Welcome to the #1 local marketing guide that will walk you through the top ways of dominating your local market today. So the question is, who is this guide meant for such as who will benefit the most from it? The simple answer is any and everyone who wants to be found online for a business, website, or personal exposure.
If you want to build an online presence like no other in the world, then you’re in the right place because I’m about to change your life forever. If you’re a small business, and you’re not online, then I must say you’re in big, big, and I mean BiGGG trouble. The reason for this is because the worlds we live in function, and revolves around the World Wide Web. If people are searching for something, then they will pull out that mobile phone or laptop and start that search.
Now, if you’re smart like I know you are, then you did the work beforehand to gain that online presence. But if you didn’t, then the other companies in your city or town just stole a potential customer or client only by having an online presence. Just as simple as having a website can mean the difference in been found versus no one knowing you even have a business. Continue reading →
Today is your lucky day if you’re looking to promote your restaurant for free to thousands of people in your community and city by just using Facebook. The time has come for you to grow your restaurant massively in a matter of weeks if you implement the strategies you will be reading about in a moment.
For over 13 years now, I have been doing online and offline marketing for myself and thousands of businesses locally and across the world. One thing I stress is that no matter if you have a snow cone stand or a fortunate 500 company like Best Buy, if you can implement simple and effective marketing tactics, then you can dominate your local market.
How to Promote Your Restaurant
Now, I’m not going to get too much into analyzing your local competition in your town because that can take all day, and honestly, that’s all on the shoulders of the marketing people you’re using to help grow your restaurant.
What I want to talk about, which is part of a chapter I wrote in my local marketing domination guide that takes you through five chapters on how to analyze, research, and dominate your local market with business profiles, video marketing and one of my favorite for a restaurant business is Facebook.
Attracting Customers on Facebook
People ask me many times at events that I’m hosting, how do I promote my restaurant business? You would think most people who are in this industry are knowledgeable on getting customers through the doors consistently, but unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
So what I’m going to reveal to you all today are the steps to promoting your restaurant on Facebook to thousands of potential customers daily.
What you want to do first is have a meeting with the staff and let them know about your goals for the next 3, 6 to 12 months when it comes to the restaurant. You would like to tell them that you’re going to be pushing towards getting more social media customers to the restaurant.
The reason for this meeting is because you must get each one of your employees on board for this to work. It works for Facebook because everyone has an account from our mom, dad to family, and friends.
Your employees have an account, and their family and friends have it also, which means lots of promoters to get this kicked off. So overall, you will like to inform them that the growth of the restaurant means lots more tips and raises soon.
Second, just spend about a week posting photos of random customers coming in and out of the restaurant. You want photos posted of the highest volume days so people can see that this is the place to be because people are packing the place. Now, unfortunately, these days are usually the weekend for most restaurants, but I’m going to show you how to have your restaurant packed daily by using Facebook, possibly.
Third, is to create a coupon that no one in their right mind can resist. Now, this coupon doesn’t have to put you in a position to lose money, but it does have to be good enough for you to break even or make just a little off of it.
If you guys ever used Groupon, then you will know that if you go on there to find a deal, then you will find it. Most of those coupons are anywhere from 50% off to 90% off of something that the restaurant is offering. So, if you do not know how to create coupons, then the Facebook local marketing guide will walk you through it.
After you create your awesome coupon that will just be irresistible to anyone who comes across it, it is time to post that coupon on your restaurant Facebook page, which you must “spotlight” so that it stays on the top of your updates. Now you have a coupon that people can click on, download, and redeem in your restaurant. “light build a moment.”
If you can picture anything about local marketing, then you will start to see what I’m trying to get to. This coupon will be what we call a lead magnet to get people to come in and redeem that coupon, but also maybe buy something else which adds to your profits. As I said, the coupon needs to be good, but not something where you will lose money but at least break even or make a little profit.
Spreading The Coupon
Here comes the viral effect of using Facebook to promote your restaurantto thousands of customers for free. Just remember that these steps are ineffective if you don’t take action on implementing them. The only way your restaurant will gain that competitive edge over the other local restaurants is from staying consistent.
Using Signs – This is powerful if you can place signs throughout your restaurant. You can place them in front of the windows, counters, restroom, bar area, and tables. Now, no matter where your customers go, they will be introduced to your Facebook page, asking them to come to join for free coupons and promotional items.
Follow us Wednesdays– I love this one because it’s done on one of the slowest days of the week, which is Wednesday. This is when you can get simple shirts made for your employees who will only wear them on Wednesdays.
Those who come on that day and follow your restaurant’s Facebook page will get a special deal for that action. That deal can be anything you want as long as it’s something people can’t help to show up for.
Place an Ad– This is simple to do; it is to place an ad in your local newspaper. Don’t spend too much money on this because of it just something to tell the public about your restaurant’s Facebook page and the great coupon deals.
Most restaurants put ads in the paper about ½ off this or that but fail to capture those people in the form of allowing them to join their Facebook page. Now you’re able to give them a great coupon deal and market to them for free.
Dominate Your Industry With Facebook Check-in
I go into more detail about how the Facebook check-in process works in my local marketing domination guide. Here I’m just going to explain the overall power of allowing your customers to check-in to get the coupon deal of the day.
Once a person checks-in to their Facebook saying that they’re at “Coleman’s Sea Foods,” then that goes out to all 500, 1,000, or 5,000 friends they have. Most importantly, about this is that most of everyone’s Facebook friends equal up to about 80% of staying in a 30 miles radius of them.
Just to let you know, anyone who is within a 30-mile radius of you is considered to be in your local market. Now, just one customer checking in has put “Coleman’s Sea Foods” Facebook page in front of potentially thousands of new customers.
Now when they see that their friend has checked into my place of business, it comes up on their news feed. All they have to do now is click the link that lands on my page, and right there in their face is a coupon that they just can’t pass up.
Hopefully, they download the coupon and come in to redeem it, which gives me another loyal customer. This is so powerful I can’t even explain to you why every restaurant isn’t doing it, but if not, then that just leaves the door open for you to dominate the market.
Did I mention there is an app you can get to automate this whole process? Check out my “FaceBook Domination Guide” to learn how to become the #1 restaurant in your city or town.
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Keywords are the bloodline of knowing what you must create your local marketing online presence around. Knowing the right keywords to focus on is like turning a $50,000 a year business into a $500,000 or $1,000,000 a year in revenue versus continuing the same process.
The second chapter is one of my favorites that focuses on building you an online presence by using business profile sites, such as google places, Yelp, Yellow Pages and more. These sites, if used right, can allow you to put your business in front of thousands of potential clients/customers each and every day.
The third chapter was dedicated to using local video marketing to get in the driver seat of those who are searching for you on YouTube or any other video site out there. But most importantly, videos are found in the search engine like Google when you search for something.
