What is Email Marketing?

Quite simply, email marketing is one of the most inexpensive options to contact your customers when you like. Not only is it inexpensive, it is also completely trackable.

Email marketing, just as it sounds, involves communicating with customers and prospects via email. Unlike other forms of marketing, you are able to know how many people are reading your email and if they click through for further information or take action on any email offers you may give.

Email Marketing is a unique marketing tool that allows small business owners to compete with large corporations successfully and in many chances stand out above large businesses by offering personalised and targeted offers that customers respond well to.

How to Implement Email Marketing?

There are several ways to create and manage an email database. While some business owners decide to store customer details within their own email account and submit email blasts that way, there are many disadvantages in doing so. Not only does this option take time to manage, it also lacks the previously mentioned tracking capabilities.

Self managing email lists can become messy, and also places you at risk of being placed in spam folders of your customers. Working with a respected email marketing database company allows you to leverage their reliability and have an increased rate of success at landing directly in an inbox instead of a spam folder.

Steps to Starting Email Marketing

1. Sign up with a recommended autoresponder company
2. Set up your account and create your new email marketing lists
3. Insert sign up form html code onto your website.
4. Direct people to join your newsletter list.
5. Send your email database members regular, high quality emails.

OR

Have your entire email marketing set up and campaign created from scratch and managed by Bright Biz. We can provide the set up, full service management or just monthly editing, the choice is yours.

If you’d like email marketing advice for your small business, please don’t hesitate to contact Loreena.

Now don’t run away scared! The entire relationship play between a webmaster, their website and Google can seem overwhelming, so this series is going to break it down for you in easy to understand pieces. Today is the first installment.

How to Get Google Love for Your Website, by Knowing what Google Really Wants.

It’s important that you believe me when I say this, because it’s the absolute truth…. What google wants is…. *insert drumroll here*

………….Relevance!……….

If you stop just for a moment and think about yourself when you are using google. What do most people do? Search for the most relevant answer for what they need to know.

Now whether that’s an answer about a recipe or a business dilemma, Google bot’s goal is to provide you with the most relevant piece of information on the internet, to give you your answer.

See, not so scary is it? The first step to ranking well in the Google Search Engine is to be sure your site is relevant.

What Should my Site be Relevant For?

Aaahhh, yes, the age old question. You know your site needs to be relevant, but relevant to what? The answer to that is……

Relevant to the keywords your readers would use to find your site.

If I have a blog, or a website about dog food, of course, I need to provide relevant information about dog food. But exactly “what” about dog food? Well I want to be the expert supplier in organic dogfood.

So there you go, I need to target my site around keywords relevant to organic dogfood. So now I know what I need to be relevant for, I will start to be sure that my site contains keywords and information related to: Organic dog food, how to buy organic dogfood, best organic dogfoods, home made organic dog food.

Does all that make sense? It’s not too hard for our first step towards getting Google Love.

The summary of today’s lesson is:  “To rank well in Google, the first step is to be relevant. To do that, we need to figure out who we want our readers to be, what information they need to know, and what keywords they would use to search for that information.”

In the upcoming articles on getting Google Love, I’ll direct you further on the step by step process you will need to undertake to get your website relevant.

Being in the market for a new home means that I spend lots of time searching for the right property, so it’s really frustrating when I constantly discover that very few real estate agents understand the dynamics of internet marketing, or what it has to offer.

I don’t have time to walk the pavement to search the window of real estate agents locally, so the first thing I do is head to Google, as do most other real estate hunters. What I find is not so good!!! Of course there are the major sites such as Domain and Realestate.com.au, but often I want to dig deeper on the sites of individual real estates. The problem is, I can’t find most of them!

When I CAN find a real estate agent with good search engine rankings, their website is often poor and not updated and the photos they put on site are horrid if they are there at all.

I get the feeling that most agents are possibly listing a few of their available properties on the “big” real estate websites and hoping people will find them, BOY WHAT A MISTAKE!!!

It should be the aim of EVERY real estate to rank first on google for all the possible property terms within their local area. Getting on that first page of google before the big sites is a huge advantage, and being sure your website contains great detail and amazing photos is the next step to getting the potential buyer/renter to make that call and give you their money.

This frustration has given me the inspiration to write an easy step guide to internet marketing for real estate agents, I’ll be posting the first part soon!

In current years it has been discovered that a majority of people use Google or other search engines as their first stop for research on products and services they are looking to buy.

This being the case, it makes sense that all business owners should have their website ranking as high as possible in order to get as much exposure to new customers as possible.

The secret to SEO is that most people don’t click past the first 2 pages of search engine results. This means that there are 20 top positions available, with the first 10 being the most highly prizes first page ranking positions.

Search engine optimisation is a long term process, the first steps to get started are:

1. It’s really important to know what words your customers are using to try and find your product. These words are referred to as keywords. These keywords make up the basis for your seo campaign. Keyword research is one of the most vital steps in SEO as the wrong keywords will return very little result or ROI.

2. Benchmarking: Know where your website is ranking right now. It’s important to understand where your website sits in relation to competition for your chosen keywords. This benchmark will be mark against which any ranking improvements will be measured.

Once those 2 steps are complete, it’s time to move on to the action taking and results!… more on this soon.

Our local area is Port Macquarie in NSW, and while the internet allows us to service companies and people all over the world, if you prefer in person consultations and meetings then we are happy to travel, we understand the online marketing needs of small business and are here to help.

Welcome to Bright Biz. My name is Loreena Walsh, owner of Bright Biz an Online Marketing Consultancy focused on helping Small Business owners utilise the online environment and other technologies to take their business to a new level.

We are based in Port Macquarie, NSW, Australia but work with clients worldwide to assist them with their small business marketing.

Getting online used to cost from $2000 to $30000 for a business website. The truth about many websites is that they simply DO NOT WORK!! A business website, especially for small business needs to be targeted, focused, and convert website visitors into customers. Something that many websites do not achieve.

So how can this Port Macquarie Website & Marketing Consultancy help you?

• If you don’t feel in control of your website - Call us
• If your website is costing you money for little return - Call us
• If your website ISN”T bringing you targeted customers that you can track - you need our help.
• If you are confused about how to get online - We’ll help you today.
• If you need ways to link your online and offline marketing - We can solve your marketing problems too.
• If your website is nowhere to be seen within Google or other search engine search results - we’ll fix that for you FAST!!

In short, our business is about helping your business. Small business is my passion. Technology is my passion and I sincerely hope that more small business takes the initiative to take control of the online medium that’s been controlled by big business for too long.

Contact Loreena today for a chat about how getting online could help your business. No obligation and a no sell introductory chat about your business is on offer, no pressure just a few ideas between business owners.

Hope to talk to you soon.