To optimise your landing page choose one product and one group of keywords; otherwise your site will not have the relevant content required by the search engines.

• Plan what you are going to promote and write your article using list of well researched keywords to describe what you are trying to promote or sell.
• Make sure the content is relevant to the chosen product.
• Your description needs to be compelling and designed to entice your reader to learn more about your products.

The instructions above are a guide to how the search engines require you to build and optimise your landing page. This rule applies to Search Engine Optimisation and to Search Engine Marketing. Each landing page can have a different product with each product having its own set of theme based keywords.

A few other tips to optimise your landing page is to place ads on:

• Google Maps
• Google Places

Once your landing page is optimised with relevant keywords, your website will gradually index over time up the search engine ladder. Your landing page will also be optimised for Google Adwords giving your website another option to gain hits from potential customers.

Socil Media is a great option for small business although do not rely on social media alone for your digital communication strategy.  Social Media at present does not rank well in the search engines if you are selling products.  The reason for this is you cannot gain link juice from socil media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
You can do a simple experiment for this…go to Google and type in a generic search query for a product like hair care and you will not see a Facebook or Twitter result unless the Facebook or Twitter account is called exactly “hair care”.

If you want to reach your customers you will need to have relevant keywords that directly relate to the product you are wanting to promote otherwise your valuable dollars and time will be wasted.

Online Lead Generation

What you need to do is build an online lead generation system but before you go ahead and build your system you need to consider if you are a service based business or a product sales business.  A service based business requires a different online lead generation strategy to a product based business. 

A Service based online lead generation objective is to encourage your online customer to sign up to a web form or contact a consultant.

A Product based online lead generation objective is to encourage your online customer to go the the check out and purchase the product.
The two options require their own unique digital marketing and online lead generation strategies, to suit the individual circumstances of the product or service.

The two objectives have similar outcomes and you will need to develop an online lead generation system that is specific to your business goals.  More importantly, you need to focus on converting the website user into to a sale (product objective) or ask your customer to sign up to a web form (service objective) so you can follow up on offering your services.

First you must establish an automated digital data base system

Before you can build an online lead generation system, you need to have a data base of existing and potential customers.  In addition, your lead generation system needs to be a  secure and easily manageable data base system, that is either online or offline software that makes it simple to collect your leads and compile into a spread sheet. For example, a Microsoft Excel CSV file, this system will not work if you are considering outdated, hand written data base management.
Your website needs to become an automated lead generation system and an automated system to gather customer information through sign ups to web forms or the purchasing of products or services. Your data base is the most powerful lead generation tool for your business and your data base is an asset you can use to gain additional leads, referrals and customers.

Develop a 360 degree lead generation system

To develop a 360 degree lead generation system you will need to implement online and offline strategies to facilitate quality lead generation. The implementation of appropriate technology will assist you in gathering and documenting information with ease and without an unnecessary overload of paper work.

An example of how to create a 360 degree lead generation system

Before you can do anything you need your automated data base system in place. I suggest you ask your website developer to build you a web form on your website to automatically collect and enter into your data base relevant information to capture details of your clients.

Optimise Your Website

The next stage is to optimise your webpage and one of the most important factors amongst the 200 factors Google requires is to include relevant keywords to your webpage. Reason being, Google and other search engines will not consider your webpage page to be relevant to the search terms of the title and topic on your webpage, so you need to include keywords that are relevant to your subject or topic. For example, if you are in business selling flowers then you need to use keywords that are relevant to selling flowers.

Optimisation of your website is necessary to build your lead generation system because without optimisation of your website you cannot generate leads from Google Yahoo and Bing. Optimisation will also give you the benefit of being able to use Google Adwords to place ads for greater lead generation flexibility, research and analysis.

What is Your Call to Action?

Your call to action, is your unique selling proposition or your way to entice your customers to make a purchase or sign up to a web form? Before you can gain leads your website has to keep the user interested enough to entice the customer into converting the reader into action, otherwise your return on investment will be low and your time and money wasted.

How to Bring Customers to You

Depending on the size of your business, you need to decide on how you are going to bring customers to your business and website. You can do the following:

Television advertising is of course the most effective and the most expensive.