Today wraps up this series by showing you guys how to use the power of Facebook to market your business locally without spending a dime on advertising. Yes, I know most businesses will tell you that they already have a Facebook page, but the truth is that 99% of them have no clue how to use them effectively. Most of them are only good at posting a photo of this or that but lack the marketing skills to get the message out. Many will post something today, and not post again until another two months from now. This type of marketing is not effective nor worth a businesses time.
The Power of Facebook
Facebook has over 1,310,000,000 active users and counting as of 2014. So, over 1 billion people are users of Facebook, and the great part about that is some of those people are right in your back yard.
Facebook is like a big family we all are connected to. We can send a friend a request even if they’re 10k miles away, or just live around the corner. Just the sheer notion of being able to connect with any and everybody becomes a powerful tool for small businesses.
Most people see Facebook as a place to chat, share pictures, and plain old let the world know your every move. The usages are endless, some as a marketer knows that it’s the yellow brick road to success if I can help my client utilize it in a more effective way.
So, overall it’s a place where each and every person on the planet can be connected to. How in the world will this help you as a business owner to grow massively in your community?
Why Setup a Business Page?
One simple reason to start a Facebook business page is to take your business clients/customers growth up 100%. If you’re getting 300 people a day to walk through your doors as a print shop company, then I know that by using Facebook in the way that I will teach it below, you will increase those numbers over time to 500, 800 or even 1,000 people walking through your doors each and every month… costing you nothing.
Math Time:
Let’s say those extra 700 people per month are coming into your place of business to use your services. Let’s say that the average transaction on the low side is $20 per order, per person.
700 x $20 = $14,000 in revenue
Now, if this doesn’t convince you that having a Facebook page is powerful, then I don’t know what will. These numbers are staggering growth numbers by using a platform that is totally free.
But, please don’t get confused by the fact that just having a Facebook page will bring in results. That’s the farthest from the truth due to the fact 99% of businesses lack the knowledge and skills on getting their page in rotation.
Not to spend too much time teaching you guys how to set up a business Facebook page, I just included a short video from the good people over there at Hubspot.
For years now I’ve connected with this company on various issues of marketing so that I know they’re the cream of the crop when it comes to giving out valuable tutorials. So, I included a video that they did some time ago about creating a Facebook page that is setup 100% in and out.
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I could have created a walkthrough video on how to set up a business Facebook page, but I felt that this video covered it in detail. It showed you the exact steps on how to get your business up and going in no time.
But, just getting a Facebook page up isn’t enough. You must know how to market that page to the massive by using what I call local marketing domination. Below I will show you how to dominate your local market by using simple but 100% effective marketing tactics that will grow your business massively.
The Power of Using Coupons
Coupons are so powerful that most businesses don’t even have a clue what they are missing. People love free stuff and things that have significant discounts on them. There is no secret on why most clothing stores run that 25 %, 35% and even sometimes a cool 75% off certain items.
People are in love with deals, and if those deals are sweet then those businesses can bring more into their place of business. Now businesses who use coupons can break even or make a little money off of them.
Personally, I’ve seen some businesses offer discounts that lost them money but they were so good and irresistible that it was worth running those discounts to at least get that foot traffic. My thing is that discount coupons are a win-win situation for both the businesses and customers/clients.
Did You Know?
“86% of consumers say that a coupon affects their decision in choosing one business over another.”
“Consumers who use coupons spend an average of 56.5% MORE than consumers who do not use coupons”
We can conclude that people love coupons! We all know how the “daily deal” or “group deal” industry was able to build BILLION DOLLAR businesses with a simple concept:
…Send coupons to consumers via email.
Their exceptional growth can be attributed to their “Too Good to Pass On” deals. Every deal was 50% Off (or more) a product or service. A deal like “50% Off” or better yet “FREE” would spread like wildfire! These amazing deals would get so much attention that a local business would sell coupon vouchers in the 1000s in a matter of hours.
Start attracting 1000+ customers to your business like a magnet with just one-click! (*Plus: Keep 100% of your revenue).
Let’s say a nail shop in your city is running a campaign in their city that’s centered around a 50% coupon discount if you come in on Mondays just to get a pedicure.
The cost of their pedicures are $30, so with a 50% coupon discount, the customers will pay only $15. But, Mondays are their slowest days of the week which only result in about 5 people coming into your place of business to get their pedicure for $30.
Now, since they’re taking action on getting more people into their place of business by using coupons, the growth of their revenue on Mondays has taken off because people love deals so redeeming their coupon was a no brainer. The nail shop is seeing on average 30 customers, which puts them at $450 a day in revenue. But, remember that they were only getting about 5 people coming in on Mondays at $150 a day revenue.
Even though they cut the price in half, they are still making money even at a discount. This is the power of using discount coupons, and no matter what business you’re in I can educate you on how to implement this into your business, and just dominate the local market.
In this guide, you will learn how to use Facebook to put this on autopilot and reap the benefits to the max. The way to use Facebook connected to your business page will just blow your mind and allow your customers/clients to put your brand, business page, and coupon in front of thousands if not millions of potential people daily.
First thing first is, how and where can you create a coupon and add it to your Facebook business page?
Creating a Coupon in 60 Seconds
One of the easiest ways to create a coupon for your business is to use Gtown coupon creator. I decided not to do a tutorial for this because it’s so easy to create a coupon that my 10-year-old son could do it.
All you need to do is upload your company logo and insert your discount, and in less than 60 seconds you will have a coupon that can be shared by thousands of people through your Facebook business page.
Below is a simple coupon I created from using the Gtwon coupon creator. You can see that it’s simple, and pretty much straight forward on what discounts you get and what for.
Just the mere thought of having a coupon on your Facebook business page isn’t going to bring you more customers/clients. You having a system in place will do that, and below is the blueprint of how to do it effectively and for zero dollars.
Marketing Your Facebook Business Page 101
If you want to take your business from making $100,000 last year to at least gaining a 25% to 50% growth, then you must do Facebook Marketing 101.
Below is a list of things you can do starting today that will allow you to kick the butts of the local competition by just implementing these simple steps.
Getting “Likes”
Facebook has this thing called the “like” system which allows any and everyone to like your page to follow your updates and more.
So, this is how to have things in your place of business that emphasizes that you are on Facebook, so come “like” our page. The more people who see your Facebook page, the more people who will like it. So every time you get a chance to show or tell customers about your business page, then go for it.
Posting Everyday “Only Once is Enough”
Being active on Facebook is one of the biggest keys to the success of growing your page brand, coupon downloads, and likes. Staying engaged with your followers/customers/clients is a must to keep them updated on what’s going on at your place of business and what offers you have available.
One of the ways of doing this is posting something to your page at least once a day. This not something you must over think because it’s not that hard to do at all.
For one, create a discount coupon for that week no matter what. I would have a new coupon up on our page just so new, and old customers can find what I have to offer.
