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Those of us business owners who do it all, whether we are home based or a small business have it made. With today’s technology we can look as big as we want. With the web, faxes, video conferencing and all the burgeoning technology you don’t need to...
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Internet Marketing and the Small Business
The internet marketing landscape has changed quite a bit in the
past 3 years and has further defined itself further in the past
12 months. With Google raising $4 Billion from new stock
offerings in 2005 we will see more changes underway over the
next 3 years. Unfortunately, I fear the small business is going
to be left out in the cold in this process. Perhaps a better
statement would be that the small business has already been left
out in the cold.
This writing is certainly not designed to provide a solution to
the growing problem. More so, it has been written to raise the
awareness and acknowledge the difficulty small business has on
the web. Certainly the small business does not receive any
sympathy from the major search engines in their quest to provide
quality information for those that are searching the web.
Let's review how the situation has been created. We have to make
the assumption a small business does not have the financial
resources for a proper advertising campaign on the web (even
though it is less costly than offline advertising) and they do
not have the man-power to devote time for the non-costly methods
of marketing. Yes, I have distinguished between advertising and
marketing.
Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and
distributing a product or service. Advertising is to make your
product or service publicly known; an announcement to call
public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to
purchase.
Can the small business market at no cost? Yes, absolutely,
however, the issue at hand is not expenditure but time. Time
they are already spending on their business and do not have more
time to spend on non-costly marketing methods on the web. What
are these non-costly but time-consuming marketing methods? This
would include but not limited to writing articles, maintaining
newsletters, maintaining email addresses with auto-responders,
submitting their articles through a variety of methods and
resources over the web. Let's not forget standard search engine
optimization issues and HTML coding. Oh, the best one of all is
"natural" link exchanging as defined by Google. If you have not
already been there, manual link exchanging is a time consuming
process even if you do decide to spend money on lost cost
services that can assist. You cannot use "link farms" as that is
against search engine policies and will cause your listing to be
down graded.
In order to reach top ranking on the search engines it all boils
down to links (or link exchanges, link popularity) and content.
Inbound only links better than reciprocal inks. Writing content
for your site, articles, news, newsletter is time consuming to
properly write a 500 word article and the submission process is
not easy either. Some services and software exists to help you
in your submission of articles, but just like link exchange
services they can only do so much. Could you create a blog
and
place your articles, certainly. However, you can see the "things
to do" list only keeps growing for the small business owner.
Could they engage in pay-per-click campaigns? Sure, however, you
now are entering in a financial issue and one that does not
necessarily provide a great return on investment. Pay-Per-Click
campaigns are good as an overall marketing strategy and if you
use it in combination with a variety of other internet and
search engine marketing methods. On its own it cannot provide
the returns the small business is seeking. Searching the key
phrases (no longer key words) and understanding which ones to
select is equally not an easy task. It requires due diligence,
research and analysis to understand the information and make an
informed decision. Assuming they can get past this part of the
pay-per-click process, the next phase is writing the
pay-per-click ad headline and content. Unfortunately we see many
small businesses flocking to pay-per-click advertising in hopes
of a quick return. They might as well go to a casino!
There is indeed another problem associated with Pay-Per-Click
campaigns. The ratio of exposures to hits is equally a problem
when you are supposed to keep a certain percentage ratio between
the two. When search engines like Google are allowing your ad to
be placed on other websites with their Google Adsense, your
exposures are indeed going up, however, how many people actually
click on the links? From Google's perspective probably a lot,
but from the individual advertiser's perspective this is not
necessarily a good situation. Google is now dictating what key
phrases you "should" bid on and ultimately consolidating the
bidding war into small key phrase groups and larger number of
advertisers.
Lastly, at least for this writing, but not necessarily on the
subject, is time to see revenues. There is no doubt that it
takes months for a website to propagate through the Internet.
This is by no means a short-term situation and expectations need
to be set accordingly. Just because you have a website does not
mean that you will see rewards anytime soon. Once again we get
into the dilemma of time resources to do the necessary internet
marketing work in order to see benefits 6 - 9 months later.
Requirements set by the search engines as they seek to provide
quality responses to those that are searching are making it
increasingly difficult for small businesses to compete on the
web. So, who will end up on the first page or in the top
position of searches for key phrases? Unless something changes
and the small business is given a chance, it will be the larger
corporations that have the man power time and the money.
About the author:
Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet
Marketing. SmartFinds Internet Marketing provides a variety
of business internet marketing services including research,
analysis and planning.
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