The importance of creating a Sitemap as part of your search engine marketing strategy and its effectiveness for you search engine optimisation efforts. One of the tools that allow you to upload and submit your sitemap is Google Webmaster. However, the importance and the benefits of using Google Webmaster Tool as part of your online marketing strategy are not limited to this.

Google Webmaster Tools is a free web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimise visibility of their websites. Also, it is a great tool for reporting statistics and diagnosing your website’s performance in Google.

The Benefits of Using Google Webmaster for Search engine marketing:

As search engine optimisation consultants we have compiled a list of task which can be performed using Google webmaster panel on regular basis. These tasks would help in doing heath check of your site as well as for creating you search engine marketing strategies.

1. Google webmaster login gives you relevant information on indexing of your site. It gives you access to all information from the last time Googlebot accessed your homepage to error reports regarding your URLs.

2. It allows XML Search Engine Submission of Sitemap. Google Webmaster allows submission of an XML sitemap to help Google index your deeper site pages and pages that are more difficult to find or may not yet be indexed. Once submitted, you have the option of seeing when it was last downloaded by Google and how many URLs you have submitted via your sitemap.

3. It provides you with diagnostic data about your site. After you log in to Webmaster, you have the option to click on the “Diagnostics” Tab and have a look over the information provided there and take actions accordingly.

4. It gives you statistics about your site. Google Webmaster gives you access to see your top search queries, top clicked search queries and information about the Page Rank distribution of your site page. You can create search engine marketing strategies based on the information you get from here.

5. It provides you with valuable insights into the anchor text of links coming to your site. From the “Statistics” tab you can click on “What Googlebot sees”. This is a very useful section for examining the anchor text of what people are using to link to your site pages. This is another important sections which helps you in building important search engine marketing strategies.

6. It gives detailed information regarding your external link inventory. If you click on the tab “Pages with external links” you will gain access to the site pages which have a low number of external links and need improvement. This is very important in checking how effective is your link building campaign and how many keyword rich links are pointing to your relevant pages. As a part of search engine marketing strategy, seo consultant would always look for this section on regular basis.

7. It allows generating / analysing robots.txt. Google Webmaster gives you the option to create a robots.txt file to indicate which robots you don’t want crawling your site, and which files or directories you don’t want crawled. Also, you can analyse them and see if it respects the modifications you made.

8. It allows you to set a preferred domain. Therefore, you can set a preferred domain that will be associated with this site. For example, you can choose to always or never show the leading “www.” in Google’s search results.

9. It gives you the option of setting geographical targets. Webmaster Tools allows you to associate a particular geographic location with this site if you are targeting users within that area. In todays time when there are millions of website competing with each other, local search engine marketing is very important. In this section we can point Google bots to rank us high in the areas we are looking to promote for our website.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/internet-marketing-articles/create-your-search-engine-marketing-strategies-by-using-google-webmaster-tool-1971536.html

About the Author

SysComm International provides focused Internet marketing services including fully managed and highly successful Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Google Webmaster, Online Marketing Strategy.

One of the easiest methods to employ in your plan to drive traffic to your local small business is pay per click advertising. This particular advertising model has been around since the late 1990’s and has been a means of generating hits for many different businesses with an online presence.

Pay per click advertising is an excellent way to get the word about your local small business to a wide audience. The process involves spotting an ad on various web sites that will forward an interested party back to your web site.

Part of the attraction of pay per click advertising is that the ad owner only pays when someone clicks on the ad and actually follows through to the web site.

When it comes to PPC advertising, never forget the importance of keywords. Essentially, keywords are words and phrases that are considered to be common modes of searching the Internet to find desired content.

As an advertiser, your job is to come up with keywords that you believe are likely to take you to web sites that are relevant to the type of business site you currently operate. The rationale is that persons who visit those sites would most likely be interested in the content of your site.

If you manage to find the right web sites for your ads, then the chances of generating clicks to your site are much greater.