Posting Ideas
Employee photos
Inside the building photos
Photos of customer service
Events
Employee of the week
and anything that your customers will love
Once you have this game plan down, it’s time to get people engaged and sharing our brand so thousands of people can see what we have to offer, and download our coupon so that we can get these people inside the doors of our brick and motor.
The Power of the Check-In
First, before we get into how to use the Facebook check-in process you must first understand what it is and how powerful it is.
Any and all businesses that signup for a Facebook business page is automatically enabled to be found by GPS for those who are looking for businesses in a certain area.
Now, when you are searching on your phone for the best restaurants in Shreveport La, they will give you list of places of business. Now let’s say your place of business is Coleman’s Sea Foods, and someone comes to my business to eat.
Now, the family has finished their meal, and to their surprise, it was awesome and tasty. Plus, maybe if the waitress is telling you about Coleman’s Sea Foods discounts, and the only way to get them is through checking-in on your Facebook and liking the page.
Once that’s complete, the customer will have access to the free coupon which can be redeemed at any time. Plus, now you will be able to notify and engage on your page with that customer until the end of time on new items, events, or deals.
But Wait There’s More.
The power of Facebook business pages has to be in the check-in process. Now, if you’re reading too fast I would like you to read over this as slow as you can because I don’t want you to miss the value in what I’m about to say, and the whole reason for this chapter.
Once a person checks in, that listing goes out to all of their friend’s news feed. It shoots right up to the top of the page of their feed, so that’s the first thing people will see. Just think about this for a minute if I’m that owner of Coleman’s Sea Foods.
That customer may have 1,000 friends in the surrounding areas of Shreveport, La. So if my Facebook page is getting in front of those potential 1,000 people as that customer sits at one of our tables, then I’m doing some serious marketing right about now.
Light Build Moment!!!!
If I added a coupon to that page which offers 50% off your second entree, then how many of those people will download that coupon and come in to redeem it?
Math Time:
Now all 1,000 people will not come in and redeem that coupon only because that will be too right. I say that only 10% of those people will come to redeem that coupon every week. So for that second entree let’s say that we profit only $15 on any menu meal items, that puts us at serving 100 more people a week at $15 more in profits because we got them to come because of the coupon. That’s an extra
$1500 a week
$6,000 a month
$72,000 a year
all from one simple coupon attached to customers using the check-in
This is so powerful that any businesses not using it are just missing out on a gold mine. Believe me, this is the most effective way to grow a business locally because I would say over 90% of your customers will have Facebook accounts.
Putting this game of attack in place will allow you to dominate the local competition, and you will have to almost turn people away if implemented in the right fashion.
Set this up today, or just get left behind
Tell The World About Your Facebook Business Page
They say that it’s strength in numbers, so when you think about building your brand through Facebook marketing, then those numbers can double and triple in no time.
But, the only way that this will happen is by you getting out the gate pushing if you want to build that buzz from the jump. You will have to take the steps on getting the word out about your Facebook page from the following.
Inviting your already friends from your personal Facebook page (if you have one)
Getting all of your family, friends, and employees to invite their friends
Posting signs all over your brick and motor business
Handing out cards to people who walk up and down your sidewalks
Put a big ad in your local paper about it (instant branding)
and any other creative idea you can come up with
Using Technology to Gain Thousands of Customers
Now comes to the part in this guide were too good gets even better from the standpoint of taking your business into the 21st century. Most businesses use the traditional way to market from word of mouth to putting ads in the paper.
Today is the day that your life changes for the better by using something that will pretty much automate most of all your marketing when it comes to coupons and Facebook check-ins. Just here to introduce you to LoyalBlocks.
Video
This is by far the best local marketing dominating app that I have ever come across. Now you can have an app for your business without all the hassle of finding a programmer to code it, build it, and charge you $10,000 or more just to do it.
This app allows you to track every person who comes in and out of your place of business. It’s so amazing that it’s hard to even type because of the power of this app. It will allow you to sit back and watch the customers over crowd your business.
The second a customer takes a step into your place of business, they are instantly greeted with a welcome message that instantly gives them some savings or coupons to encourage them to come back time after time.
Plus, it integrates with the Facebook check-in that really takes your business to an all new level. Now, customers can check-in right from their phones and get coupons and incentives to share your business on their Facebook.
This app is a small business dream, and those who take advantage of it can grow their business to hundreds and thousands of new customers with just a little creativity if it’s set up right.
Look, I can talk about this app all day long because I understand the power in it, but at the end of the day it comes down to you making the move into the 21st century on giving your customers something they will love and enjoy sharing.
Don’t believe me.Look what people are saying about LoyalBlocks
So, if you haven’t taken a look at that guide, then when you finish here, take a moment to check it out. It’s filled with a step by step process of building your local presence the manual way.
Today is all about the other part of local marketing that I love more than anything in the world. This form of local marketing is called local SEO video marketing. Now comes the fun part of dominating your local market by utilizing videos to push the competition out of the way.
Most people don’t even know that you can rank videos online. If you ask people, they will tell you that they thought only content could be moved up and down the rankings.
The truth of the matter is that content is king, but videos are the prince of that king. The video is dominant in the form that most of us would rather watch a video versus reading something.
More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth, and 50% more than last year
100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
80% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
YouTube is localized in 61 countries and across 61 languages
According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network
Millions of subscriptions happen each day. The number of people subscribing daily is up more than 3x since last year, and the number of daily subscriptions is up more than 4x since last year
The numbers are staggering for those who want to jump into the video marketing community. If you can sit down and analyze your market to see who your competitors are, then you can outdo them in the marketing game, and you will become the dominant force in your industry.
The point is to use video to get in front of those who search from the search engines, and those who search from Youtube. The truth is that the 2nd most used search engine is Youtube, but the first one is Google. So guess who owns YouTube…Google?
[Tweet “ATT: The Advance Guide to Local SEO Video Marketing to Dominate Your Local Market”]
What I will be covering in this guide is the complete steps of dominating your market locally and nationwide. Now some of you may not understand what I mean about local video marketing versus national video marketing. So, to clear this up, here is an example of some keywords targeting both markets.
National Video Marketing Keywords
Real Estate
Homes for Sale
Real Estate for Sale
House for Rent
Local SEO Video Marketing Keywords
Shreveport Real Estate
Shreveport Homes for Sale
Shreveport Real Estate for Sale
Shreveport House for Rent
So, as you can see, the keywords above are targeting two different markets. By the way, you must do good keyword research before you even think about doing local marketing. The right keywords will bring the treasure to your door, but choosing the wrong ones can completely suck all the time and energy out of you.
The keywords in the first list of “National Video Marketing Keywords” are very highly competitive keywords that can take you anywhere from 30 to 120 days to rank highly if you know how to do SEO. SEO is something we will talk about at the end of this guide because without that; you’re not going to outrank anyone if there is some competition base.
It’s a lot harder to rank highly for those national keywords because now you’re competing with millions of websites that are using that word and have been linked to thousands of websites.
