Understanding your market and targeting your small business marketing will position you to become a major player in the green industry. Have you heard Realtors say the three most important keys to business are “location, location, location?” For green industry entrepreneurs, this is also true. However, it’s internet location which is important. Why is that? Inherent to the green industry your target is not locally confined. It is national or global. This is integral in determining the methods of marketing you employ. This is why it is important you utilize search engine optimization [SEO] as a key area of your marketing focus.

According to a recent Penn State survey 10% of your target audience will be searching to make a purchase or searching for your company. Conversely, there is an 80% chance your target market will be searching the internet for facts or information about your product or service. So, in order to capitalize on the majority of searches you need a website that provides relevant content about your green specific product or service.

Essentially, there are two ways that internet searchers will arrive at your site following a search. You either have to appear high in the organic rankings or be in the top few sponsored search results. To clarify, the sponsored search results are paid ads that will appear at the right side of the page or in a different color at the top of the search results. Interestingly enough, according to another study at Penn State, people are very suspicious of the sponsored ads. In fact, according to their research, about 80% of internet users will click the organic links rather than the sponsored links.

The first lesson to learn from this—in contrast to what Search Engine Placement [SEP] companies will tell you—investing the time to create a website with several highly optimized pages targeted for specific topics and keyword phrases will provide you with a much higher return on investment [ROI] than spending money on sponsored links. In future articles we will continue to explain the differences in SEO and SEP, so that you can have a clearer understanding of how search engine marketing [SEM] can be employed to provide the most value—both short term and long term—for your small business start-up. In the next article we will discuss how using narrow keyword phrases versus broad based keywords will impact your business. Make sure to subscribe so you do not miss out.

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The bad news for social media advertising and mobile advertising is that they are falling short of the desired results businesses had hoped to see. Continuing to use a blend of advertising appears to be the best way to hedge against uncertainty in the social media and mobile advertising markets. The report indicates a great deal of risk exists in utilizing these forms of digital advertising. However, it stops short of defining any reason why social media and mobile advertising are failing to deliver the results that other forms of digital ads are delivering.

It may well be the reason they are not performing as well, is due to a general lack of credibility; due to the fact that there really has been no formal regulation regarding claims and endorsements made about products, services and opportunities which are abundant in blogs and social media.

Social media spam may contribute to the lack of delivery for social media ads, as well. We have been dealing globally with email spam for about ten years. Some measures are in place to address this type of spam; not that they have actually eradicated spam from email marketing and advertising though. However, using reputable email marketing companies and utilizing opt in lists, has allowed email marketing to still deliver decent returns with targeted audiences. Blogs, and social media are still frontiers, without any consistent regulation. I wonder if the spam and abundance of non-regulated marketing could be a significant factor in the results found in the survey?

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A gentleman from New York discovered what he calls an “oversight” on the part of 99.9% of all marketers that allows him to get otherwise paid-for advertising at Google as well as all other search engines that allow sponsored ads.

And no, nothing about his “secret” is illegal – nor does it require that you know someone on the “inside” at Google, Yahoo, MSN, Overture and others.

Instead, the New Yorker boasts proudly “…this is something that I caught onto just before 2000 when there was so much search engine craze running around, and started doing small just to test things at first … but which I later expanded on after getting the hang of it.”

This same fellow went on to start and operate sixteen separate online companies selling everything from pet food, DVDs, children’s toys & games, books, software, and sold not only his own manufactured products but became an affiliate for other web businesses – all the while applying his mastermind secret.

Over the course of nearly eight years the New Englander confesses “I’ve actually gotten over $87 million in advertising that using my secret I never had to pay for … and the largest share of which was more recently in Google pay-per-clicks as well as other forms of pad advertising at search engines … all of which I got for free …”

So powerful is his secret that he’s able to monopolize any niche online, and can always secure the top premium spots just above the usual organic results featured at most search engines.

He still has to set up an account with the search engines – but after applying his secret he is removed from having to pay for all the costs otherwise involved.
Again, nothing about his secret is either illegal or robs from the search engines.
One spokesperson from one of the most popular search engines said chuckling after being made privy to this amazing secret “Wow! Ha! This is really unique … and in my expert opinion it would only serve to enhance and bring more business to us at [name of search engine withheld for legal & confidentiality reasons] and not cause us to lose business in the slightest. Amazing!”

The northerner revealed that in this nearly eight years’ period of time since applying his secret he’s done well over $300 million in sales revenue with a most diverse line of products, and most recently in the last two years netted nearly $166 million after really “buckling down and pressing my secret to its fullest potential.”

Now to everyone else’s fortune, the city slicker is releasing his secret for getting an unlimited amount of pay-per-click ads to the general public. But he’s not promising any of us for how long.

A bit of an eccentric, the gentleman says “We’ll see just how long I can make it available before it saturates things.”

One famous public web guru pointed out that although this man may gain economically more so as a result of the publication of his secret “he’s already so amazingly rich that whether he continues or discontinues its sale will neither make nor break the man, but not grabbing it for yourself while it’s still available could prove disastrous for you as you may only have one chance, and a very limited one at that, to get this.”