While the keyword mode of pay per click advertising is very common, there is also a second method. Known as content match PPC, the principle is still the same.

The main difference is that rather than basing the search on keywords, the results are based on the content of the site. As an example, if you run a site that is dedicated to gardening supplies, then it would be a natural for you to want to place ads on sites dedicated to gardening.

Content matching can be used right along with keywords to create a well rounded pay per click component in your overall publicity campaign.

Finding online resources to help you with the process of placing pay per click ads is relatively easy. One of the most popular approaches is to make use of the Google Adwords program. You can get started by identifying a list of relevant keywords. You can also get help in designing the appearance of your ad, using online tools.

Adwords also includes a number of online tools, so you can keep track of how many hits get to your web site through those hits. This allows you to stay on top of how much pay per click is advertising is costing you each month. By comparing the sales that result from the hits with the cost of your pay per click campaign, you can determine if the program is making money for you.

Another target for your pay per click campaign is online comparison shopping engines. These types of engines often are willing to provide feeds through the placement of ads on their searches.

Just as with the ads on informational web sites, persons can click through to your web site and see what you have to offer. Some of these sites provide you with the ability to see the number of hits, while others do not. Payment for placing the ad on the shopping comparison site may be in the form of a fixed monthly amount or based on a fixed rate per click.

Keep in mind that there is no such thing as exclusionary pay per click arrangement. This means you can sign up with as many keyword and shopping ad services as you like. In fact, you may do very well to try out several different services, to see which ones seem to provide you with the best matches and coverage.

If funds for advertising are limited, go with a well known service, and then add more services as your revenue stream builds to the point you can afford to do so. Remember that your goal is to build a solid foundation for your web site, so it may take some time before you begin to see results.

Disregard stories about overnight success. Chances are you will go about six months to a year before you see significant traffic that results in sales.

Pay per click advertising is often an affordable way to launch your advertising campaign. The cost per click is often a fraction of a cent, so it certainly will not cost a great deal, unless you happen to get a huge number of visitors clicking through to your site.

The law of averages would dictate that of that huge number, enough sales would result to make your investment in the pay per click program well worth your time and the expense.

To learn more ways to drive traffic to your company using local business marketing go to: http://www.streetsmartsalesandmarketing.com/LocalBusinessMarketing.htm

Internet Marketing Strategies Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
By Festus Taferi

Internet marketing means the use of the internet to advertise and sell goods and services. It includes banner and text advertising, email marketing, interactive advertising, affiliate marketing and search engine marketing (including search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising). The aim of using search engine optimization in internet marketing is to increase targeted traffic to one’s website via search engine rankings, paid listings and advertisements.

So, what is SEO?

It is the art and science of making your Web pages as relevant as possible. Here, relevance is a measure of how close your Web page is aligned to what the user is looking for. Simply, the more relevant your page is, the higher your rankings are by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista etc.

This means that if your web page is ranked high by the likes of Yahoo or Google, and a user searches for information that contains specific keywords/terms associated with your web page; your web page is most likely to be among the top 10 search results that will be presented to the user.

The act/art of adding keywords to ones web page for maximum relevance is what is known as search engine optimization (SEO).

Humans and search engines treat Web pages in different ways. Where people look at design and read text, search engines will scan and detect relevant keywords that it would use to rate your web page as having the relevant information that a user needs.

Such “key words” are strategically placed within the web page for search engines to “see” them. Also noteworthy is the relevance of your link popularity and theme. That is, who is linking to your page? Are they related to your site’s theme?

So how do search engines evaluate your Web pages?

They determine relevance of your page by breaking it into areas. Each area consists of elements, namely HTML tags. this engines emphasize some of these tags and scan them for your keyword. If found, your page is considered more relevant.

To optimize your pages, you need to learn these three main terms: Frequency, Prominence, and Weight.