Now, with the local “VideoMarketingKeywords,” things get a little bit easier because now you’re competing only with the websites and companies in your town, city, or state. So the number of people competing for “Shreveport real estate” is astronomically smaller versus the national searchers.
So, I’m looking to educate you on how to do video marketing both nationally and locally. The rules apply to both. It’s just that it will take a lot longer and more time to dominate a national keyword versus the good ole local keywords.
Just know that when you finish this guide, you will be able to dominate any market that you want on this planet. No matter if you’re a real estate company, and want to be known nationwide or that local real estate company who just wants to build that number one presence locally.
You will have the keys to grow your business without picking up a phone to call any marketing company. You will be able to do this all by yourself if you choose to. I’m here to help those along the way who need help, advice, or need it done for you. All you have to do is contact me, and we will set up a marketing plan to get your business in front of thousands or millions of people on a daily basis.
Video marketing is nothing more than you creating a video in a content form, talking head form, tutorial form, or screen capture to share with the world. Most videos take on this approach no matter what you search for on one of these video websites.
People are making videos to get their message out there to millions of people for free. This is one of the top ways of getting free advertising for your brand, no matter the industry. People are lazy in today’s market, and no one wants to read about this story or that story.
We would rather watch a video telling us about this or that instead of reading a magazine, newspaper, or blog. So those who know how to do video marketing are the ones who can build their audience up online by creating videos people are searching for.
So, what we do is create the videos that our audience is looking for and rank them online. We use the right keywords because we don’ want to target the New York marketfor a local video campaign when our business is located in Louisiana.
Determining the right keywords is the most critical aspect of SEO video marketing. If you get this wrong, then you will never achieve the numbers that you’re looking for.
Before we get into setting up a video campaign account and creating our video, I want to let you in on a little secret. This is something that many of you may have been thinking of and wondering how you will work around it.
Yes!!! I’m Afraid of Doing Videos
Over the years, if I had a dollar for every time, someone told me that they are not video type people. Meaning they’re not the upbeat person who can sit in front of a camera and talk. They’re terrified of how they look, sound and will be viewed by their audience.
Take it from a guy who has created at least 500 videos from 2007 to the present date. I had a successful YouTube channel that I built over the years, where I just discussed topics about marketing. Just in one year, I was able to obtain 8,764 subscribers and over 1,000,000 video views.
Some of these videos are just a talking head of me rambling about all topics of online and offline marketing. Some of these were screen capture tutorial type videos where I took the viewer by the hand and showed them a case study, strategy, or some form of tactic to help them become a better marketer.
Even though at first, my videos weren’t the best quality, because I was using my Logitech Camera, which I still have today sitting at my office desk. People still followed me and wanted to learn more about the things I had to offer.
By saying that, your videos don’t have to be perfect because there is no such thing as being perfect in life online or offline. I’m going to get into video creation here later, but I understand your videos can be done in many ways.
Like…
Employees can do it
Hire an actor or actress
Just do some screenshots
Do a captured video
Or my favorite..use a free video making website..learn more below about it.
Setting Up a YouTube Channel
First, you must have a Google account to be able to have a YouTube account. If you been living underneath a rock for all these years, you will not have known Google owns YouTube, so get a Google account if you don’t have one.
So, they like to have you create one account that can be used with all of their programs. If you already have an account, then you can sign on YouTube and get prompted to customizing your profile.
Before we move any further, I would like to say for video marketing; you don’t have to get too complex when it comes to customization of your account profile. Your goal here is to have an account where you can post videos when needed.
But, by saying that, if you want to brand your business, then take some valuable time customizing your account so that it fits your brand. I know that most of you out there are business owners and not online marketing geeks like myself. So if this is something over your head, then don’t worry, just a simple profile will do.
Now, if you don’t have an account, then apparently, you must get one setup, and this only takes about 5 minutes to do. I’ve posted a screenshot of how the sign-up page looks just in case you wanted to make sure that you’re in the correct place. Get a Google/Youtube account here.
Next, once you’re signed up and ready to go, it’s now time to log into your YouTube account. With this chapter of the guide, I could have gone into detailed instructions on how to customize your profile. But like I said earlier, it doesn’t matter that much about your profile look unless you’re going after the branding aspect of it.
The only thing that I would say about getting your profile ready is to get the name of your account searchable on YouTube and on Google.
I talked a lot in the first chapter when it comes to building an online presence by having your business listed on hundreds, if not thousands of profile websites. Your YouTube channel is just another profile type website that will be listed in the search engines.
Now you can go to your Channel Settings and make the changes I’m about to talk about. So basically, you have two options for naming your YouTube profile, which are.
Or you are branded with the local keyword targeting your local market such as “Minden Marketing Company or Shreveport MarketingCompany.
You will have to decide which route you will like to go to. My recommendation is that if you can squeeze in your company name and keyword, then now you’re in the driver seat, but if not, then roll with one or the other.
Ready, Set, Go
Now you had the YouTube account setup and customized with your choice of branding; it’s time now to create our first video. This is the part where you start to get nervous because for the one you’re not an actor or actress, so how in the world will you build the guts up to stand in front of a camera and speak to the world?
No fear I’m here to help you get over those fears in a way that you don’t even have to get on camera. That’s right..you don’t even have to get on the camera you can use photos to create your video. Below I will teach you the step by step process of making quality videos that rank highly in the search engines.
Creating Simple 30 Second Videos
Now comes the part of this guide where we get down to the business of creating videos that will promote your business online to potentially millions of people.
Video marketing is something that I’ve been doing consistently every since 2007, when I created my first YouTube channel. This YouTube channel consists of me creating awesome Internet marketing videos where I teach people how to grow their business and how to market their website and how to grow that domination online.
What we are going to talk about in this part of the chapter is how to create short 30 second videos that bring results to your company. These videos will be short videos that we can get posted to YouTube and create a microenvironment around keywords that can be found in the search engines.
These videos do not have to be high-quality type videos, which only needs to be photos screenshots and text in just a link back to your website or any Facebook page that we have set up surrounding your company.
So What Type Videos?
There are only five videos you must create to be able to dominate your local market. These videos will be for branding and able to get targeted traffic to your website, profiles, or social mediawebsites such as your Facebook page.
Videos to create will be…
Company video
Testimonials video
Customer review video
Discount video
Targeted niche keyword video
But before we get into how we’re going to create these videos, lets first talk about why these five types of videos. One thing I have learned over the years is to educate people as much as you can because if you do, then you steam for them to action. So fundamentally, you must first understand why we are making these videos even to get the process.
Company Video
This is the video that will be all about you and your company to give people who search for your company name a blueprint of how you do business. To provide an example of this, then Google my company name, and you will find a video of me talking about CMG.
