I’m confident that every small business owner and service professional, just about, understands the importance of developing a specialty and then marketing that specialty to a specific target niche. But why is it that a lot of businesses these days still fall apart after just six months of operation?

Because after all is said and done, there’s only about 1 out of 3 chances your business will succeed. Let me elaborate.

Successful marketing, like a delicious cup of blended coffee, is a complex mixture of specialty and target niche marketing. Too much of one thing is doomed to failure, and the same goes for not having enough of the other.Great specialty, no market niche

Imagine a business consultant marketing his services in an online classified ads. He’s great, he’s done his homework, and he has more than enough work experience in his field.

Then he goes on to write that he is available for “anyone who requires his services“, that’s when he loses out to his competitors, which are a dime a dozen. He isn’t reaching out to anyone in particular, and the result is no one reaches out to him.

Specific market niche, no specialty

This time imagine a consultant advertising to small- and medium-sized businesses within 40 miles of her office in Calgary. So far, so good. When asked about her specialty, she says, “I don’t have a specialty. I can advise anyone about anything!”

Would you hire this person to advise you on your company’s finances? Not even if she pays me.

Like I said earlier, good marketing is 1) knowing what you can do and 2) knowing the right people to talk to.

There are several ways to achieve both. Join social networking sites and connect with experts in your field to develop your specialty. Enter into a business partnership with more experienced individuals and learn from their methods and mistakes. To focus on a target niche, use local SEO and search engine techniques to generate traffic towards your business or website.

The secret is to maintain a good balance of both efforts. Market niche and specialty are the two most crucial ingredients of success.

Every website wants to attract local traffic. Sure, maybe that isn’t the case for some like Rotten Tomatoes (movie reviews) or TIME Magazine, but I’ll bet half my life’s savings that every blogger or small business website out there is eager to gain the attention of a local townsfolk or two.

Why is that? Because local traffic brings business and generates sales.

Making your website visible on local search engines becomes easier once you know what to do and where to begin. Without further ado, let’s start the process of exploding your website traffic by…

1. Adding your business to the Google Local Business Center
Google is the world’s most popular search engine. It is now a household name. Why wouldn’t anyone want to make their website “Google-friendly”?

When you create a local business listing on Google, you 1) put yourself within reach of every person who uses Google, 2) allow Google to show your exact location through Google Maps, 3) display your website as a search hit and 4) create printable coupons for your customers to avail when they hire your services.

2. Putting your city and state as title meta tags of your webpages
Most if not all search engines pay particular attention to the title meta tags of webpages they search for. It’s just how search engines are designed. Knowing this, if you want to improve your website’s local search visibility, you should include your city/province and state (ex. Calgary, Alberta) in the title meta tags of your homepage as well as other important webpages you wish to draw attention to.

3. Adding a local number and full mailing address on every webpage
An 800 number is fine, but thing is it doesn’t give any hints to your location. So an 800 number by itself is pretty much incomplete.

Adding your full mailing address and local number at the bottom of every webpage achieves two things – first it improves your local search visibility and second, it’s easier and more convenient for visitors to obtain your contact information.

4. Building quality inbound links to your website
The long-term goal of every internet marketer—that is, small business owners and service professionals marketing their services online—is to build a library of quality links that directs visitors from other websites to yours.

Take note this isn’t a case of quantity as it is a continuous effort over the years as long as your website is running. Search engines see inbound links as a sign of influence—a sort of “thumbs up” sign. The more links directed toward your website, the better you’ll rank on most search engines.

5. Attracting good (and bad) reviews
Review websites like Yelp help increase your local visibility.

Create a business listing on Yelp. Then write something like “I’d love to hear your comments/feedback” on your contact page followed by a link to your Yelp business listing.

The thing with a near-perfect review record is that some people tend to become suspicious. So welcome bad reviews as you do positive ones. No company is perfect. Even Apple has its haters.

The problem with small business owners and service professionals who want to attract local traffic is they tend to look for solutions in all the wrong places.

If you want for people to find you on the Internet, you got to start at the place where everybody goes when they want to find anything on the Internet – the search engine.

This is the last part of the video series.

In this video, you’ll learn…

• How to give away stuff and attract more clients.
• How to easily create product that you can give away that will cost you nothing.
• The oldest marketing trick that works every time.

Click the PLAY button below.

Here’s the 2nd video of our 3-part video series.

In this video you’ll learn:

• A very powerful to research your market.
• How to identify the objections and doubts of your prospect WITHOUT them saying it.
• How to turn prospect into client easily.
• How to turn your ads, website, and brochures into “client-getting” marketing materials.

And a lot more.

Click the PLAY BUTTON Below To Watch The Video!

So what do you think about the videos?

Are you ready for more prospects, clients, and money?

I’m sure you do.

In this short video, I’ll show

• How you can easily win prospect and turn them into client.
• What’s the BIGGEST mistake service professionals make and how to fix it.
• The “long-forgotten” principle that if you apply it in your business, you will surely get more client to hire you.
• Your market behave so you know how to market to them and give you money.

Here’s the truth: No matter how good your are or your services is, if a prospect is not ready to buy they are not going to buy from you. Period!

