TOTAL WEB PRESENCE LOCAL INTERNET MARKETING MADE EASY A million-dollar entrepreneur shares 3 Sneaky Ways to make your offline business visible in an online world Michelle Chance-Sangthong
INTRODUCTION If you feel as though your local business has been left behind by the dot-com explosion, you re not alone. Small businesses are losing opportunities every day because their brick and mortar storefronts have become invisible in the brave new online world. As an Internet marketing expert who s sold more than $5 million in retail goods online, I have developed an array of tools that get businesses back on the radar screens of potential customers. I ve helped dozens of entrepreneurs leverage the Web to grow their offline businesses. In this book, I share 3 Sneaky Ways to make YOUR business visible on the Internet. (Heads up: it s not all about your website.) By following the simple steps you ll learn in these pages, you will build a deeper connection with your existing customers. More importantly, you ll find new customers in less time than you could have imagined. Not sure if online marketing will work for your offline business? Meet Nickee, the owner of a local pet sitting service. Like most pet sitters, Nickee used to get the majority of her new business from referrals. After utilizing just one of the sneaky techniques in my Total Web Presence strategy, her business grew so rapidly that she couldn t make time for a vacation for two years! It s been nearly five years since I worked with Nickee, and 80% of her new customers still come from the Web.
Will the 3 Sneaky Ways work for your business? Absolutely! And if a pet sitter can grow her customer base year after year by using only a third of what you re about to learn, think about what you can do with the whole enchilada. Get started today! Every hour you wait puts you further behind your competition. You ve got my word on it: if you implement these 3 Sneaky Ways, your visibility online will improve, and so will your business. It s all about Total Web Presence, which I ll explain in Chapter 1. Experts predict that the vast majority of businesses that don t have some type of online presence will be out of business in five years. Don t let your business be one of them; start putting the 3 Sneaky Ways to work today!
CHAPTER 1 : WHAT IS TOTAL WEB PRESENCE & WHY DO I NEED IT? Let s start with a little visualization. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and imagine someone typing your product or service into a search engine like Google. When this imaginary person hits search, your company immediately pops up. In fact, it s listed more than once on the first page of search results! Now, open your eyes and remember what you just visualized. Because, my friend, you just saw the Holy Grail of Internet marketing. It s called Total Web Presence. And if you want to remain competitive, it s time to create those results for real. In your imaginary search, your business came up several times in the SERPS (that s Search Engine Results Pages to the uninitiated). What did those listings say? Let s see one of them was probably a listing for your website. Another may have been a video you posted to YouTube. Still others might be a note from your Facebook Page or your Google Plus page. You could easily show up in four or five listings that are all about the product or service you sell by leveraging Web channels outside of your own website. Total Web Presence is simply the sum total of all the channels you use to reach potential customers. And the goal of having a TWP is for your business to dominate search results wherever your future customers are looking. It may seem a little egotistical to want to be everywhere on the Internet. But when you show up all over, you become larger than life in the mind of your future customer, and that s exactly what you want. You may be thinking that this won t work for your kind of business. But I m here to tell you that if you offer products and services people might search the Web to find, it will work for you.
Consider the Yellow Pages. If you re over 30, you might remember the days when the Yellow Pages were the first thing you looked for when you wanted to find a business. (I mean the big, heavy book that got dropped off on your front porch every year or two, not the online version!) In the Yellow Pages, ads were designed to make the biggest advertiser stand out. Predictably, businesses with large, eyecatching ads got more telephone calls from prospective customers than little businesses with regular listings. The whole process worked so well that each year advertisers went bigger and bigger -- that s how they got more attention. Marketers have done the same thing for years in traditional media. Big corporations like McDonald s and Nike spend millions of dollars annually to place ads everywhere potential customers might see them billboards, television, sponsorships, even blimps. The rest of us, however, have these pesky little things called budget limits. We simply can t afford to advertise on such a large scale. On the Internet, though, we have a chance to level the playing field. The Web is the great equalizer for small businesses. It gives the rest of us a chance to connect with customers for much less money -- and in a much more targeted way -- than traditional advertising. And all we have to do is show up where our customers are looking. In years past, that meant Google or other search engines. Today, it means social media, too. Showing up everywhere gives you credibility, which is exactly what you want. You want prospective customers to see you as the credible source, solution or choice for people looking for your service or product. Many people tell me that because their customer base is local, they don't need to have a Web presence. I couldn t disagree more!
For one thing, businesses today are expected to have a website. A website is the virtual front desk of your company; it shows you are a going concern. Even more importantly, a well-done website will help customers find you. Believe me, they are not going to find you in the Yellow Pages. While it used to be one of the main ways for people to generate business, today it s a dinosaur big, heavy and extinct. There s a good reason for this. Why would anyone want to look through actual pages with teeny-tiny print when they can go to the Internet and search for exactly what they want and find it in the flash of an eye? People today are on the go. They want to research products and services online, and they re looking for instant gratification. Your potential customers go to the Web to find services, get directions to shops and restaurants, and read reviews of products they might want to buy. They search the Web on their desktops, their laptops, their ipads and other tablets. And they search on their mobile phones. When I do seminars about Total Web Presence, I ask audience members to raise their hands if they used their phone that day for something other than a phone call. Every time, almost every hand in the room goes up. Those people with their hands up are the consumers of today. Their call minutes are low and their data usage is at an all-time high because of texting, social media and search. Nowadays, a mobile device is a computer and camera that you can also use to make a phone call! If you re still wondering whether customers really use the Web to find a business like yours, stop wondering. They probably do.
Whether you provide a service or sell products, you ll find that most of your customers come either from direct referrals or from searching the Internet. If I want some cupcakes for my next office party or need my windows washed, I may ask around for recommendations. But I m just as likely to head straight for my computer. There was a time when I believed the everyone needs a website rule did not apply to convenience stores or gas stations, but mobile devices have changed that. Now, when my friends and I travel, we search for nearest gas station on our phones. Trust me when I say that people are probably searching for your business, too. Are there exceptions to this? Sure. If you re looking for, say, a psychologist, you will probably ask your doctor or friends for a referral. But if you re like most of us, once you get the referral, you ll look the doc up online -- even if it s only to get directions or find out their office hours. Now that you have a better understanding of WHY you need a Total Web Presence, we ll talk about some specific ways you can create one and make it work for you.