Testimonials Video
When people do this search for your company, it’s great to have a video of testimonials from current or past clients/customers. Now you can do this with the method that I will be talking about below, or you can video them, put it all together on one video, and get it posted to your YouTube account. Testimonial videos are powerful because once people see videos like this, they are more inclined to do business with you.
Customer Review Video
Reviews are influential to your reputation, which I talked about a lot in the first chapter of this guide, and which I talk about entirely in building an online presence with business directories.
Reviews can be put into videos by using screenshots of the reviews. As I said, when people are searching for you online, it’s valuable to have videos in place to do the marketing and selling for you.
Discount Video
Want to get more people coming to your place of business? Then create a discount video. People love free stuff, so if you can offer a discounted video at a deal, then your potential customers will love it. Creating a short discount video is like honey to a bee, because once people see this, they can’t resist to redeem it.
Targeted Niche Keyword Video
You want to be found by your company name, but also most importantly, it’s highly valuable to be ranked for targeted niche keywords. If people are searching for “Shreveport real estate,” then you better have a video talking about Shreveport real estate. People will 99% of the time find you by doing a local search containing your niche keyword, so make sure to optimize your video to be seen.
Making Free Videos With Animoto
Animoto has been around for years now, and thousands of videos are created by it every day and every year. I started to use their service back earlier in 2009 to produce short niche videos.
These videos were only about getting a message out to whoever I was targeting. With Animoto, they allow you to create unlimited videos for free using their platform. For this reason, I was able to create tons of videos in a short amount of time that serves an audience.
Now, all you have to do is gather up all of your material that you’re looking to put into your videos from photos to screenshots. With this platform, all you have to do is upload your pictures, and the system will do the rest.
Steps Of Creating Videos
First and foremost, you must have an account, so run over there and setup you a free account. Just remember that they have some options on upgrading to a paying service, but you don’t need that unless you choose to. What I will teach you below will be enough to get your videos ranked without using their upgrade system. But, as I said, if you want to get a little more bang for your video, then upgrade to one of the monthly packages.
To start creating your first video out of five, you must click on “Create.”
Next, you will be taken to a page where you can pick the style of video that suits your needs.
After picking your style comes the platform that allows you to create your video. From here, it’s pretty much self-explanatory when it comes to adding photos, text, and naming your video from one of the five video categories above.
This is by far the #1 thing you must do, is the name your video the keyword you want to rank for. Plus, don’t forget in the description to add your website, Facebook page, or your business profile. That link must be the first thing in your description, followed by what your video is about.
Animoto interface allows you to do this with ease as you are customizing your video. So don’t make this any harder than what it is, because it’s easy to create your video by using the simple to use tools.
Finally, once you create your video, it will be posted to your account, where you will be given many options. The first option you can see below is that you can share your video on Facebook, Twitter, and a couple of other platforms.
What we want is to get this video posted onto our YouTube account we set up earlier. The good thing about Animoto is that you can post right to YouTube from this page. You don’t even have to leave Animoto to get your video up and live on the second most searched search engine.
So, once you click the YouTube icon, it will prompt you to log in to your YouTube account or export it out. Once you export it, your video will take anywhere from two to five minutes to become live.
Now, you just created the first video that will allow you to dominate your local market. Now comes the part of this guide when we go that step further in ranking our video so that it shows up in the top of the search engines for our targeted keywords.
No SEO For 7 Days
Video marketing, when it comes to local marketing, is pretty easy straight forward stuff. Now I say this compared to trying to rank a video for a worldwide term such as.
Real Estate Company
Mortgage Company
Bike Shop
Life Insurance Companies
These keywords will be tough to rank for even doing video marketing. It gets even harder if you have a business surrounding that industry, and trying to get it ranked nationwide will be like climbing a mountain with 1,000,000 people in front of you.
But, if you take those same keywords above and add the following, then the game gets a little easier.
Shreveport Real Estate Company
Dallas Mortgage Company
New Orleans Bike Shop
Chicago Life Insurance Companies
Now, instead offighting with 1,000,000 websites, now you might be competing with anywhere from 1 to maybe 50 websites in your industry. So, getting local rankings will be a lot easier, but you will still have to put in some work maybe.
By saying that, once your video is live on YouTube, it’s time to do the waiting game for about a week. What you will notice is that your video, if done right, will at least get posted into the search engines within 24hrs.
Now it may not be ranked highly for your targeted keyword, but it should be at least in the top 50 results. Plus, the chances are that you’re the only person in your industry locally that will have a video connected to their business. Like I said earlier in this guide, is that video stands out to the searchers, so even if you’re not number one or you’re just in the top 5, people will be more inclined to click on your video versus any other listing.
Before you even think about doing any SEO to boost your video, you first must give it some time to settle into the search engines. Google seems to joggle websites and videos around for about a week when it comes to local videos.
So, after that time, you should see your exact spot in the search engine. But there will be videos where you will almost automatically get first-page ranking, and that’s for your company name video. Doing a video on your company name is first and foremost, because people will Google you, and that will be the most accessible video to rank.
Unfortunately, the other videos surrounding your niche market might take a little more effort in doing SEO on them to move them up the rankings.
Basically, after one week, you might see something like this after one week.
Company name video ranking between 1 to 5
Niche video ranked on pages 3 to 5, “depending on the competition level.”
So, after one week, you’ll know that you’re right when it comes to your company video because sooner or later, it will hit number one if you don’t have a website or number 2 if you do have a website. You now have a video in place, and if anyone ever Googles your company, then they will get to know who and what you guys do before you even talk to them.
Unfortunately, that niche video hasn’t made it to the front page yet, and if it did, then it might be in the last spot on the page. Not knowing the industry is hard to say where a video will end up, but from doing this for so many years, I do know that you will at least be in the top 50 results.
One Week Later
One week has passed, now it’s time to do some SEO magic to get our video moving to the top so our potential customers and clients can find us. But, before we get into all of the fun of ranking videos, let’s first talk about why it’s more to rank videos versus your websites.
Video Ranking vs. Website Ranking
First, I would like to say that for over the years 10 years now; I have been studying SEO from the beginning days, where you just had to write some good content on your website to get it ranked. To where inserting keywords into your meta tags was the thing to do for those who wanted to call so cheat the system.
Those days were very good to us SEO guys who knew how to create content that ranked regardless of the quality. So back then, it was about getting your website ranked locally to get customers to find your product or services.
Sad to say that those days are long gone, and if you do have a company website, you must go through trial and error to see any results. It can take 2, 3, 6 months to build any traction through the online world to build up your presence locally. Even worse, if you’re not a marketer who knows how to construct your website in the right way, then you have no chance of getting local exposure.
Ranking websites can become very time consuming if you don’t have that sort of time on your hands. There are so many technical issues from building backlinks to tracking your rankings.
These are the things as a small business owner that goes completely over your head of expertise. Plus, the rules and regulations have changed so much over the years that it’s almost 100% impossible for you to succeed.
