Internet Marketing for Small Business: 48 Traffic Tips Series

If you’re looking for a way to improve internet marketing for your small business, there are three things you must have:

1. Traffic – in order to get traffic, you must first answer the question, “who would buy this”? That is actually the most important question in your marketing equation. As a former yellow page sales professional, my priority was not understanding the needs of my customers market. My priority was knowing how to convince them that advertising with my company was in their best interest.
2. Conversion – what can we say to persuade them to opt-in or to buy? The two biggest priorities of any website ought to be list-building and sales. If you provide enough value and craft a compelling enough message, you can get site visitors to convert.
3. Economics – can you reach your audience and sell to them at a profit? Another way to say that is, “what does it cost you to acquire a customer”?

Today, I’m starting a series of 48 traffic tips that will give you a road map to create all of the traffic you could ever want.

The first three traffic tips are 1) do your keyword research; 2) Write your articles for the reader — and the search engines; and 3) Submit your article to the proper article directories.

Tip # 1 :  Keyword Research

Online search results are determined by relevance. The more relevant the content, the higher up your articles will rank. Keyword research will show you which words to target in order to maximize your chances for success. Writing articles has been one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. If you choose the proper keywords, you have better chances of showing up at the top of the results pages.

A good free tool is the Google Keyword tool. (At the time of this post, that link works. If you read this at some time in the future, you can just Google the term “Google Keyword tool”.)

When you go to that tool, you’ll be able to put in keywords that match what you think your prospect would type in to search for your product or service. The results that come up will provide you with multiple keyword combinations so that you can see how many people are searching for those terms, and what the advertiser competition is.

Example:  If you own an Atlanta dental practice, you might type the word “Atlanta dentist”, and you would see that 27,100 is the number of people who searched on that term in January of 2010. That’s a fair estimate…this is not an exact tool. There were 1300 who typed in Atlanta pediatric dentist.

It’s also important to pay attention to how much competition there is for each keyword you are considering. The way that you do that is, you go to Google and type in your keyword phrase surrounded by quote marks. The results that pop up are the other sites that are specifically targeting that term.

Example:  When I search for “atlanta pediatric dentist” I see there are 37,800 web pages that are already listed for that term.

Practices competing for "Atlanta Pediatric Dentist "

This information provides you with a good foundation to know how to proceed.

Tip # 2:  Writing Articles for the Reader and the Search Engines

There has been a long-time debate around how many times a keyword should be placed into your articles. A major key is to avoid the mistake of “keyword stuffing” your articles. Search engines can tell when you are using your keywords too much and in ways that are un-natural. Make a practice of doing your keyword research as a foundation and giving your readers plenty of value. Google has become the #1 search engine because they are relentless about providing relevant search results to their users.

An ideal target for keyword density is 2-5%. So, for every 100 words in your article, you should use your keyword somewhere between 2-5 times. If your content is good, then the readers who reach your pages will stay there longer and consume your content. Ultimately…that’s what you want. If your content is providing real answers to their problems, then you are developing credibility and trust. Trust is what causes people to do business with you.

Tip # 3:  Submit Your Articles to the Proper Article Directories

There’s a large number of article directories that you can submit articles to, but not all of them are worth your time. Since you’re trying to drive  traffic to your website, you want to invest your time in the article directories that will give you the best return on investment time-wise.

Here’s a list of the top article directories:

• EzineArticles.com
• GoArticles.com
• ArticleDashboard.com
• Buzzle.com

What you’ll want to do is open an account at these different directories and set a regular schedule of posting articles. If you do, I know from experience that you will begin getting more visitors to your website.

Internet marketing for small business is only going to get more difficult as competition increases, so you’ll want to develop the right habits early on.

In my next post, I’ll start by talking about how to use the resource box to persuade your readers to take action.

Make it a great week!