After president Obama's administration successful internet marketing online strategies there is no doubt that a well thought out, targeted, developed and deployed internet campaign is critical for today's small business needs.  President Obama generated 3 million voters to reach out and make phone calls encouraging others to go vote, they acquired a 13 million names email list, and raised over 500 million dollars for the presidential campaign.  The New York Times called it the campaign that changed politics.  Imagine those type of results in your business?

Before getting into different techniques we will discuss the number one most important component of your internet marketing efforts:

Small Business Internet Marketing

Launching a full scale small business marketing campaign targeting the wrong keywords or the wrong audience is a disaster that will result in an enormous loss of time and financial resources. Spend a great part of your time identifying the keywords that will target the audience at the buying stage you are looking to attract. For example targeting discount blue widgets/cheap blue widgets will produce higher convergence ratio then the term blue widgets alone. The fist one is someone who already knows what blue widgets are and is looking to buy at the best deal available, the second is someone who might be considering the blue widget however is not in the buying process. Now you will have to both educate and convert and the same time. Wouldn't it make more sense to target the first category.

Also identify if blue widgets is what the market is currently looking for. If your target market is looking for green widgets would it not make more sense to position yourself at the top of that market?

The first thing you need to do is become familiar with the google adword tool and wordtracker tool, this will provide a great deal of information on what people are looking for and an average on how much could you expect to pay on Pay Per Click campaigns

The next step is to identify your competition and if the keyword you are targeting is over saturated by competition. By analyzing your competitors page rank you can determine the difficulty level to outrank them. Utilizing the seo quake extension for firefox will display those listings for you.

Now that you have determined a target market and what keywords people are actively searching for you can proceed to the following.

Small Business Website 

Most people spend a great amount of money on pretty websites, the reality is that websites that convert are not pretty they are efficient. They’re purpose is to sell and promote rather then to be visually appealing, in fact all the visual graphics take away from the message and purpose of the website.

Starting from easy to difficulty level you could start buy submitting your product or service to promotional websites such as Google base, shopzilla, yahoo,  msn, ebay and craigslist.  They provide easy, free or low cost listing for your business.

SEO optimization

If you already have a website is it SEO optimized? Search engine optimization allows for your company to be displayed in goggles top page index. At this time of this writing Google has over 70% of search traffic.  SEO is not an easy it task it takes a large amount of time to get a website indexed by Google with high rankings it is by no means an overnight process.  Consider hiring an internet marketing service. However by appearing on the top of search engines it can greatly  improve the sales volume of your business.

Email Marketing Campaigns.

By offering resources for free such as white papers, web-based seminars, tele-classes, free product samples in exchange for the person's email address can be a lucrative strategy. These are subscribers that themselves added their email address to this list and have given you written permission to market to them.  Also consider that they have used your product or sampled what you have to offer and are a better qualified lead then any other type of lead.

Video Marketing

After you have identified where your target market goes to on the internet you can use video strategies to capture their attention, offering them something of value, position yourself as a resource and send them to a landing page on your website with a call to action.

Landing Pages or Squeeze pages

A landing page is where you have captured the audience attention from your lead generation system to a call to action either to make a purchase, to submit their email address, get them to call you etc. 

Blogging

Blogging is a great internet marketing strategy to build a following and position your company as a credible resource, it is a critical component of your brand awareness and to market to your audience at the same time.

Wordpress is a highly customizable free application you can use to start your blogging.  Consider owning your own blog on your own host other then using a community based blog.  This will make your content your own and by attaching it to your own domain name, will help you rank better in search engines. Be sure to tie your blogging strategy with social networks sites such as Linked-In, Facebook, Plaxo, Myspace etc…

PPC (Pay Per Click)

Depending on what keywords you are targeting the most effective use of PPC advertisements is to redirect clicked traffic to a highly targeted and well crafted landing page.  Otherwise you will be flushing money away.  Imagine you paying someone to give away your flyers with no phone number, address or website address.  

I will end this hubpage with the first message that it began with, because you can't underestimate or undermine the importance of proper keyword and target market research.   If that is well developed it will all come together in your favor at the end.