The reason for this is that all of the people who, for years, have been trying to cheat the search engines to get to the top fast. So now it’s hard to gain any success with your website only if you know exactly what you’re doing. So for all of you business owners out there, it’s a better way to getting your business found more natural and faster.
Video Rankings 100%
Ranking videos are not completely easy, but it’s not hard either. If you’re trying to rank a video for a national keyword such as “real estate,” then I would tell you that this will be extremely hard to do. You will need to have a great SEO guy or know how to do SEO yourself to even sniff the front page.
The reason I say this is because of all of the authority websites that are listed there. Many of them are nationwide websites with millions of pages to them, so they’re well-liked by the search engines.
These websites have thousands or millions of links pointing to them. This is what makes it so hard to take a video to the #1 page and rank it higher in the search engine because you’re competing with active ranking sites.
But as I said, if you know SEO, then you can make it to the front page, but it will take a lot of hard work due to being a dominant search term. Plus, I searched for “real estate” and found that there were no videos on the front page that don’t surprise me.
Thanks to this guide, you will be able to use video marketing to dominate your local market. No matter your industry, you will be able to create an online video presence that will put you light years ahead of the local competition.
Videos are easier to rank locally in your city for your given keyword. There are fewer competitors, and the websites in your local market are not as strong as the nationwide websites. So, to use my keyword “Shreveport real estate” that gets about 1,900 searches per month, which is a lot of people looking to buy or sell some real estate in Shreveport.
So, if you do a google search for “Shreveport real estate,” you will notice that there is a local real estate website for the Shreveport market. This is pretty much the only local website that is ranking organically in the top ten. Now, there are Google places listings on the page, but they don’t count as much as they’re not in the organic section.
For you to understand how ranking videos locally are more effective than ranking nationally, then I must explain the following. On this page, you should see lots of national websites ranking on the front page, but the local website is #1 or in the top 3, depending on your search location.
Why is a local website outranking great national websites?
The simple answer is that the search engine sees that site as a local authority over the national brands. The local website is strong enough when it comes to its keywords and content on the page to outrank them. Frankly, what I discovered is that a video will rank just as well because, for one, YouTube is owned by guess who? Google.
For this reason, right off the back, your local video will rank well if it’s targeted and formatted correctly. Once that happens, it only comes down to doing some basic SEO to get it moving if it’s not on the front page in the top 3 spots. Remember, you don’t have to get it to number one, but it needs to be at least in the top 3 to be able to get seen so that people can click on it.
To sum it up, a website can take so much time to rank if you need to get it up on top in a hurry. But with a video, you can create unlimited amounts of them and get them ranked for any local keyword surrounding your industry. Once people find them by searching for your product and services, they can then click on your website in the description and follow it over to your product or service page.
If you look at it, it’s really like ranking your website, but you’re piggybacking off of the authority of videos to make it happen. But the only way you’re going to be able to drive thousands of people to your place of business is by doing videos, and ranking them is that you must know how to even get them to #1.
So here goes…
Blueprint to Ranking a Video
Here comes the fun part of growing business locally in your niche market. It’s about ranking your videos so you can put your brand, products, or services in front of thousands, if not millions of people every month.
Ranking videos are done from having it formatted correctly, which I talked about above, to end it off by building links to your video. Links are what rank a website, citations profiles, social media profiles, and yours truly…Videos
Here is the formula of building links, and if you follow this formula to the tee, then you will see the movement of your video in the search engines. Below I will explain to you how this process works and the actions you must take to get things started.
Linking Game Plan
What you need to do is go out and create backlinks on web 2.0 sites, article directories, profile sites, bookmarking websites,or any place you can get a link. So now, let’s check out how this process works when it comes to creating a link to building links to the link you just created.
There are tons of web 2.0 websites out there such as WordPress, Blogger, Squidoo, HubPages, to name a few of them. But I’m only going to focus on one web 2.0 website, which is wordpress.com. As I said, there are tons of free places to get links from, but for this approach, I’m only going to focus on one platform at a time.
But first, here is a small list of places where you can start building links.
I’m going to show you how to build links to your videos by doing them manually and automatically hands-off. Now doing this manually is very, very, and, I mean, very, time-consuming if you go about building links by hand.
Doing it by hand can take you months to build a thousand links just to one website or property that links to your video. Below you will see the manual way of doing it, which is not hard, but as I said earlier is that it’s time-consuming.
But, if this manual way is too much and you would love to make this a lot easier, then I will have a section below that will blow your mind of how easy it is to get this process done for you in a matter of minutes all on autopilot..but until then here is the manual way.
Day 1
Write a piece of content around 400 to 600 words that center around your nice market. Within the content, make sure you use your keyword at least three times throughout the article. Next, you will need to post this article to your wordpress.com free blogging site.
Make sure you link your video in the article where you have listed one of your keywords. The link that they give you once your video is live is what you will link within your content. Once that’s completed, it’s time now to publish that article on wordpress.com, which will also give you a link to that article.
Day 2
This is the day we get down to work by signing up for the rest of the web 2.0’s, article directories, and bookmarks websites. Just turn your hat around this day because you will need to signup for all of these accounts.
Day 3
Write a separate piece of content for EzineArticles.com that’s centered around your niche market. Get it posted to your account, and make sure you link not to your video, but to your wordpress.com URL that has the article you wrote on day one.
The key to ranking your videos is like the following screenshot below.
So, as you can see, the goal is to create a link and then have the other properties to link to that piece of content. What this does is that it builds up strength in that website/page URL by putting it’s a link on all of the other platforms.
Day 4
Now I say day 4 on this one, but it’s maybe like day 7 in real-life terms, because if you’re a new EzineArticles user, then it will take some days before your article is approved. So once its approved, then take some time and post that same article you put on EzineArticles on all of the other platforms you have left.
You will be posting that same article and link to your wordpress.com blog post you published on day one. So take your time, and once you complete that, you should have built a total of 29 back-links to your wordpress.com website.
Next, after you complete that you should move on to another web 2.0 website, and rinse and repeat. The process from start to finish for one website property to build links that will take about a week to finish.
Keep doing this week after week until your video is ranking where you want it to be. So, this is the manual way of doing it in a simple but productive way. The only thing you must do now is.
Rinse and Repeat
How to Automate This Process
One thing I realized after 13 years online is that if it’s possible to automate something, then please do. My time is very valuable, so if I can use a software that could help me complete a project in one day that could take weeks to do, then count me in.
I’m not even going to joke with you guys; I’m a lazy guy when it comes to doing tedious tasks online. Yes, I know creating content is easy, and signing up for all these sorts of sites to post my content to is even easier. The truth of the matter is that I’m not that patient because I have tons of clients to tend to, so the last thing I want is to do link building to my videos by hand.