Radio is next in line and this is also an expensive but effective method to gain leads for your business.

Telemarketing can be cost effective for small business although this varies depending of the laws of each different country. Due to the take up of mobile phones I believe this form of marketing will be on the decline in years to come.

Print in Newspapers is a cost effective method of advertising for the small to medium sized businesses although many small businesses are moving away from Newspaper advertising and over to online advertising.

Email Marketing is also a great way to advertise your business and gain leads from this form of advertising. Furthermore, email marketing gives you the ability to use viral marketing to create a lead generation referral system to bring customers to your business. For example you can provide send to a friend links on your email template and your original recipients can then send the email to their friends and colleagues.

Build a referral system using postcard style mail out or hand out reward cards to people and reward them for finding you a customer for your business. You can quickly build your data base with this method alone.

Finally, of course your website with the implementation of Google Adwords and organic search engine optimisation so your customers can search online for your business, products and services.

All of the above can be used in a synchronised interchangeable way to build your lead generation system. Always remember to focus on building your data base of customers because your data base is a valuable asset to your business. Can you imagine if you had 2000 contacts in your data base…what about 20,000? or even 50,000?

Your online lead generation system will enable you grow your business reducing your marketing costs through the ongoing cycle of gaining leads and entering those leads into your data base. Once you have your leads you can use your existing data base in joint ventures with other businesses and their data bases.

Your Final Analysis Using Google Adwords

Once you have a lead generation system in place, all your hard work needs to be analysed and compiled into reports. Google Adwords gives you some basic statistical analysis, necessary for you to monitor and modify. As a result, you will be able to focus on your ROI (return on investment) and demographic targeting of your customers saving your business time and money.

The examples in this article are only a snapshot of what can be achieved and there are many strategies you can create on a cost effective basis with out spending tens of thousands of dollars on advertising.

I know I am not the only person that feels social media is too time consuming,  there are many online comments regarding the excessive time  it takes to navigate around, signing in reading emails, writing back and then more reading.

Here is a quick tip…Download Yoono which is software that can help you synchronise all you comments to many social media sites at the same time.

My question has always been… are we getting any real social value in being a member of numerous social media websites. Spending this much time with friends and acquaintances face to face would seem like a better idea. On the other hand, social media is a great way to keep in contact with friends and business contacts in far away places.

Business can also keep in touch

It is just not possible to have any meaningful contact with thousands of people on Facebook, Twitter or Linked In  ,(depending on your social media). The main purpose for many business oriented pages is to gain attention of the followers, receive a comment, get clicks, links and direct traffic back to their website.

Of course many pages on Facebook and Twitter are social only, social users will now be spending this space with the business world. Why is this the case? Social media sites need to fund the ongoing operation of the websites so revenue needs to be raised through advertising.

Patents of Google and Yahoo  have included higher ranking points for comments made on bloggs so it makes sense to have a blog on your website. Promote your blog and entice your loyal followers to make comments on your site, which consequently increases your data usage.

In regards to small to medium business… social media research  shows businesses are spending approximately 6 hours per week implementing social media strategy. Small business and sole traders have the highest weekly usage with more than half of marketers indicating a rise in the use of social media.

My take on social media is it will grow as more businesses see a low cost way to reach their target market. Of course this mainly applies to sole traders and small to medium business. Many corporate business would not see the time invested in social media as an adequate ROI(excluding advertising on Facebook or Linked In) as they require high volume response levels which social media does not adequately deliver.

As I am also involved with digital marketing I haven’t seen many printing companies willing to embrace the digital communications industry and many printing companies believe the internet as the competition. As a result I posted a question on a popular discussion group on the Linked In website called “Web to Print” asking other print professionals … “In Australia many printing companies are turning to digital printing. I would like to know if this is the case in the US or UK and how is this affecting offset printers”. Below is an answer many printers in Australia can easily implement for future profit streams.