They don’t care if you have to meet a sales quota nor your about your bills and mortgage.

BUT…

If you can dance with them, you can easily move them from being a prospect to a paying client.

Watch the Video Now!

Generating local leads is one thing, turning those leads into profit is another.

Let’s face it, if you can’t convert a single local visitor into a paying client, then everything else, all your marketing efforts that lead to your client conversion campaign, from email marketing to article marketing, might as well go down the drain.

The road to success is a long and hard one, but knowing a few crucial details can make the journey much easier.

Here are some tips on how to increase your website’s conversion rate.

1. Don’t hesitate to start small
They say, “The bigger something is, the harder it falls.”

Small business owners and service professionals should listen to this age-old piece of advice. What I’m trying to say is, don’t be afraid to start small, even for your website. The first time a local visitor clicks your website, there’s no way he’s going to give you his phone number or address right off the bat. Instead, start small by offering something free in exchange for his email address.

To his ears, it’s a harmless exchange. For you, you just added another name to your prospect list.

2. Make your return policies an offer they can’t refuse
I’ve seen websites that simply has no return policies whatsoever, some that leave customers feeling unsatisfied and cheated and, the worst kind, some that are actually pretty good but nowhere to be found on the website before the actual purchase. Which is wrong.

Solid return policies make great sales because they lure customers into thinking they’ve got nothing to lose when they take you up on your offer. Make your return policies irresistible, and declare it in huge bold letters on your website. Something along the lines of, “I’ll return 100% of your money back if you feel like you’re not getting your payment’s worth,” etc.

3. Ask, don’t offer
I’m going to assume you’re constantly watching and keeping tabs on your local client list on a weekly basis. When you send them an email or a newsletter, don’t say, “Hire me today and start drowning in clients tomorrow!” Everyone is skeptical on the Internet. Aren’t you whenever you receive an unsolicited email in your inbox?

The trick is to rephrase that in-your-face talk into a smooth, subtle pickup line. “If you have a question or two about internet marketing, ask me via email. Unlike your doctor, I’m always in.”

Now which approach sounds better?

4. Put up a toll-free number on your website
Most customers won’t really have any need to call you. But having a number on your homepage—a toll-free number at that—makes a big difference in making your local clients feel secure in that they could talk to someone about your services anytime they need to. In addition having a toll-free number also makes your business look more legitimate.

5. Be persistent
The magic to successful online marketing is starting small and never giving up. Some of the richest online marketers today didn’t start yesterday. They’ve been going at it for years, learning the science and honing their craft as they go along this ever-changing and highly-competitive market.

So I suggest you do the same: keep going and believe you’re always making good progress. Success will come soon at the time you least expect it.

That wraps up my online marketing tips for this week. I hope they help make your business a huge success.

Feel free to leave a comment below.

Imagine you have an idea of a service or product and you know in your heart that it’s going to bring you a fortune. So you think about starting a small online business.

Why online business? Let’s face the facts: in this down economy, an amateur businessman looking to start a business outside of the Internet is a recipe for disaster. Trust me on this. The best way to go it is online. Period.

But take note there’s more to online business than putting up a website, or a squeeze page, in place and simply waiting for orders to come in. The concept of marketing stays very much true online as it does offline. Fact is a revolutionary product may or may not bring success to your business, marketing does.

Without further ado, here are 7 simple tips on how to get started on your online business.

1. Invest on a solid business plan
This is one of those things a novice entrepreneur should never shave off his list of priorities. A business plan covers many things – from your market niche to the status of the competition to attracting customers. Whether you’re a product retailer or a service professional, in the beginning you need to invest on a solid business plan more than anything else.

2. Establish a market niche
Next is knowing the people you should be talking to. Not everybody’s going to buy your product or service, not everybody’s interested to hear what you have to say. But the people that do require your services, these are the people you ought to be reaching out to and making an offer. Remember, knowing the right people leads to success.

3. Mind your pricing
When determining the cost of your services, expenses and profit aren’t the only things you need to put into consideration. You must also think about the competition. Mind your pricing, and keep your fees at a competitive level.

4. Design a professional website
We’ve come to the topic most people think about when they think about online business or internet marketing. Your own website. Simply put, you need a professional-looking website if you want to try your hand at an online business. If you aren’t familiar with web design, you can hire someone to design a website for you. Web designers are a dime a dozen these days. So finding one at a reasonable price shouldn’t take too much of your time.

5. Market, market
You know what made Bill Gates a billionaire? It wasn’t Windows. It was his marketing skills. Gates marketed his operating system aggressively to PC retailers and manufacturers. Afterwards when nearly every home PC was running on Windows, that’s when Gates took the time perfecting the OS we know today.

Every type of business relies on marketing to succeed. Your online business is no exception.

6. Be patient
The best things come to those who wait. Remember that great success doesn’t happen overnight, especially when you start small. The key to growing your online business is patience and dedication to the pursuit. Your time to hit it big will come soon. It’s only a matter of working hard and doing the best that you can until it does.

Remember these tips when starting your own small business on the Internet. I look forward to hearing stories of your success.

Trust.

