Standard websites designed to be viewed on laptop and PC screens are incompatible for the smaller screens of iPhones, Androids and other mobile web devices. Even if your non-mobile website can be seen on a mobile device, that doesn’t mean it’s functional on a mobile device. Only 1% of standard websites will render on a mobile device.

Your standard website may feature high-resolution graphics, flash video and lots of interesting content. The very things that make your standard site so interesting are what will make it unusable as a mobile website. Most smart phones can’t play Flash programs, hi-res photos take too long to load and the volume of content will make the site slow to load and navigate.

Instead, you need to focus on the most critical information about your small business that a mobile web surfer needs. At a minimum, they need to know where you are, what you do, how to contact you and your hours of operation. For a mobile website, less is so much, much more!

Many of the best mobile websites launch with an opening screen that has just a few options that are large clickable buttons to easily navigate the user to the information they need including:

• How to Find Us – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page where they can see your address, click for directions or click to activate their smart phone’s GPS function to automatically navigate to your establishment
• When We’re Open – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page that simply lists your daily hours of operation – if there are holidays upcoming, you should also indicate whether you are open on the holiday as well as any days your hours will deviate from the standard
• How to Reach Us – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page where they can click-to-call your business number, click to send an email to you or click to send a text to you – just be sure that whichever option they choose is monitored so you can communicate on the spot
• What We Offer – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page that very briefly summarizes what you do, what you sell, what services you offers, etc.
• Special Deals – clicking this can take your potential customer to a page that offers them an incentive in the form of a discount or freebie to sign up for your mobile texting list – this captures them on the spot and allows you to reach out to them again to encourage a transaction with your small business

Two other options to consider when prepping your small business website are social media links and an option to link to your full website. Consumers are very engaged in social media and if you have a presence on Four Square, Facebook, Twitter or other media sites, you should include links to your pages so they can follow you if they like. Another option that many mobile sites don’t offer, but that may be desired is a link to your full website in case they want to browse all of your content.

No matter what, a mobile website, even a poorly executed one, is better than no mobile website at all. But it’s easier than you can imagine to set up a mobile website for your small business in just a few hours to get found on the mobile web and drive business to your establishment.

One thing you can do is to write articles and submit them to online article directories. The best thing about this approach is that you can do this with absolutely no money to start with. If you’re not good at writing, you can outsource the job and it can still be cheaper than other kinds of advertising.

Another website marketing strategy is to use pay per click marketing to get traffic to your website. This is done by setting up accounts on major search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, and creating ads that that show up out side the normal search results. They are usually located to the right of the organic listings. Everytime someone clicks on your ad, you will be charged a predetermined amount that you set up in your account.

The advantage of Pay Per Click marketing is that it works quickly. You should start seeing an immediate stream of visitors to your website. The disadvantage is that unless you know what you are doing, you can lose your shirt doing it. So take the time to learn about PPC before starting, or hire someone knowledgeable to do it for you.

Social Networking websites, like Facebook and Myspace offer great advantages for anyone who is looking to market their products and services. These websites have milliions of users that you can tap into if you do it properly. The key to social network marketing is being subtle. Be creative with your social network profile. You don’t have to leave out the fact that you have a business, but you do want potential customers to ask questions.

As you can see, there are many ways to attract attention to your business. You need to develop a complete marketing strategy to bring in new customers and increase your bottom line

I created a video that I’d really like you to see, that shows just how powerful traffic from the internet can be for your business, especially compared to things like advertising in the local paper.

Watch the video.

A website is no longer just a calling card for a business. It is an essential part of any marketing campaign. In fact, there are many businesses which only have an online presence. However, to take full advantage of a website you need to know the ins and outs of online marketing and this is where an internet marketing site can help you.

Rather than having to go around in circles and hope you are doing it right, the best choice is to get some expert advice and tips from an established internet marketing site. There is a lot more to making your online presence profitable than just simply putting your site up and hoping for the best.

An internet marketing campaign can be just as complex, in fact even more complex, than traditional marketing campaigns. However, the up side is that unlike traditional mediums, internet marketing campaigns can be strictly monitored for effectiveness since the results are easily quantifiable.

Your business can grow exponentially if you leverage the internet wisely, but to use it wisely you need to have experience which can take time. There’s a saying: a wise man learns from the mistakes of others, a fool learns from his own. Therefore, why not learn from the mistakes of others when they are there for all the world to see.

There are so many internet marketing sites offering valuable information that can save you tremendous amounts of time and money, that it is a shame for you not to leverage all the resources at your disposal.

Of course, not all internet marketing sites offer useful information, or sometimes it takes longer to sift through the useful information than it is to simply buy an internet marketing product. If you are in a hurry, the latter is an option, but generally, most of the information is available for free. At least what you will need in the beginning.

As you progress in the internet marketing field you may more information or even the services of a professional internet marketing consulting company. However, initially you will probably be able to manage with the information available on internet marketing sites for free.