Doug Bowker • Hi Paul,
While I’m in Canada, not the US or UK, your question is relevant both to specific trends in offset vs. digital print production and to a broader issue of a print vendor’s focus with their clients. The trend away from offset to digital printing for many applications where short runs and quick turnaround are needed, as well as longer runs where personalization is required, has been going on for many years; in fact it really has not even been a trend for many years but the de facto market standard. If there is a trend in the marketplace in recent years, it is more likely the adoption of online communications replacing both offset and digital printing in client business applications where electronic communications are more practical and cost effective than print.

This leads to the broader issue – the focus of print vendors. I worked directly in the print industry for over two decades and found this to be one of the most difficult challenges to overcome. The migration of print volume from offset to digital and then to online has caused serious challenges in the “print” industry because the industry in general has been so focused on production hardware – justifying it, feeding it and acquiring more of it. “Print” vendors who have prospered over the past 10+ years are the ones who have realized that they have to focus as much or more on client communication business requirements than the order backlog on their own print production gear. As clients’ communications requirements evolve, so must vendors’ ability to deliver communications solutions evolve from offset and digital print to include online communications that may bypass print completely. Focus on your clients’ business requirements and equip yourself to meet those requirements and you will retain the clients, albeit with an evolving solution set. Focus primarily on protecting and chasing volume for print production hardware, regardless of the technology, and other more nimble “communications” services providers with more than print in their solution set will eat your lunch. You may retain some print business but you will lose strategic control of the client relationship and eventually lose what print volume you have.

The real issue has been for many years, and will remain into the future, is how best to equip yourself to manage and deliver the broad range of communication solutions that your clients need in order for them to be successful in their own markets. The need for print production hardware will not go away but it is just that – production. It’s an internal delivery tool, not a strategic focus. The focus should be on tools that you can provide to help your clients be more effective in their businesses, including tools that you produce (print or develop) and deliver, as well as online resources to manage the tools that you deliver and make them quickly and easily available both to your clients’ internal users and to their customers. While I can and do still deliver innovative print solutions – offset and digital – where appropriate to my clients’ business, my lead solution strategy is based on a powerful integrated online platform that enables and manages both online and printed communications, and I’d be delighted to provide more information about that.
Doug

Paul Murphy from Liberty Marketing
Hello Lea and thank you for your time today. I would like ask you 10 questions on how you are finding starting up a small business in Australia.

Paul
For starters, what has been the most difficult hurdle to overcome when you started your small business?

Lea Allison from Wellness Within Naturopathic Clinic
The administrative side, learning about profit and loss, BAS and MYOB ensuring that my business runs professionally, quickly and smoothly. It’s one thing to know your job and do it well but expanding on my knowledge in the business area has been time consuming, however well worth it now that I have put the time and effort in.

Paul
Do you have a targeted marketing strategy at the moment?

Lea
Yes I do. My primary focus is with women’s health and I am planning on advertising the same advertisement with a colour photo once per month to attract that market.

Paul
Are your clients fully aware of what you do or do you need to inform them on how your profession can improve their health?

Lea
I do need to promote how my profession can assist. The customer is more interested in what I can do for them specifically rather than what can I do in broader sense.

Paul
I believe you have completed the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme small business training course…did you find this training helpful?

Lea
I found this course vital in setting up a small business. It has taught me basic business skills on how to expand my business rather than let it slide and fail. For example, marketing, advertising, book-keeping and networking. These were the key factors that I took away from the course as well as how to project into the future and plan ahead.

Paul
Where do you see your industry moving into the future?

Lea
The industry in natural health is a strong one and has proven to be continually moving forward for the last 10 years. There are so many modalities in natural health to choose from and I’m finding customers like these choices as they are becoming increasingly more aware of their own responsibilities with regard to their health and therefore are in more control of what they are requiring from the medical profession. Self diagnosing is not a good thing however a professional health practitioner will always be able to start the client off on the right foot first, then they can look at wellness and how to keep themselves on the right track once wellness has been attained.

Paul
What marketing and advertising has worked for you so far?

Lea
The local newspaper. A colour photograph with the advert and only using a point format as to what my services are and who I am targeting my services to. I have learnt keeping adds straight forward and not to busy is the answer to advertising.

Paul
Have you considered what the demographics of your clients are and how you can reach them?