The game plan I listed above works 100%, but the issue is that it takes so long and sucks up a lot of your time. So, if you’re a business owner, and doing this yourself, then it takes you away from doing everyday tasks. Now it doesn’t take long to do, but if it’s not something you have to do manually, then I wouldn’t.
In this section, I want to talk about using linkbuildingsoftware for your video marketing. Now you don’t even have to consider this, but from experience, I would say that this will make your life much easier. Plus, this software is something you can fire up for about 30 minutes, and with a snap of your fingers, you’re done. In 30 minutes, you could complete a task that would have taken you weeks to complete.
As I said, I learned a long time ago that you should automate any and everything that takes away from growing your business. So, today I want to introduce to you one of the easiest link building software online. The software is called FCS Networker is one of the leading link building software in the world.
This piece of software will make your link building as easy as 1, 2, 3. Now you will be able to set up a project once and allow it to run on autopilot.
If you need content, it creates it
If you need accounts created, it creates them
If you want to link all content together, it does that
If you’re going to sit back and relax, then you can
You can set this software up once, and it will run until the end of time. You can have it drip feed your links over a week, months, or even years. Whatever you need this software to do, it will do just that and more with just a few clicks of the mouse.
You can do this yourself or have an intern, employee, or hire someone for pennies on the dollar to run it for you. No matter what, this software will only take nowhere from 30 minutes to 1 hr each day for you to start ranking your videos.
I really can’t say that it’s anymore simpler than that to check it out yourself if you feel like you can save more time, and allow you to spend more time on your business, then it’s an option. Automation is the key to success when it comes to building your brand online.
Yes, the manual way works and will always tell people if you want to get a front-row seat of how we use to do link building back in the day, then manually is the way to go. But, I know as a business owner that you’re time is valuable, so this is why I’m introducing this software to you just in case it’s something you want to take advantage of.
So, to end this long chapter off, I want to say that if you want to dominate your local market, then the video is something that you must do to gain that competitive edge over the competition. Just do a Google search in your local market industry, and if you don’t see videos, then jump in headfirst.
I got a client of mine who is a real estate investor in Dallas, TX, and he seeks me out to help him dominate the Dallas real estate market area. Come to find out that when we did the local competition search, that no one was doing videos, and if they were, the videos were nowhere to be found on the first page. So naturally, he is equipped with the right training to be able to create videos that dominate his market.
Make this guide a part of your local marketing if you want to reap the benefits of more customers/clients,which in the long run, should turn into more profits.
If you think this chapter was filled with tons of video marketing nuggets, wait till you read my next chapter of dominating your localmarket with Facebook Marketing. The things I will show you how to do will double, triple, or even quadruple your customers/clients if you correctly use these tools. Guarantee you that 99% of your local competition doesn’t even know that this even exists.
Last chapter we talked about how to do local keywordresearch, and dominate your market. That chapter maybe one of the most important chapters because, if you can’t do research on who’s searching for your product or services then you’re in big trouble.
You need to know what keywords people are using to find what you have to offer. Not doing this in the right manner leaves your business out to dry while the competition steals all the online customers.
Yes, no matter what business you’re in, people are searching online for what you have to offer so don’t overlook this like it’s just an online thing. If your business is offline and you feel like it’s important to be listed in the big yellow book “YellowPages,” then you better believe it’s 100 times more important to be found online. Reason being is that no one carries around that big yellow book anymore, but they do have mobile phones at their fingertips.
Wink, Wink, doing local searches…get it
So today you have the keywords you want to target, let’s build this online presence so hundreds if not thousands of people can find your business without me spending tons of money on advertising. For this whole chapter I will still be using the “Shreveport Real Estate” keyword as my local business I’m trying to dominate. Remember over 1,900 searches for that keyword per month, so if I have a real estate business in Shreveport best believe I want to be found locally.
The best way I’m going to do this with or without a website, is that I’m going to be using business directories to do this. The power of using business directories will just blow your mind by the time you complete this chapter.
What Are Business Directories?
How has the internet changed since the early days when I started back in the late 90’s? I can’t even tell you if I remember seeing business directories online. Plus, the only one that most people knew about was from Yahoo. Think you had to pay tons of money just to be listed in that one.
Gratefully now there are tons of these sites that allow you to submit your business information for free which will be indexed by the search engines. If you do any google search on most big name companies you will most likely see the yellow page, manta, Angie’s List, Google places and much more I can’t list.
These sites are here to give you, the searcher, an overview looks as of the company you’re searching for. You don’t even have to search a company name, all you have to do is type in “the city + keyword” then it will spit back targeted information.
This is a great place to have your business due to the many factors that I will be talking about here in the minute. But overall just understand these sites are free to be listed on, so it will be wise to dominate this space of marketing if your competitors are not.
How Do They Work?
To the average person, these sites are nothing more than a big yellow page book to get a phone number, address, and ect. But good old marketers like me see them as gold mines for local businesses, and this is the reason I created this local marketing guide.
I know that these sites are powerful if you did the right keyword research, and willing to put in a little time to get them filled out completely.
So all you have to do as a business owner is to go to any of these sites, and set up a free account. First, make sure your business is not already posted if so then all you have to do is claim it.
Once you have an account, now it’s time to fill out all the information from A to Z. Don’t leave any stones unturned because you want as much content on your listing than the local competition. The more complete your profile listing, the more visibility you will have over your competitors.
The setup of these sites are easy as pouring a glass of water. You can easily setup a fully customizable profile in about 20 to 30 minutes if you really take your time. So, before you know it you will have built your first online presence, and one step from someone searching and finding your business.
How Can Business Directories Grow My Business?
I remember for years people thought it was best to start with your website when it came to local rankings. Marketers said it was best to put in more work right off the back to get your own site to the top of the search engines before your small business profiles.
Since the search engines over the years has turned a whole 360 in the way they rank websites from its algorithm such as panda, penguin and the latest the hummingbird. The releases of these animal updates really hurt the old way of doing SEO for your own site.
Now it’s taking a real long time for your personal site to get that authority it needs to even rank locally. So, instead of starting with your website it’s best to build your online presence through the major business profile sites, and then bring your personal site along later.
Now it’s time to learn how these sites help grow my brand and overall business? The first thing you as a business owner need to understand is that people are searching for that local car dealership and ice cream shop. So the only way you will be able to get in front of all those people who are searching for these places of your own business is to be everywhere.
Being everywhere is going back to our example for this local marketing guide. Our keyword is “Shreveport real estate” so every word that someone searches for online that contains “Shreveport + any real estate type word,” then I want to be the company profile or website to come up.
Now, if I do the research it will show that there are about 1,000 keywords that contain my main keywords and/or similarly searched terms. So these 1,000 words are getting anywhere from 5k to 10k total combined searches per month.
So it’s my job to create hundreds or not thousands of places online that contain these keywords so whenever someone searches for anything in this industry concerning “Shreveport real estate” my content or profiles will come up.
