites.

To start with, whatever niche or field your offline businesses are in probably has an association, and nowadays few industry associations don’t have websites where members can discuss issues, trade referrals and all the other areas of business networking. If your industry association was helpful to you before, think of how much more valuable they’d be to your offline businesses if they also became a source of contacts and targeted business leads?

Next, professional associations that cross the niche boundaries can be a major boost to the networking efforts of offline businesses too. For example, retail councils, manufacturing associations, wholesaler associations and even consumer advocacy groups all have websites where, with a bit of study and prudence, you can find ways to extend your business networking.

Then there are the actual social networking sites online, designed to cover all areas of business for both offline businesses and online businesses alike. LinkedIn, for example, lets each employee or owner in your company have their own resume-style page where they can list what they do and who they work for, and builds company listing pages as well showing which members of that company have pages there. A quick look at their site will show you it’s a dream come true for offline businesses looking for networking opportunities.

Social media sites like Twitter and FaceBook, and Web 2.0 properties like Google Buzz and Yahoo Buzz aren’t designed specifically for business use, but can still be extremely helpful in your business networking quest. Give your employees some guidance in how best to represent your company on these sites then allow them some time each day to network with people there in an effort to find suppliers and get referrals to targeted leads – there efforts can even help you get more traffic to your company websites and directly through the front doors of your offline businesses.

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in online marketing through his Internet Marketing Coaching and his Affiliate Marketing Coaching programs. Give your online marketing the PowerStart it needs today – enroll now!

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Offline Businesses – Train Your Corporate Marketing Department In Online Marketing

Posted on September 22, 2010 by admin

Offline Businesses – Train Your Corporate Marketing Department In Online Marketing

© 2010 Doug Champigny, http://dougchampigny.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Every year, offline businesses like insurance companies, equipment suppliers, telecommunication companies and retail chains spend a small fortune sending executives, marketing professionals and salespeople to seminars, conventions, retreats, trade shows and the like. Yet for just a small percentage of that expense they could be training their entire marketing department in the hottest emerging marketing technologies – online marketing strategies.

There still exists today a gulf between traditional corporate marketing professionals and online marketing professionals. The former are mostly old-school marketers who have come up through the ranks learning the ins and outs of traditional media and traditional strategies – skills that while vitally important, bring fewer and fewer results each year as traditional media audiences dwindle.

The latter, by comparison, would be considered ‘Rockstars’ by corporations and other offline businesses – true hotshots who get amazing results but just aren’t team players. And while everyone wants the phenomenal results corporate rockstars regularly achieve, today’s politically-correct corporations have done their best to divest themselves of them, fearing they can’t easily be controlled.

So what is the solution facing offline businesses? Most will decide to relegate any and all online marketing to outsourcing – web design firms, seo specialists, social media experts, ghostwriters and so on, at a cost of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. And even then they’ll be at the mercy of these outside companies, since no one in-house knows enough about the emerging online marketing tools and techniques to include them in the planning stages of marketing strategies development.

The smartest companies, those with the greatest foresight, will realize it’s far less expensive and far more profitable to train their existing marketing and sales departments in the online marketing ways instead. These people already fit the corporate culture of the offline businesses they work for, have the required offline savvy to make the most of traditional methods, and can now become much more valuable again by learning a whole new, though related, skillset.

Most importantly, this new professional online marketing knowledge will allow marketing plans to include the Internet right from the inception of each campaign’s planning stages and protect the company from outside suppliers pushing outdated web designs, building overly complicated web sites that don’t rank well in the search engines, holding them up for a king’s ransom to get jobs completed or taking 4 times as long as promised to deliver online properties. And if you don’t think major offline businesses fall victim to each of these scenarios every day, ask yourself when you last saw a Fortune 400 company show up on the first page of results at Google, Bing or Yahoo, or came across their presence on social media sites? Those are currently the two largest sources of online traffic, yet for all the millions they spend, the biggest corporations are shut out by small independent online marketing pros with little or no budget.

If you’re a professional offline marketer, think of how much stronger you’d be with these new technologies under your belt. If you’re an HR pro, ask yourself when an experienced professional Internet marketer last applied for ANY position within your corporation – or any other you’re familiar with. And if you’re a CEO, CFO, COO or business owner, ask yourself how long it’s going to take you to realize you should already be training your corporate marketing department in the online marketing techniques and strategies?

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in online marketing through his Internet Marketing Coaching and his Affiliate Marketing Coaching programs. Give your online marketing the PowerStart it needs today – enroll now!

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How Online Advertising Saves Offline Businesses Money

Posted on September 9, 2010 by admin

How Online Advertising Saves Offline Businesses Money

©2010 Doug Champigny, http://offline-businesses.info-at-this.com
All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

Offline businesses, especially small offline businesses, have long sought effective advertising vehicles they can include in their marketing mix without breaking the bank. And while some services, such as film separations for color printing and the need to purchase typesetting, have been eliminated as advertising agencies moved to full computerization, most mass-audience media has stayed out of the financial reach of small businesses. And even the biggest multi-national corporations usually produce more good advertising ideas than their budget will allow, leaving some great ideas relegated to the round filing cabinet.

Well, educated offline businesses can now rejoice, thanks to the internet technologies of today. Those technologies have brought the mass audience within the range of ALL offline businesses. Business blogs, for example, can be utilized by anyone with a computer and Internet access – no additional software is required and hosting can be had for free. Even taking their blogs to the upper echelons online requires only a few hundred dollars year for their custom domain name and business blogs hosting. If you can type, you can blog.

Other powerful marketing techniques can also be employed for far less online. Radio and TV too expensive for small offline businesses? Replace radio ads with podcasts – audio articles or commercials recorded directly on your computer, then uploaded to your web hosting. From free programs like Audacity to fully-featured professional but inexpensive software like SoundForge or Acid Music Studio, the technology you need to turn any computer into your own recording and editing studio is easy to find and easy to learn.

Have great ideas for TV commercials or short documentaries to boost your bottom line, but can’t afford what some offline businesses pay for production and airtime? Learn to use Sony Vegas, Corel Video Studio Pro or similar software and you can be producing powerful spots whenever you have some downtime – with or without a digital video camera! Best of all, you can upload your videos to the video sharing sites like YouTube and Viddler for free, giving you access to a potentially huge audience already geared to video advertising!

Until the current technologies and the evolution of today’s Internet, such advertising vehicles were out of reach of most small offline businesses, and limited in scope for major corporations trying to operate within strict budget limitations. Just these three marketing techniques alone can merge into a very powerful marketing mix, yet implementing all 3 is possible while keeping the out-of-pocket costs under a thousand dollars.

All of which adds up to saving offline businesses thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year – and that’s before we even touch on article marketing, social networking, e-mail marketing and all the other marketing tools employed by Internet marketers every day to boost sales and brand themselves worldwide. Isn’t it time your offline businesses started saving money every month by making self-driven online advertising a bigger part of your overall marketing strategies?

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Having gone from newspaper advertising manager to founding and operating 2 full-service advertising agencies, Doug Champigny had already mastered the world of offline marketing before turning his attention to online marketing full-time. Now, over a decade later, marketing mentor and speaker Doug Champigny is a world-famous marketer with a major online presence who often appears live onstage at marketing seminars, conferences, conventions and workshops around North America. With more than 35 years of online and offline advertising and marketing experience, Doug Champigny is uniquely qualified to teach you how to succeed in online marketing through his Internet Marketing Coaching and his Affiliate Marketing Coaching programs. Give your online marketing the PowerStart it needs today – enroll now!

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