Lea
Yes I am currently advertising to 50,000 in the local newspaper however I am going to try a wider demographic by advertising in the West Australian in the middle of the week. Wednesday being the 2nd most popular day for the West Australian. I may pick up more locals who are reading that particular newspaper on that particular day. It’s worth a shot.

Paul
Who would be your ideal customer and why?
Lea
Women are the best customers. The reason why is because women are great communicators especially to their own families. If something works for them, they will share it with their friends and families and are therefore fantastic advertisers through word and mouth.

Paul
Where would you like your business to be in the next 5 years?
Lea
I am a single parent looking after a 10 year old at present. However ideally building my clientele to a level where school hours are completely covered and that I am able to pay all my expenses both business and personal from the income of my business would be a rewarding personal achievement. I don’t see myself employing anybody but to be busy and earning enough to support a healthy lifestyle for my daughter and myself would be ideal.

Paul
What is the biggest health threat facing Australians in the near future?

Lea
I believe obesity is the biggest health threat. Obesity comes with other inflammatory disorders, now commonly known as metabolic disorder. This means other organs and systems within the body are under stress and struggling. For example, self repair, vitality, energy, good sleep, healthy menstrual cycles in women and especially children with regard to nutritional status and learning ability are all highly regarded as ‘quality of life’. Addressing the body as a whole with regard to obesity and inflammation is the key to wellness and maintaining that wellness once achieved.

Paul
Well that just about concludes our interview with you Lea. I am sure small business people can learn from your experience regarding the small business training…and I strongly agree on the points you made on making sure you have the bookwork in order. The one other major factor I would like to point to is knowing your customer, what they want and especially where they are searching for your products and services. Once you know the demographics and psychographics of your customers you will be able to reduce your marketing costs due to a more targeted marketing and advertising strategy.

By using a quality digital marketing strategy you can reduce your marketing costs and stay up to date with how your online business tools can help you to reduce your client acquisition costs in a downturn.

The first online business tool you will need is a professionally designed website with graphics that keep the website user interested although the site needs to be built to convert your customers to a sale or to make an enquiry to your business via a contact form.

The website will need a blog and it will need to be a Content Management System (self editing) website. Your site needs to be up dated with new content on a regular basis and self editing is more cost effective than using a developer to update your content.

Secondly, once you have your business online you will need to optimise your site otherwise no-one will see your site. The website you have chosen needs to be built with search engine optimisation and customer conversion in mind so your business can get a return on the investment for your digital marketing efforts.

Once you can optimise your website on all the major search engines, you can only then use other cost effective digital marketing strategies such as email marketing and other traditional marketing strategies to their full potential.

Thirdly, email marketing is another digital marketing strategy small business can use to acquire more customers at a fraction of the cost of direct marketing I strongly recommend all small businesses to start keeping a data base of your customers and potential customers in an excel spread sheet or use MYOB or some other accounting software device to keep electronic records of your customers.

The reason why I say this is because you need to use electronic forms of data bases to upload your contacts to all email marketing software. If you would like to do some research of your own on the cost of buying a data base you won’t get much change from $1000.00 for a small data base that you can only use once. Make sure you build your own data base and save money.

I would not say don’t use traditional marketing to reach your customers although many small businesses need to make good use of their online capabilities and encourage customers to go to the website to view special offers or maybe a competition as a call to action. Your website needs to give your customers a reason to come back and book mark your site.

If you are considering traditional marketing such as printing you can use a printed brochure to entice your customers to your site with a strong call to action offering a discount or to become a member of your VIP club. Once you have their details you can enter them into your data base for email marketing at a later date.

Research has shown when a customer receives your direct mail brochure and it is also backed up by email marketing they will remember the message sent to them in the mail resulting in higher response rates to the offer. Many customers also appreciate a reminder from you and your business especially when it’s a competition or special offer they had forgotten to enter.

Digital marketing is to be used to support the initial marketing mix or cross marketing promotion your business needs to reach its target market. By cross media marketing using your digital communication tools more effectively you will lower the cost of reaching your customers.

