Internet Marketing Expert And Consultant Jay Berkowitz Offers Advice Filled with Free Tools You Can Use to Beat Tough Times and Maximize Your Website Traffic
Boca Raton, Florida, May 21, 2008 -- As many small business owners already know, discussions about whether we are in a recession or not doesn’t impact the hard fact that we are clearly in economic down times. Many business owners, particularly small business owners, would welcome any help to get more business and to make it through. That’s why Jay Berkowitz, Internet Marketing expert and founder of the Internet marketing promotion and advertising firm Ten Golden Rules, has created a list of “Ten Free or Low Cost Ways to Use the Internet to Help Your Business in Down Times.” These Internet marketing ideas, tools and technologies are immediately available online to maximize your website traffic and safeguard businesses to create opportunities that can help weather the current tough economic climate.
1. Maximize web site traffic by using Free Search Engine Optimization techniques. Generating additional search engine traffic results from two things, using the right words on your website and creating links TO the site. Step 1, add words to your website. Google and the other search engines read words and if someone searches those words you must have them on your site. The easiest way to accomplish this is to write an article a day (or one a week) about your industry. Free tip – you can find the word phrases that people search most frequently through a free trial at Wordtracker.com. Step 2. Build links to your site. When another site links to your site that gives your site more importance and moves you closer to Google’s first page. Ask business partners and suppliers to link to your website, get links from industry associations and your local Chamber of Commerce.
2. Create a FREE Offer on your site to get leads. A free brochure, a free eNewsletter, a free white paper, or a free industry rate calculator will attract people to sign up and when they do you can ask them for permission to send a free eNewsletter or more special offers in the future.
3. Measure the cost to acquire a lead and a sale. You now have the ability to measure your Internet marketing promotion and advertising efforts using a FREE product from Google called Google Analytics. This enables you to determine where visitors to your website came from and how many from each source signed up for your free offer or made a purchase. Once you know how many leads you generated from a banner campaign on your local Chamber of Commerce vs. your Google Pay Per Click ads you know where to invest in the future.
4. Learn from the competition by using Competitive Intelligence Tools such as Spyfu.com and Compete.com. These websites offer free products that can show you where your competitors are advertising on the internet and how much they are spending.
5. Take advantage of FREE Internet products like Google Optimizer to improve conversion on your web site. Optimizer allows you to test different offers, different prices and different designs on a web page to determine which is the most effective and could maximize your website traffic.
6. Generate greater awareness for your business or product by using Free or low cost Internet Press Releases. Another Internet marketing idea is to use free press release options include PR.com and ClickPress.com. Tip - we recommend PRWeb.com, for just $80 your press release will have an excellent chance to get picked up in search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
7. Develop an eNewsletter. eNewsletters are a staple of effective online communications. A FREE eNewsletter is a great reason for people to sign up with you and become a lead on your website and then you have permission to send them great articles about your industry, profile your expertise, and provide case studies and client testimonials. It allows you to stay top of mind with current customers and prospects and gives them a ‘send-to-a-friend’ feature to forward your information. Tip – make sure you add the articles to your website so the words in the articles get picked up by the search engines!
8. Create a virtual internet sales force using Affiliate Marketing. Affiliates are marketers who will send traffic to your website in exchange for a small fee for a lead or percentage of the value of a sale. Affiliate networks include Commission Junction (CJ.com), Linkshare (Linkshare.com) Share-A-Sale (ShareaSale.com ). Tip - Determine how much it costs you to get a sale and offer the affiliates slightly less. Affiliate marketing is very direct - you only pay for a lead or a sale.
9. Build your company’s position on high traffic Social Media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Both sites just started allowing company pages and it is a good way to build presence and links for a website.
10. Cut out the middle man by selling direct at eBay, Amazon and Yahoo stores. The Internet advertising consultant offers this last tip. Many businesses are developing a whole new branch of their business by selling direct to the consumer through online stores. While you do pay a fee to the website, consumers trust these well known online brands, they have built in traffic and they have easy to use tools to build virtual stores with eCommerce functionality.
Bonus Tip – Recession or not, now is a great time to build your personal network. Making business connections using sites like LinkedIn and Facebook creates a personal network for you to go to when times get tough. Search for all of your current contacts on one or more of these networks and start participating in the community. Answer questions and help people out as the good business karma may come back to you when you need it most.
About Internet advertising consultant, and founder of the Internet marketing promotion and advertising firm TenGoldenRules.com, Jay Berkowitz is an accomplished marketing professional who brings more than twenty years of marketing and Internet experience with Fortune 500 companies such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and others to work with his clients. He has created successful traditional and interactive marketing programs for AT&T and Sprint and helped lead eDiets.com to a position of leadership in the online health and fitness field.
Jay created the Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing and his business in order to assist companies of various sizes to maximize website traffic and convert that traffic to sales. The company provides strategic consulting services, unique ideas for Internet marketing, search engine optimization and marketing, banner and landing page creative, affiliate management and related services.
An astute and well-regarded Internet marketing expert, keynote speaker and presenter, Jay regularly hosts the Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing Podcast and is the President of the Global Interactive Marketing Association Advisory Board (GlobalIMA.com) Past President of the American Marketing Association of South Florida, a founding Board member of the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association and past Board Member of the Toronto International Film Festival. As a popular and regularly sought-after presenter, Jay has addressed audiences at the American Marketing Association,, The US Department of Commerce, the Association of Internet Marketing and Sales, The Affiliate Summit, Ad-Tech and the CEO Executive Forum.
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