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Anchor Intro: If you own a small business, you know that the Internet can mean the difference between profit and loss. So it pays to make sure that the online part of your business is as good as possible. Bankrate.com found one Internet marketing pro with some golden rules for Web marketing.
SOT: It's not a type of situation where you can just put up a Web site and there it is. You have to follow these rules of the Internet to get your site going and get people to actually come to your site and see it.
Voice over 1: Annie's costumes used to be in a shopping center. Now they're online only and doing five times the business.
Voice over 2: In part from help from Internet consultant Jay Berkowitz. And he's got some free advice for small business success online.
SOT: "The single most important thing you can do is optimize your Web site for the search engines. That's the practice of adding the words that people are going to search for in looking for your product and services."
Voice over 3: Optimization for search engines really worked for Annie's costumes.
SOT: "You get more traffic and a lot of free traffic. So like for instance last Halloween we had 1.3 million free visitors just from Google alone."
Voice over 4: Tip number two? Get visitor names and e-mail addressees by having some kind free offer on your Web site.
SOT: "If you offer something really great for free... like for Annie's costumes, we created a free contest. We gave away a plasma, flat-screen TV during the Halloween season. And people opted in for a chance to win that prize.
Voice over 5: Using that strategy helped get names and e-mail addresses. And what they did with those names is tip number three.
SOT: "Send people something on a regular basis. And make it really, really good. Don't just spam them with offer after offer. Send them articles, send them interesting information they can use.
SOT: "There's approximately 175,000 people that subscribe to our newsletter."
Standup: Bottom line? Success online is success anywhere else for a small business. You get noticed, you make compelling offers, you stay in touch with your customers. For Bankrate.com, I'm Kristin Arnold.
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