Reach the consumers in your neighborhood, city or region with local search. This is a great tool for small businesses looking to advertise on the Web, Yahoo! and Google offer local versions of their search engines. Citysearch is another site to look into. With this marketing tool, small businesses such as restaurants, hair salons, insurance agencies and boutiques will be able to target a localized consumer base through search results.
Recognizing the economic power of multicultural business, DiversityBusiness.com – the nation’s primary resource for small businesses and Fortune 1000 companies – has named Starmark International one of the Top Ten Woman-Owned Businesses in Florida. Regionally, Starmark is the second top woman-owned business in Fort Lauderdale, according to DiversityBuiness.com’s ranking.
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On April 16, 2009, Starmark International, a full-service integrated marketing communications agency located in Dania Beach, Florida will host “Gallery Night” for artist Alan S. Maltz.
Placing ads on Facebook and/or LinkedIn is certainly worth a try. For a relatively low budget of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, you can test these social media waters. And you can choose the pay-per-click or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) plan.
We’ve already told you about some great places to publish content online (Create a blog; Market yourself as an expert on Squidoo and Hubpages.com; and Make your brand the next YouTube star). Slideshare.net is another free social media content site that allows you to create an envelope of information about your business outside of your website.
If your company sells products or services online, you can increase your visibility by offering discounts to relevant associations, trade organizations, and people with popular blogs or e–newsletters. Approach these groups and offer a discount on the purchase of your product or service to their members and subscribers. For example, if you sell Italian kitchen cabinets, a builder’s association or interior design blogger might be interested in offering their members a discounted price.
When doing Search Engine Marketing (SEM), or paid search, it’s important that search engine results take consumers to a specific landing page, as opposed to your home page. This is especially true when using a long tail keyword strategy.
Link building involves anything you do to point hyperlinks back to your website or blog from other websites. One of the easiest (and totally free) ways to accomplish this is to leave a comment on someone else’s blog. When doing so, you will be prompted to enter you name, email address and a URL. It’s not hugely important what your comment states. An elaborate display of your expertise is not required, although your remarks should be positive and intelligently worded. The URL field is where you really bring it home – literally. Through link building tactics like this, you can increase traffic to your site, create awareness and add credibility.
With just a camera, a microphone and software that you probably already have on your computer, your company could become a viral Internet sensation. At the very least, you can engage with consumers on another plane by creating YouTube videos related to your products.
To be a real player in the game of online marketing, you need to at least do what your competitors are doing, and preferably more. As I always say, “The competition doesn’t set the bar. The competition sets the floor.”
This means you can’t just launch your website and forget about it. Look at Yahoo! This is a company that didn’t keep up with the evolution of Google fast enough. They fell behind, and now they’re hurting. They should have done a competitive assessment.
With this free testing tool from Google, you can turn your website into a conversion dynamo. Google’s Website Optimizer divides visitors to your website into different groups, presenting each a version of your website in order to track how they interact to your site. You can do simple AB Tests that compare just two or three pages, or complex multivariate experiments.
That web page title in the top bar of your web browser may be something you regularly overlook as an Internet user, but search engines know its true importance. In fact, they have placed a great deal of trust in what you put on the page title, and it’s a high-ranking factor in current search engine algorithms.