A. Frequency:

Frequency is how often your keyword appears on the page or in its elements (Title, META Description and Keywords, visible text, H1, ALT, etc.).

B. Prominence:

Prominence is how close to the start of the tag your keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the beginning of a page element (Title, META Description and Keywords, visible text, ALT, etc.) will make your Web page more relevant.

C. Weight / Density:

Keyword weight shows the number of times a keyword appears in an area as a percentage to all words in the page:

Keyword weight is calculated as the number of words in the key phrase multiplied by frequency and divided by the total number of words (including the keyword). Mathematically, it is:

Weight = (Words in keyword/All words) x 100%

Logically then, the higher the weight of a particular keyword in a page, the higher the ranking of the page for that keyword. However, repeating a keyword too often to increase its weight can cause the page to be penalized by the search engines.

Keyword weight is sometimes referred to as ‘Density’ which stands for the same notion – overall percentage of some definite word relative to all words in the text.

It is very important to balance your site’s optimization so that it is neither under-optimized nor over-optimized.

Under-optimization may get your site lost among hundreds of thousands of other sites. While over-optimization would get your site penalized or worse – banned from the search engines

Festus Taferi is an IT professional with over 9 years experience in online business development and marketing. Get more mind blowing SEO techniques at: http://linksman-seoplace.blogspot.com/.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Festus_Taferi

Your website should be the hub of all your lead generation efforts.  But before you start or continue to spend your time, money and resources sending traffic there, you must be sure that your website is set up to convert those visitors into leads or better yet, paying customers.  Watch this video to learn what you need to be doing to help you drive more traffic, generate more leads, convert more visitors and increase sales.

• Has the traffic to your website declined over the last few months or years?
• Are looking for new and inexpensive ways to convert more of your website visitors into paying customers?
• Would you like to have more of your website visitors sign up to get your online or offline company newsletter?
• Are you frustrated because no one is calling, e-mailing or buying from your site?

Want to know why? Attend this free webinar and find out.

Click Here to Register: http://budurl.com/10WebsiteMistakes

I don’t care how great your website looks, how many awards you’ve won, how many friends say it looks great, the bottom line is that if your website isn’t converting visitors into leads or paying customers you may be making some of these 10 fatal errors.

By attending this free webinar you’ll learn:

• How to better influence a visitor’s buying decision and increase your conversion rate
• The most important thing you need to know about your prospects before they even come to your site
• The one thing you need to do to give you a distinct advantage over any and all competitors
• Emotional triggers that can stimulate your visitors to take action
• Important website statistics that you need to track
• How your website can benefit from social networking sites
• Why search engine optimization is so important

If your website is not generating as many sales as it should or if you just want to take your site to the next level, then you must attend this webinar.

When: Thursday February 4th, 5 PM PST/8 PM EST
Where: Your Computer
Price: FREE

Click Here to Register: http://budurl.com/10WebsiteMistakes

I look forward to seeing you all on this webinar.

The biggest issue facing any business today is how to drive more traffic to the company website. But not just more traffic, but more qualified traffic. Qualified meaning that they are more likely to buy once they get there. There are tons of books and articles out there that provide multiple strategies some – harder to implement then others.

This article is going to focus on one of the easiest to implement and one that’s free! I will be showing you how to make use of a tell-a-friend script to make your website become more viral. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

A tell a friend script is a simple programming script that you can literally “cut and paste” into your website. Tell a friend scripts can be placed anywhere on your site. I place it in my navigation bar so that it appears on every page. You just want to be sure that it is easy to see so that a person can easily click on it to send the information they find interesting to any of his friends or his family members.

To see an real life example of 2 types of tell-a friend scripts go to www.StreetSmartSalesAndMarketing.com. Check out the side and bottom navigation bars and click on the Tell a Friend/Share This button.