The concept of customer loyalty is defined by this one word. If customers can trust what you have to offer, no doubt you could make extremely loyal customers out of them.

Today most service professionals, just about, are ready to leap to provide customers the services they want. But what they don’t realize is they don’t have what customers really need—that is, a sense of trust and security in whatever service they are offering.

So back to the topic, do you wish there was an easier way to build customer loyalty? I’ll be frank with you and say there’s no such thing as an easy way to do that. Building customer loyalty is a slow and tedious process. It needs to be done right, or else everything would backfire and that is something you don’t want to happen. Building loyalty is no different from getting someone to trust you completely: it is earned and not something easily given away for free.

Here are some tips on how to build customer loyalty for your business.

1. Advertise your service as a solution to their problems
Most businesses and service professionals like to blabber on about how they are at the top of the food chain. “The No. 1 Internet Marketing and SEO Specialist on the Internet Today,” says a website I came across the other day.

Thing is, customers aren’t looking for the best. What customers really want is someone who could provide the best solution to their problem. To deliver this message, you must market yourself on a gut-feeling, emotional level, not through witty one-liners and bragging rights.

2. Stop being a one-trick pony
A satisfied customer doesn’t necessarily make a loyal customer, just about. Customers are always thinking, always looking for someone who could provide better service at a cheaper expense to their wallets.

As a service professional you’d do good to remember that to build a loyal customer you need to make yourself indispensable to that customer. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself what it is they truly need from your service at this particular point in time. If you could address that again and again, then no doubt you’re making a good impression on your customers.

3. Value the trust they’ve given you
There’s nothing worse than finally being given the customer loyalty and trust you’ve always wanted to achieve, and then squandering it away by losing focus and taking everything you’ve worked hard at for granted.

As a service professional, you should never underestimate the value of maintaining a solid one-on-one relationship with your customers, even after they’ve grown to trust your service over time.

Customers become loyal because they feel a connection with you they can’t find anywhere else. If you let go of that connection, the customer starts to feel unattached and you’re back to square one.

4. Make customers pay for relationship, not your expertise
The most important thing is to make customers feel that they are paying for the positive results as an outcome of hiring your services, not your expertise. Truth is most customers don’t really have a clue about how to measure your expertise until you’ve started producing results. If you could fulfill their needs as well as make them feel as valued customers, they’ll keep coming back, simply because they’re getting so much more than just straightforward service.

It goes without saying that the most successful businesses boast the most loyal customers. The customer is the blood that keeps the business running, and the loyal customer is its soul. Think about it. Everyday service professionals struggle to invent new ways to market themselves. For what? To build customer loyalty. It is by all means the end goal of every entrepreneur.

In this podcast, I revealed some cool tricks to get FREE traffic to your website.

If you got a budget, I also revealed the best way to pay for targeted traffic for your website.

Also, I answered a “business question” by one of my dear subscribers and members.

Go ahead and click the play button now!

Or

[ Click Here To Download MP3 To Your Computer Or IPod ]

When you quit your job, the day you dropped a resignation letter on the boss’ desk, you knew next couple weeks was going to be anything but easy. But you had no idea it was going to be this grueling.

Now you’re in a desperate position to improve your internet marketing efforts, but at the same you need to make every single penny count. You could no longer risk spending any more money on campaigns and strategies that, simply put, don’t work squat. What you need is new strategies that produce return on investments, and that’s why I’m here to help.

Here are 5 online marketing tips designed to boost your online presence without costing you a single cent.

1. Redesign your homepage
The homepage is the first thing visitors see when they look up your services on the Internet. Sometimes making small changes to it—for example, changing the banner image regularly—could spell the difference between a new client and a lost prospect. Redesigning your homepage regularly is an easy way of telling visitors that your website is alive and your services are available and on stand-by.

2. Offer more free content
All of us are suckers for anything free. Free this, free that. To drive traffic to your website, I suggest offering more free content to your visitors, perhaps additional free content by way of a blog page. Also take note you’re more likely to rank higher for any particular keyword the more pages Google sees on your website.

3. Monitor sales and change your headlines based on results
The headline is very important. It’s either a ticket to getting visitors to click on that “Sign me up!” button, or a cause for them to leave your website for good. Headlines such as “Discount at half the price”, “Buy one and get another one free”, and “50% off” all mean the same thing. But most marketing experts agree one of these headlines pull at least 80% more prospects than the other two.

Test visitor responses and adapt your headlines based on the results.

4. Get your clients to sell your services
Your working freelance doesn’t mean you always have to go it alone. Why not offer something nice, an incentive or discount, to clients who introduce new prospects to your website or business? Since you earn back more than what you gave up for the incentive, you still didn’t have to spend a single dime.

5. Ask visitors for feedback
Don’t be picky when it comes to customer feedback. In fact adding a small button at the bottom of your homepage with the caption, “I’d love to hear your feedback. Send me an email,” can go a long way in helping you build a stronger bond with your clients. Don’t deprive them the freedom to say what they think about how you can improve your services.

Online marketing was never meant to be an expense in the first place. Take advantage of these online marketing tips to help your business grow and make more money, for free.