Internet Marketing and Small Business

The internet marketing landscape has changed quite a bit in the last 3 years and has become even more defined in the last 12 months. With Google raising $4 billion from new stock offerings in 2005, we’ll see more change afoot over the next 3 years. Unfortunately, I fear that small business will be left out in this process. Perhaps a better statement would be that small business has already fallen by the wayside.

This writing is certainly not designed to provide a solution to the growing problem. Furthermore, it has been written to raise awareness and recognize the difficulty that small businesses have on the web. Certainly, the small business gets no sympathy from the major search engines in their quest to provide quality information for those searching the web.

Let’s review how the situation was created. We have to assume that a small business does not have the financial resources for a proper web advertising campaign (even though it is less expensive than offline advertising) and does not have the manpower to spend time on non-commercial advertising. . expensive marketing methods. Yes, I have distinguished between advertising and marketing.

Marketing is the process or technique of promoting, selling and distributing a product or service. Advertising is to make your product or service publicly known; an advertisement to attract the attention of the public emphasizing qualities to arouse the desire to purchase.

Can the small business market at no cost? Yes, absolutely, however, the issue at hand is not spending but time. Time they are already spending on their business and they don’t have more time to spend on inexpensive web marketing methods. What are these marketing methods that are inexpensive but time consuming? This would include, but is not limited to, writing articles, maintaining newsletters, maintaining autoresponder email addresses, submitting your articles through a variety of methods and resources on the web. Let’s not forget the standard issues of search engine optimization and HTML coding. Oh, the best of all is “natural” link exchange as defined by Google. If you haven’t been there yet, manual link exchange is a time-consuming process, even if you decide to spend money on lost-cost services that can help. You may not use “link farms” as it is against search engine policies and will cause your listing to be demoted.

To rank higher in search engines, it all comes down to links (or link exchanges, link popularity) and content. Inbound links are better than reciprocal inks. Writing content for your site, articles, news, newsletters takes a lot of time to properly write a 500 word article and the submission process is also not easy. There are some services and software out there to help you submit articles, but like link exchange services, they can only do so much. You could create a blog and post your articles, certainly. However, you can see that the “to do” list keeps growing for the small business owner.

Could they participate in pay per click campaigns? Sure, however, you’re now running into a financial problem and one that doesn’t necessarily provide a great return on investment. Pay per click campaigns are good as a general marketing strategy and if you use them in combination with a variety of other internet and search engine marketing methods. On its own, it cannot provide the returns small businesses are looking for. Searching for key phrases (no longer keywords) and understanding which ones to select is not an easy task either. 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 to write 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!

In fact, there is another problem associated with pay per click campaigns. The ratio of exposures to hits is equally an issue when you are supposed to maintain a certain percentage ratio between the two. When search engines like Google allow your ad to be placed on other websites with their Google Adsense your exposures increase however how many people actually click on the links? From Google’s perspective, probably a lot, but from an individual advertiser’s perspective, this isn’t necessarily a good situation. Google now dictates the keyword phrases you “should” bid on, ultimately consolidating the bidding war into smaller groups of keyword phrases and a larger number of advertisers.

Lastly, at least for this writing, but not necessarily on topic, it’s time to look at revenue. There is no doubt that it takes months for a website to spread across the Internet. This is by no means a short term situation and expectations should be set accordingly. Just because you have a website doesn’t mean you’ll see rewards anytime soon. Once again we find ourselves in the dilemma of time resources to do the Internet marketing work necessary to see the benefits 6 to 9 months later.

The requirements set by search engines, as they seek to provide quality answers to those who search, make 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 keyword phrase searches? Unless something changes and small business is given a chance, it will be the larger corporations that will have the manpower, time and money.