As long as you act on what you learn, there is no reason for it to be ineffective. Unfortunately, though, that is the main killer in the online business arena, people do not take action on what they learn.

However, you have the opportunity to take your business to a new level by establishing an important, online presence and you can do it all with the information available for free on any internet marketing site.

Internet Marketing Basics

You need to know some of the basics of internet marketing before you can just jump right into it. Getting some books on the subject or consulting with a professional is always a good idea. You need to understand the benefits you can gain if you want to understand why internet marketing can be so effective for boosting the bottom line for any business enterprise.

Learn Where You Can

There are a great many books and magazines on the subject that you can delve into. Set aside time to do this on a weekly if not daily basis. If you are planning on making a living online, then the more time you devote to studying it, the more likely you are to succeed in your pursuit.

If you want more in-depth learning on the subject, you may be able to find some courses that will help you. Colleges often host classes on why internet marketing is an important aspect of a business. These may be found through the college, or through a local small business association.

One of the very best places to learn about internet marketing is from someone who works with it every day. If you know anyone in the marketing industry, or can make contacts somehow, do so.

If you can gain knowledge from someone who has hands on experience, you may be able to avoid many of the pitfalls that some people face when they are just starting out in marketing. Talk to them whenever you can, and ask them questions regarding why internet marketing is so effective for them and how you might translate those tactics to your own business.

Look at the Competition

Take some time to study your competition’s marketing campaigns. Try to find the marketing of as many businesses that are similar to yours as you can. This will give you a good idea of how they are using online marketing.

Some people wonder why the internet marketing of the competition is important, but the answer to this is simple. If they are getting a lot of business and growing, they must be doing something right. If they are failing, you may be able to get some ideas on what not to do.

As you can see, there are many different ways in which you can learn a lot about internet marketing. Once you know something about it, you will be able to start applying it to your website and your business. Before too long, you should start seeing increased traffic and sales. Then you may just find yourself happily ahead of the competition.

It is easy to see why internet marketing should be taken very seriously. If you want to survive in the online community, you have to be able to prove your mettle. Without internet marketing, you will be lost among the thousands of other businesses out there. So find some good resources and get to learning.

Small business owners can now reach out to customers all over the globe. By interacting and providing added value, a small business can now move in and take market share from larger companies. However, even small businesses need professional internet marketing consulting so that they can gain that coveted position in front of their customers.

Of course, anyone can eventually get some traffic to their website, but the question is can a small business afford to take the risk that what they are doing may or may not work? Internet marketing can take time to show results, albeit not as long as some other marketing methods, but still long enough to warrant hiring an expert to handle the job.

What you need to ask yourself is whether or not you can afford to waste time? Essentially, a business with no internet presence might as well pack up and go home because it’s as good as dead. The internet has brought people closer together and is also changing business practices. If you aren’t ready to adapt then you will be pushed out of the market.

The advantage of getting professional internet marketing consulting is that you will see results much quicker and your return on investment will be much higher than if you did it alone. You will be able to take advantage of expert knowledge and your campaigns will be much more effective.

Even if you think you can do it on your own, because after all how difficult can all this internet marketing stuff be, you may have a big surprise. There is a fine line between success and failure in internet marketing and a business can end up losing a lot more money by trying to pinch pennies in the wrong places. You may save a few dollars now by trying to put together your own internet marketing campaign, but how much revenue will you lose because your campaign isn’t as effective as you thought it could be?

With internet marketing consulting you will receive professional advice on everything from choosing the right mix of communication channels for a cost effective campaign to measuring the efficiency of each individual campaign. That is the beauty of the internet that no other advertising medium has been able to offer before, quantifiable results. An internet marketing campaign can be tracked down to the last click and you can quickly see how effective each channel is so that tweaks can be made if you are dissatisfied with the results.

However, to be able to take full advantage of all these benefits, you need some good internet marketing consulting to put on the right track so that you don’t waste your money on inefficient campaigns.

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 businesses as well, allowing them to compete with the big fish.

However, web wide 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, “French restaurant Houston” will not cost as much per click as “French restaurant” and will only target people interested in a French restaurant which is in Houston. On the other hand, a search for “French restaurant” will bring up a very long list of French restaurants all over the world.

Local internet marketing is an excellent option for offline, small businesses that provide local services and their type of business does not allow them to expand globally. Plumbing, landscaping and even cleaning services are all such businesses. On the other hand, web development companies or ebook 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.

Local internet marketing is an excellent way to reach extremely targeted 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.

You have the ability to use WordPress to create a blog that quite simply does not act or look like an actual blog, but also it gives your site business and search engine advantages more than any other software offers. There are many reasons why WordPress blogs make great business sites but the top five are listed here.