The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

To get you started you can check out SocialTwist.com or ShareThis.com. The cool thing about these 2 services is they also let the website visitor share your website though social bookmarking websites like Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon just to name a few.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

To learn more secrets on how to drive more traffic, convert more visitors to paying customers and get found faster by the search engines pick up a free copy of “7 Steps to Website Success” Just go to www.WebsiteMakeoverASAP.com

Newsletters allow you to impress your subscribers. It can show your expertise and knowledge about the topic at hand and the many benefits you can offer them. When you impress people, they will become potential customers and another great thing is that they can recommend you to their friends, colleagues and family. All of them could very well be customers in the future.

Providing a newsletter for your opt-in list subscribers provides many benefits in terms of driving traffic into your site as well as boosting the sales and profits of your site and company. This is a marketing ploy that will not hugely dent your marketing budget and will not also require many man-hours in developing this project.

With a newsletter, you can inform the public about your company and products as well as services. You can keep them posted and updated about what’s going-on with your company as well as many of your promotions and offerings. With these, you keep on reminding your subscribers that you are still here and is willing to offer them good deals and services.

If you do not have a newsletter or publishing one for your site, then you may have to consider about researching and be well informed on how to publish one. It is not as easy as it seems but if and when you get the right idea and process, it will be smooth sailing from there on. Try to take the time to learn what you need to learn and get that newsletter ready and good to attract subscribers to your newsletter as well as traffic to your site.

In the next few paragraphs, I will provide you with some things to reflect on when you decide to start your own newsletter for your site. Here are five things to consider when publishing a newsletter.

1) Make sure that the content of your newsletter pertains to and closely associated with your business or the theme of your site. Do not dwell too far on what could be regarded as your field of expertise. You have started a site and your theme for your site will always be something you are knowledgeable about. For example; if you have a site that sells auto car parts, your newsletter must contain articles or content like photos that pertain to cars, auto parts and such. You may also include content about your company and your staff.

Remember that visitors of a certain site are there because they are interested in what the site has to offer. If they sign up for an opt-in list or for a newsletter this means that they want to be updated for that certain theme or subject. Be sure that when you publish your newsletter you are providing for the need of the subscriber as well as their interests.

2) Ensure that you have well written, information riddled and content rich articles. You articles will be the body of your newsletter and that they should be able to excite your readers as well as provide information. Articles should be well written and checked for errors such as spelling and grammatical errors for it to look professional and believable. The trust of your client to you and newsletter is at stake here.

3) Fact-check your articles. Make sure that you provide true facts and figures so that your reputation as an expert and knowledgeable in that field is not questioned. If you lose the trust of your subscribers these may persuade them to unsubscribe to your newsletter. You will lose many potential sales this way.

4) Provide fresh and new articles that can provide new information to your subscribers. If you publish stale and old news in your newsletter, there is a tendency that people or your subscribers already have read and known about them. This will lose their interest in your newsletter and they wont get to read what is most important, your ads. They may not open or read any of your succeeding newsletters losing your intention in writing and publishing newsletters, to get them to visit your site and make a purchase.

5) Never use copyrighted materials such as photos and articles. This is outright plagiarism, you may get into a lot of trouble for this. You can lose your business and get sued over copyright infringement. If you do not have the time to write your own articles, there are many willing and able professional article writers that can do it for you for a reasonable fee. All your investment in writing and publishing articles will be well worth it when you see your list build up and your traffic increasing.

6) Be sure to offer unique ways to get visitors to your website to opt-in to your newsletter. Offering a free special report available for immediate download can be very effective. I offer a free Website Makeover Analysis Quiz to get some of my visitors to opt-in

By the way for those companies that have a retail or store location, publishing an online newsletter is a great way to help in your local business marketing efforts.

If you’re not optimizing your Net pages for the search engines, you’re not only missing out on a lot of traffic, however possibilities are that it’s costing you money, especially if you rely solely on Pay Per Click advertising to urge traffic to your site.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is straightforward, and if you are doing it yourself, it’s free: it just takes a little time, and a strategy.