It is currently available

here

…so you may want to head on over there now and get it.

It’s in a very easily readable format and is quickly and readily understood and mastered by anyone with even a 4th grade reading level.

While you’re there, why not scroll down and review for yourself the huge successes others are now having with this incredible breakthrough in targeted advertising now made freely available to the rest of us?

To your success,

-Tom

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In this post I am simply providing you with a small handful of Excellent Social Bookmarking Sites that you and I both, can and should check out:

Social Bookmarking Sites

• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Danny Sullivan’s Sphinn
• reddit
• Propeller
• Shoutwire

Note: Toms Skyline Design is not an affiliate of the above social bookmarking sites, nor does their listing here necessarily constitute an endorsement of their content, policies, practices or effectiveness. They are listed for information purposes only. Hopefully, the information can be helpful and valuable to the readers of this blog.

Coming Soon:

More Market Expansion Listings for

• Recommendation Engines
• Social Shopping Networks
• Horizontal Markets
• Virtual Worlds
• Photo Sharing & Video Sharing Networks
• Mobile Networks

Don’t forget to subscribe to this blog so you do not miss valuable information and important news.

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There are numerous social networks where your message(s) can be seen. Visibility is important; however, you want to be visible in the right marketplace. Rather than spending time blasting your message and ads to the wrong market, or to thousands of others whom you are competing with, try to locate social networks appropriate to your target audience. This methodology employs the same tactics as keyword usage and SEO/SEM. Broad based keywords will have the effect of generating more traffic than narrowly based keywords. However, narrowly defined keywords will generate higher conversion rates. Being more specific and less generalized in your targeting is an important factor to consider when preparing and delivering your message.

Types of Networks

In addition to the well-known multi-purpose networks like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter; depending on your product, service or niche, consider employing vertical markets, social bookmarking sites, recommendation engines, social shopping networks, horizontal markets, virtual worlds, photo sharing and video sharing networks, mobile networks and if appropriate, international networks.

Of the more hotly discussed social media networks, Twitter is so hot now due in part to the fact that it transcends the multi-purpose market and encompasses the mobile empowered network. Even though the majority of the social network options do not share this empowerment, they can nonetheless, be valuable to your campaign(s).

To keep this post short, I will list some of the many other social network options in a soon to follow post. Go ahead and subscribe to this blog so you do not miss out on valuable information and important news.

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Notwithstanding the huge dip by MySpace, let’s examine these numbers more closely to afford ourselves an opportunity to view a different perspective. The MySpace users clearly overshadowed the Twitter users time spent on each of their respective sites by over 1600%. One reason for this is that the Twitter population appears to be fairly transient, with many users giving it a try and then abandoning it after a month or so. Thus, they have been dubbed as “Twitter Quitters” This is not the case with Facebook and MySpace users. Statistics show they have a much higher loyalty rate.

A few others in the top ten included Blogger, at the number three slot, Tagged.com in fourth, and LinkedIn was in eighth spot. So, over the next year, it will be very interesting to see where the big dogs in social media stand.

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With narrowly defined keywords you will need to use more of them to maximize your campaign’s target reach. It is certainly easier to go the broad match route. However, over the long term, like so many other things in life, you get back what you put in. If you take shortcuts when you sow your advertising seeds, you will reap shortcomings on your returns.

So, the question to ask your potential SEO specialist is whether they think you should use broad matched or narrow matched keywords. You may also want to ask them why they give you the answer they do, so that you have a better understanding of where they are coming from.

This is Part Two in a Series on Selecting an SEO Company or SEO Specialist. Read Part One

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Whether or not the pattern becomes a trend or not, I think there is a strong impetus to see this shift unfold in the upcoming months. For one, mobile advertising targets a subsection of the online market. People on the go, in a hurry, who are socially active and social media receptive, are a demographic that substantially represents this market. I recently read in Paul Gillin’s ‘Secrets of Social Media Marketing’ where he quoted Giovanni Gallucci, cofounder of Dexterity Media, stating “People on MySpace aren’t running away from pedophiles and stalkers. They’re running away from marketers and advertisers.”

I think most of us can relate to that. New social media marketing is about relationships and the perception of the relationship. A good example is visible on Twitter. People are on Twitter for different reasons. It is a popular and growing social media network. Some people are trying to figure out how to cash in on it. They are trying to use it as a conduit to fill the funnel. With Twitter, if you want to monetize the experience then bring value to those who follow you, be a real person and pitch yourself in a non-intrusive way. If every time you tweet, it’s an ad, people won’t bother to even look at it. In fact, they may put you on block. It’s no different than your cousin or neighbor who only calls you or drops by when they want to try selling you something. You probably will avoid them as much as possible. The same principle can be applied to mobile marketing.

From the standpoint of mobile device limitations, not everyone has a mobile device that is capable of displaying the banners and display ads. So, advertisers are missing that mix of the target audience if they are not using search advertising. For these reasons it would make sense that the pattern could become a trend.

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