1. Updated Frequently:

When you are running a WordPress blog you are updating it on a daily basis and search engines just love that. Your fresh and original content that you place on your site is virtually irresistible to any of the search engines. Search engines thrive on new content and the more you provide daily the more the search engines will grab on to this information and your ranks will rise in the search engines as a result.

2. Keyword Searches:

When you create a WordPress blog keyword searches will occur more naturally. This means that people will be able to find your site more easily when they are searching by a keywords. If your competitors are not using WordPress in their blogs this will pull you ahead of them in the search engines. If they have already been using WordPress for their blog you will just have to use some extra effort to beat them in the ranks. Search engine rankings are just too important these days for businesses not to take advantage of these WordPress blogs.

3. Events:

When you post an event or date the webcrawlers tend to attach themselves to these easier and quicker. So if you wish to schedule an event for your visitors or just wanting to promote a new product short news announcements work great with WordPress.

4. Subscribe:

By using RSS fees people are able to subscribe to your site and get notified immediately when new content has been added. This is a great feature for those that are constantly adding new products or features to their site. This will save them time from sending out bulk emails. All they have to do is post the new content and the email is automatically generated for them.

5. Comments:

With a blog your visitors are allowed to leave comments on your site, if you want them to. This will help increase interest in your site and gets visitors to come in more often. It will also increase your search engine results because this will add original new content to your site. A final advantage to comments on your site is that it is a great way for you to network and learn about new developments in your field that you may have not known otherwise.

As you can see there are advantages of using a WordPress blog for your business. These are just the top five but there are many more. It would be wise to create a WordPress Marketing blog for your business today.

What is marketing?

Marketing is a plan or execution of the marketing mix for products or services to create business exchanges between people and organizations. One more important fact of marketing is the four “P’s”. Personalization, Participation, Peer-to-Peer and productive modeling.

Draw internet visitors to your business website

To become a successful internet entrepreneur, you must learn how to draw internet visitors to your business website. No matter the quality of your web content, which you have upon your business website, if no one knows your business website exists, you will not be successful.

Let search engines work for your business website

You must strategically place your business website on the popular search engines upon the internet. Search engine marketing is used to describe paid visibility within the internet search engines. This entails marketing your business website to steer more visitors to your business website.

What is SEO?

SEO is where you will match your content to how you want internet traffic to find it within the search engines. This must entail keyword and or meta-tags with your keyword listings. Keep in mind that you cannot control what internet visitors initially search for within the search engines. You will not know what pages will get the most visits from internet traffic.

Consult a SEO expert

You will not have to dish out loads of money but keep in mind that you will have to pay for the initial outlay of having your website content optimized. SEO practices have been questioned from an ethical standpoint as of recent. Some SEO consultants will fill your website content with spam and this will end up getting your business website penalized by the major search engines. Ensure that you interview carefully for a good SEO expert, otherwise you will face negative results as compared to positive results for your business website.

Pay-per-click advertising

Pay-per-click advertising is when you receive advertising space upon a website. You pay when someone clicks on a particular link. This can definitely lead to more internet traffic flowing into your business website; however do not forget to have protection in the case of what is commonly titled “click fraud”.

What other forms of PPC can be utilized with my business website?

PPC advertising also can be found in the form of search engine services such as a great tool titled “Google Adwords”. Google Adwords give you not only paid inclusitivity within the Google Search Engine but also across numerous ranges of subscriber websites.

Sites like PRWeb and PRlog allow you to submit a press release on your latest innovation and have it read by thousands of viewers on Google news. Not to mention that those sites have a high ranking on the search engines so provided your press releases are written properly – informative, showing the benefits, and optimized for search engines with the correct choice of keywords used to find your products – that press release will be found over and over again.

It’s all about clickthroughs. This is the action someone takes when a site link or button is pressed to open a web page containing details of the product or service. Depending on the suitability to the interested visitor, this could be a conversion to a sale. This is the essence of the internet in marketing for businesses.

Google offer a wonderful set of tools to augment any plans set out by the marketing department or the sole marketer. Google analytics allows you to track all your visitor activity and conversions and plan out campaigns around those findings. You can research the right keywords that will allow your site pages to rank high in the search engines so people will find your site.

Using the internet, you can build a fast mailing list by starting a blog and inviting people to opt-in for a newsletter or a free product. This in turn provides a good ROI (Return On Investment) that other forms of media cannot compete with. Your web site is operating 24/7, literally taking orders while you sleep. This has left many traditional channels for media exposure quite redundant which is why so many magazines have spent a lot of time crafting a web presence.

The internet in marketing strategies involves so many aspects that will drive a business. You can send email newsletters that launch a product or new benefit to a mailing list. Video has invited a wealth of possibilities by inviting viral marketing with video clips showing business promotions. YouTube has become a platform for business launches as a result. There is podcasting, distributing audio files that talk about a business venture. People are moving away from TV, radio and the yellow pages in vast numbers to gather up to date information on the web.