If you follow the process outlined in this text, within a few weeks you’ll be getting a flow of free traffic to your Internet pages. What’s more, the people who arrive on your website’s pages can be targeted guests, primed to buy from you, because you’ve got just what they’re trying for.

While the usual SEO method is well known, the process made public in this text is totally different, as a result of it focuses on making landing pages — destination pages — as entry points to your Web site.

Let’s observe the process.

Step one: Discover who’s wanting for you

Begin by pondering your customers. Who’s wanting for you, and what terms would they sort into a look engine query box to seek out you? The terms that they’d type into the search engines are your website’s pages keywords and key phrases. Create a list of those keywords. If your website has been on-line for a few months, scan your referrer logs to determine what keywords your visitors used. As a result of the search engines are basically simply indexing software, your keywords are the keys to the SEO kingdom.

You’ll use your lists of keywords and phrases as you optimize all your Web pages.

Use the keywords in: your page titles, your page descriptions, your meta tags, and in fact within the content on the pages themselves. You must conjointly use your keywords in internal links across your Internet site. It’s wise to get different web site owners to link to you using the keywords for which you would like placed too. This tells the search engines specifically what your pages are regarding, and when the pages ought to be came within the query results.

Optimize each page on your site with keywords which are specific to your site, furthermore to every individual page. Aim to create around three hundred to 800 words on every page. Though you won’t manage tons of content for each page — some pages don’t want it — the more text you can get onto your pages that includes your keywords the better.

Yes, this takes time, particularly if you have a massive site. But, it’s time that will repay you again and again within the months and years to come back, in FREE Web traffic.

In your optimization method, your individual pages are all-vital: especially your site’s landing pages.

Step a pair of: Create landing pages that sell

The strategy to optimize your Web web site to induce traffic and to create sales is to optimize every page, furthermore to form specific “landing pages” for your site. This can be as a result of your pages get to the high of the search engine results pages, known as the SERPs, your sites don’t. (The SERPs are the search engine pages which are returned when folks enter search queries into the search engines’ question fields.)

Step three: Realize that landing page content is that the emperor

You’ll typically hear that “content is king”. However, this needs to be amended to “content is king, however landing page content is that the emperor”.

Landing pages are generally referred to as “Net sales pages”. Usually they’re developed as the landing purpose, so to talk, for PPC advertising. These pages sometimes have a lot of content, that makes them magnetic to the search engines.

Suppose of your landing pages as entry points, or destination pages, for your site. You want your landing pages to face out — they’re the foremost vital pages on your site.

As a result of they’re so vital, you’ll wish to form several landing pages for your web site: these will be special pages that you simply produce specifically for keywords for that you would like to be discovered within the search engines. Consider making a landing (sales) page with unique, data-rich content for every product and repair that you just sell.

Over time, your special landing pages will draw an ever-increasing flow of targeted traffic to your site. So in 3 steps, you’ve created powerful search engine optimization for your site.

To learn how to increase your website traffic, visit: multilingual seo. You can use our multilingual seo to increase website’s rank on search engines and boost your business as well. Why SEO is crucial? And what can SEO do for your business? Find the answers at multilingual seo.

Many small- to medium-sized businesses fail due to a lack of an effective marketing and sales program. Entrepreneurs may be very good at their core business, but know very little about marketing. Certain people suffer from the theory espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” They are innocently caught up in a love for their own products or services and believe the world will indeed beat a path to their door when prospects hear about the fantastic new product. This attitude is wrong, dangerous, and not in line with the practices of successful B2B marketers. In fact, more often than not, superior marketing beats a superior product.

Another reason for failure is that an effective marketing campaign is hard work. Since marketing is probably not what motivated the entrepreneur to open his or her business, it receives less priority than product development and other tasks. Marketing also often comes up short when scarce funds are allocated. Sadly, there are start-up companies that spend tens of thousands of dollars on furniture and equipment, while complaining that there is nothing left for marketing.