Additionally, if you were to use digital marketing to communicate to your customers you can reduce your marketing and advertising costs by up one tenth of the cost of traditional printing and direct mail costs.

If you would like to contact a consultant on how you can reduce your marketing and advertising costs please contact us now.

Dear Bob,

Broadband is jobs in your region. Bob I am writing to you to so you can consider how many of your electors are wanting a website they can bring the world to them. I remember a website a few years ago of a person selling hand made whips online; he did well in his venture and he lived in regional Queensland.  How many other people are there like him?  

There is a revolution happening in online business and your region is in need of innovative action. Just think about Home stay and accommodation opportunities that give people in your region money and prospects for the future.  Just think if “I”  in Western Australia wanted to travel to the gulf on Capricorn and it was made more affordable through micro business being able to approach me online. In addition, exporters need a quality broadband and I will tell you why. Google is the major search engine. Soon Google will be penalising websites that load too slow and these slow websites will not rank highly. Your constituants will not know this until later down the track as it happens at a rate that is not noticed by the novice website owner and needs to be measured on a regular basis. 
Your constituents will not be happy when their business is no-where to be found on Google and other search engines. I only say this as I provide digital communications/IT technology and to be informed in this subject is critical. Just consider how many people pick up the yellow pages compared to searching online. If you cant get fast broadband in the country then jobs are going to be lost and more people and their businesses will leave regional areas due to a lack of opportunities. 

 Bob all I want to say to you is think about how enterprising your people are with the right tools. Think about all the regions that have a new tourism market that THEY can promote in a cost effective manner. 

 Think about international trade…if I could find a holiday in Cape York that was online and gave me trust and reliability then it would be a great adventure. But if it does not load up and gets rejected by Google and other major search engines then basically we will never find these places with so much to offer.

I wrote this topic with the hard work of country people in mind and my motivation is for these people to have all the benefits we all enjoy.

Regards

Paul Murphy

Please post your comment here and I will pass them on to Bob Katter.

One factor that I have recently read in many blogs is that Google is fighting spam on tweets the same way in combats spam when people link to websites with irrelevant content or have content on their website that is not relevant to the subject topic. It makes sense as any-one can tweet the same topic over and over and it should not get any ranking. Moreover, total duplication of tweets will push your site further down the search engine rankings.

One major factor of Twitter is it brings people to your website and therefore increases inbound linking, book marking your site, retweeting and viral marketing through the promotion of increased traffic to your site.

Microsoft and Google have signed agreements with Twitter giving each company rights to measure tweet traffic in real-time facilitating real-time search engine results.

Therefore, your twittering should be considered an important factor when optimising your website…people will come to your site because you offer something they want. Furthermore, factor in your content strategy, the subject topics you choose need to be relevant to your website content.

There are too many businesses online today that have no rankings in the search engines and see no need to have an online presence high up in the search engine rankings. If I could ask any business person if they would like more people to walk past their store, of course they would say yes.

Spending large amounts of your marketing budget creating a website on what looks good will not convert the customer to a sale or prompt them to fill in a contact form. Conversion to a sale and submit a form is the primary goal you need to consider when building a website.

Without search engine optimisation there is no possible way any website can get a return on the investment made for the website. If you are not converting your prospects into sales of some kind then you may as well build a bill board in the desert, or pay for a sign that does not attract customers.

Search engine optimisation is now a main stream way of reaching your targeted audience. At Liberty Marketing we can help your business gain new customers from a target market not previously accessed before.

If you need to gain more customers please contact a consultant.

What makes sense is why Google and other search engines are making relevant content a top key factor.  There are many reasons why spam is more abundant now and one reason is linking campaigns by webmasters or companies that are linking to other websites that are not relevant to the origin website.

Spamming has become a nuisance to other website owners due to black hat linking to sites that are not in the same industry or do not share the same topic, such as a Plumbing site linking to a Printing site. There is no keyword relevancy for the end user searching the internet so Google will not recognize this as a quality link.

Quality content and related keywords are important factors you need to consider when writing your copy for a website. This way your topic or subject material will be seen as in line with the Google webmaster guidelines and you will have positive ranking.

Want to be in a better position in search engines? Contact a Consultant