By having this sort of online presence is more powerful than any type of advertising you can name. What other platform allows you to put your brand in front of potential 10k people per month that targeted. This is all forms of free marketing that your competitors are not doing so if I were you then I will be on the first bus to get this done today.
There are 25 to 50 small business profile sites that are the cream of the crop that you can start using today by setting up your company information on. But to be honest, there are hundreds and thousands of them out there which you can be using also.
In this guide, I’m only going to list the top 50 so you don’t get too overwhelmed. The other thousand or so I have are mainly the ones I use for my clients who really want to target every area of the market so their domination is felt throughout.
Now comes what you all have been waiting for which is the process I will take if I was doing this for my business. Now this is all by hand so it’s a little time-consuming, but it works if you want to do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.
The whole key to this is to optimize each and every small business directory you sign up for. You have to make sure each one of them hit on at least 3 to 5 of the keywords you’re looking to rank for locally.
Your goal is to have all the 55 profile websites above fully filled out and optimized for at least 3 keywords. So, now this puts you at around 150 keywords that a potential customer/client can find you by doing a search on the major search engines.
Just simply doing this easy to do action is the difference between an extra 100 or so people visiting your place of business each month. Only because you took action to build the beginning stages having an online presence that you’re in the running of dominating your local market. Now the game gets even better when you have your business listed on 100, 500 to even 2,000 small businessprofilesites optimized for every keyword in your market. “Numbers Don’t Lie”
The Daily Game Plan to Follow
What I said before is that doing this by hand is time-consuming, but best of all it’s free to do. So, you have to crank the muster to do it or hire someone to take care of it.
So, what I would do if I had to do this myself manually, is that I would create a game plan that will be easy to implement, and not kill too much of my time away from my business.
First – I will take a two-week approach on this project to get my business listed on all the 55 business profile sites above. The goal is to get all of my profiles completely filled throughout within two weeks to get the ball rolling.
The objective will be to do and complete three business profiles per day at a mere 20 minutes per profile. Now it will be possible to do this in this amount of time because you should keep the information you need at your fingertips in some notepad.
This is your name of the business, address, phone numbers, logos and ect…having these items present on your hard drive will be as simple as copy and paste. So, if you’re doing this manually then you should not be spending no more than one hour per day to get this project done in two weeks or so.
Second – Now it’s been two weeks, and all of your profiles are completely done. You should be able to search the name of your company and see all the listing you created. Now, if you don’t see all of them don’t worry too much because sometimes the search takes a couple of days or weeks to index them.
Now comes the fun part, and the reason why you need to build an online presence to be able to dominate your local market.
Potential Results
Just wanted to say that results for your business will be a lot different than your counterparts. Depending on your industry, some businesses will get more searches per month versus others.
Meaning in the “Shreveport real estate” market gets around 1,900 searches per month. While another industry who focus on “Shreveport Ice Cream Shops” may only get 300 searches per month.
No matter the number, just understand that as long as you’re getting targeted traffic it doesn’t matter how big or small the searches…never forget that. So never get upset when you do keyword research, and the monthly traffic is low because no matter what somebody will search for what you have to offer.
Here are some examples of the way your listing title or description should look like. Either way, you do it should bring up one of your local business profiles…such as
Coleman Investment – Shreveport Real Estate
Coleman Investment – Shreveport Homes for Sale
Coleman Investment – Shreveport Home for Rent
If you’re able to get this into your title, then I would say do it because it will help you get that ranking you need locally. But if you find it difficult to add this to the title of your listing, then enter something like this in your description. I say this because some business directories allow you to do this and others don’t so just give it a try.
So, after two weeks of completing these profiles, and you’re ranking not for your business name or your local keywords then it’s time to step up your game. Meaning your listing will need a little SEO love.
Most of your listings will rank well regardless because of the authority of the listing website. But, a good majority of them may lag behind, so you should do a little SEO by using my SEO in Practice ebook. This book will educate you on all parts of SEO, so you can use the basics to move your listing up the ranking.
The Numbers
Once you put in the work of moving your listing up the ranking, you should start to see results. These results will come in the form of more phone calls, websitevisitors, reviews if you have the right incentives in place.
One of the things most businesses don’t do is that they don’t track their ROI (return on investment) now even though you didn’t spend money on this project if you did it yourself. But, you did put in quality time which is worth something in the long run.
So, the best thing you can do is to track where all of the calls are coming from. Are they coming from the newspaper advertising, radio promotion or are they coming from the online presence. Best believe most of it is coming from the online presence you have which should be around 90% or even 100% if that’s the only marketing you have out there.
One way to track this is by using the free way of just taking notes of the calls that come in. You can simply ask “how did you find us,” and if they say online then record that in a notebook. This is a cheap way of doing it if you don’t have money to spend on something. I suggest you do this to make your life much easier.
I say get a 1-800 number and forward it to your main number. There are many companies online that will help you set this up very inexpensive. Now you will be able to log into your back office account and see how many calls are coming in from your online presence. This is by far the best way because you’re not forcing your customers to remember how they got your number.
Over time you should see tons of calls coming in which will be targeted, and more willing to do business with you. If done right no matter what business you’re in, you should be getting at least 100 more calls per month which turn into 1,200 new calls per year. You wouldn’t have gotten it if you didn’t take the approach of building an online presence. Believe me, it would be hard to get 1,200 people to walk through your doors by doing traditional marketing.
Reviews Builds Creditability
When people are searching for that “Shreveport Attorney” and they come across the listing profiles, then they have a choice to make. That choice usually comes down to the reviews left by previous clients.
The good and bad things about the internet is that it’s a place for freedom of speech. People can go on any review website, and just trash your business or talk highly of you. That line is very thin, and its something you must monitor on a daily basis.
But, what will separate you from the rest is having reviews on your Google Places, Yelp and other listing websites you created. Your goal is to ask for reviews when appropriate. I’m not going to go into depth on how to get more reviews because I will write more about that in a separate blog post.
Just make it your duty to stay active building your reviews online by asking customers to review you. One way of doing this is by having signed up saying that you’re listed on certain business profile sites, and encourage them to leave a review.
Place a link from the profile listing sites on your website which can be easily found. You can just ask them to head over to your website, and follow the link to leave a review.
Last Thoughts
With this guide of dominating your local market, its purpose is to educate you on what’s working for those across the world. Yea, I know many of you are used to the old way of advertising which is the norm for most but it’s time to take on a new way of building your brand.
Many small businesses don’t even know how powerful it is to have an online presence. Hopefully, I at least gave you a blueprint to follow on at least getting some sort of online presence. This could have gotten even deeper but I think just for this guide, it covered the hot spots to get you started.
It’s important to every business to have this setup asap. No matter what industry you’re in it will be wise to build up your visibility today.
But, I’m not going to leave you hanging, so if you need more educational help getting this rolling then don‘t hesitate to contact me. I know most of you are not computer savvy, so help is here for you even if you just need a question answered.