New companies also make a mistake by hiring expensive advertising agencies that are incapable of cost-effective, low-budget marketing. Or they hire marketing and sales talent from big companies, and these people are often clueless about how to get results on a limited budget. So if you are in a small company, be careful about hiring the hotshot from a big company to come solve your problems. It often doesn’t work. This is not to say that everyone from a big company is incapable of being effective with a smaller budget-some are great no matter the company size.

Small to medium businesses and start-ups face two major obstacles not shared by larger, entrenched companies. First, if you happen to be a small fish in a large pond, you will be confronted by competitors with much larger advertising and marketing budgets. Second, you may have to spend a larger percentage of your revenues on marketing than older, established organizations.

Given the reality of this situation, you need to squeeze as much efficiency as possible out of every dollar. Be assured that you can do a lot on a limited budget, and expensive does not always mean better. I’ve often used limited-budget strategies to beat the big players and you can do the same. And the lessons you learn by doing it the frugal way will serve you well, no matter how successful you become, or how far your marketing budget expands. Here are a collection of small budget strategies and tactics you can use to beat the big guys:

Small Budget Website Strategies:
1. Don’t overbuild your Website. There are ways to create an impressive site using less-complex open source or template approaches.
2. If possible, have an easy-to-remember Website address that relates to what your company does.
3. List your Web address (URL) on all of your corporate materials.
4. Make sure your Website is optimized for organic search terms. This is a low-cost strategy that will make you much easier to find.
5. Try narrowly focused low-cost pay per click search terms.
6. Give some information away for free to increase your Website stickiness.
7. Create many links with other sites to increase your search engine visibility.
8. Refresh your content often. Do not let the site go stale.

Small Budget Social Media Strategies:
1. Start your own blog and comment on other blogs.
2. Always list your Web address on your blog postings and any electronic communication.
3. Leverage LinkedIn and other networking sites.
4. Use Twitter to find relevant posts and prospects.
5. Be controversial (but not too controversial) to attract attention.
6. Choose a niche where you can be an expert.
7. Write articles and get them published in online media.
8. Focus on one or two social media outlets. This concentrated attention will bring more attention than throwing your efforts at five or six outlets.

Small Budget Email Strategies:
1. Work hard to build your email prospect file of opt-in names. This will be a gold mine of low-cost leads and sales.
2. Include a promotional message and your Website address as part of your standard email signature.
3. Provide links to valuable information in your emails, not just product pitches.
4. Make your emails interesting and/or unusual.
5. Run your email copy through a spam detection tool like EmailExam, Acxiom Digital, or Lyris ContentChecker to ensure your emails will not be caught in the spam filters.
6. Have an easy opt-out process. You do not want to keep sending emails to people who want to be removed from your list.

Small Budget Direct Marketing Strategies:
1. Target your lists more effectively by using demographics, psychographics, and some of the other list segmenting tools available. The object is to mail fewer packages and achieve greater response.
2. Test your mailing and telemarketing in small quantities before committing large sums to full-blown programs. Equally important, use the information you learn on every program to make the next work better.
3. Try a postcard mailer. The production costs are low, the first-class postage is less expensive than letter mail, and they pull very well. You can drive prospects to a Web form or toll-free telephone number.
4. Cut back on four-color process direct mail packages. Unless you sell food, magazines, resort properties, or other products requiring excellent graphic reproduction, you can probably pull as much response using two-color printing.
5. Consider mailing with third-class postage instead of first-class. Depending on whether you presort the file, this will save you a great amount of money, and most prospects will not notice the difference. The exception is with time-sensitive offers, since third-class mail can take a week longer to arrive than first-class.
6. If you mail to large numbers on a national basis, or send highly concentrated mailings into local or regional areas, use postal pre-sorting to lower postage costs.

More Cost-Cutting Ideas:
1. If you are a small company (a flea), find a big company (a dog) to partner with. This will make it much easier for you to sell to bigger companies.
2. Read the chapter on public relations carefully and begin carrying out its advice. PR is a low-effort, high-reward vehicle that is often under-utilized by small-budget marketers.
3. Be persistent. Remember the eight times rule: You don’t have to spend a lot of money on each communication, but you must repeat your message up to eight times to gain prospect awareness.
4. Write handwritten personal notes to prospects and customers. They are cheap but make a big impact.
5. Ask for referrals. They are much easier to sell, at lower cost.
6. Utilize experts. An expert’s advice will cost you something in the short term, but can save you money and aggravation in the long term.
7. List your primary products and services on your stationery and business card, or anything else you give to potential buyers.
8. Since consistency is vital for those with small budgets, make sure every one of your marketing efforts supports and reinforces your unique selling proposition (USP).
9. Sharpen your bargaining skills. Media outlets are hungry for business and many have unsold inventory. Use this to your advantage by negotiating aggressively.

One other important principle to practice is leverage. Try to create content once and use it in multiple marketing scenarios. This is less expensive and time-consuming, and the consistency of message is important.

Christopher Ryan is a noted expert in B2B marketing. Chris is founder and President of Fusion Marketing Partners and was formerly a senior marketing executive at companies like Sybase, PeopleSoft and Group 1 Software. You can buy Mr. Ryans latest book, How to Create an Unstoppable Marketing and Sales Machine, at Amazon.com or at Get the Book.

I was speaking to a local business owner last week who was obviously struggling. Leads generated from the usual sources are off, response to his advertising is almost non-existent and store traffic is down 75%. “Joe” asked me to put together a proposal for turning his business around quickly.

In a few days, I came back with several easy and inexpensive ways that he could double “hits” to his website and generate 20% more leads – guaranteed.

Joe’s response was – “Wow this stuff is great, but I think I am going to hold off for now until things pick up a little.” When I asked why, he said that it was just too much money to spend right now. When I asked what he was going to do, he said “I guess I’ll keep doing what I’m already doing and hope for the best” said Joe.

Joe’s odds of survival? Dismal at best. Why? Not because he didn’t hire me, but because he doesn’t have a specific course of action in place that will see him through these trying times. The sad truth is that many small business owners continue to do what they’ve always done regardless of the mediocre results they continue to get. Why? It’s easy and they just don’t know what else to do.

Listed below are three low-cost/high ROI strategies for that you can implement quickly and can have an almost immediate effect on your bottom line.

1 – Turn Your “Online Brochure” Website Into a Lead Generation Website
Visit the website of any successful Internet marketer and you’ll quickly be exposed to an offer to either sign up for their newsletter or download a free electronic special report. To get this free information however you are asked to give your e-mail address.

Prospects visit your website for one main reason – to get information they can use to make their buying decision. Providing free and helpful information in exchange for a prospect’s contact information will help generate qualified leads for you to follow up with. Click here to learn how to get a fast Website Makeover

2 – Make Your Website Easy to Find Using Search Engine Optimization
These days, having a website is not enough. Your website has to be properly “optimized” so that it can be easily found by Google, Yahoo and MSN. This includes having the proper keywords, titles and descriptions as well as both efficient internal navigation and a lot of incoming external links. Do this correctly and you could be rewarded by being on page one of the search engines.

3 – Drive Traffic Using Internet Marketing
Are you taking advantage of social media, article writing, PR, blogging, e-mail marketing and other forms of inexpensive yet highly effective internet marketing strategies? I have seen firsthand how effective these free or almost free tactics are at uncovering new customers.

The Bottom Line? – When times are good, almost any type of marketing and advertising works. But in recessionary times like we are in now, you have to venture out of your comfort zone and try new things. If your current marketing is not producing the results you need or want, challenge yourself and your staff to create new ways of finding more business.

Looking for new ways to drive qualified traffic to your business? Check out our Local Business Marketing services