Would you like to cut your marketing budget by 50% or more and still make as much money (or even more)? If so, you are going to be really excited about today’s tip.

To do this, you will create a free “preferred customer club”. For a customer to become a member of the club, they simply go to your website and register their email address. This is called “opt in” email and you can’t use your regular email account for this. You need an autoresponder service like Aweber.

There are several methods you can use to promote your preferred customer club. You can place a sign in your store. You can put a message on your receipts. You can mention it on your offline print and tv ads. You can put out flyers. You can have a clipboard and paper next to the register and simply ask.

When you are having a slow day or week, you simply log into your autoresponder account and send your preferred customer an exclusive coupon to come to your sale. For best results, I recommend that you do a one day sale on your slowest day of the week. Make it a coupon that must be printed and shown at the time of purchase. This makes it more exclusive and also gives you a way to track your results.

This strategy works best for service businesses like restaurants and spas, but any business that uses coupons can put it into action.

If you need help putting this type of system together, give me a call and I can do the whole thing (including sending the messages) for you.

Here’s A Way To Cut Your Marketing Budget by 50% is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

We recently started building small business niche directories. We are getting these directories ranked in Google and sell sponsorships. These are super niche targeted in the local market. We currently have sponsorships ready to roll in the following directories (all on page 1 on Google as of today).

DaytonPreschools.com
DaytonMoldInspection.com
CincinnatimoldInspection.com
DaytonHeatingContractors.com

The sites are fairly new and should be at #1 very soon. These types of sites get super targeted traffic ready to do business with you. Our advertising rates are a fraction of what the newspaper or the phone book would run and there are different options available.

Several more sites are in the works soon. If you have a niche not listed but are interested, please let me know and I can add it too the list.

Advertising Opportunities is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

It’s been a while since I posted to this blog. Been a little crazy around here. I’m tweaking things a bit and am rolling out new services.

The first one is for home improvement contractors. I’m rolling out a site called DaytonContractors.org for home improvement contractors to connect with homeowners. This is going to be exclusively for good quality contractors who I personally know deliver a good service. If you are a contractor who delivers good work and you want to just pay for leads, I would love to hear from you. Contact me and let me know what category you would like on the site. Unlike most of these leads sites, the leads you get will be EXCLUSIVE to you!

Next, I’m also rolling out a Google Places submission service. I’ve done a lot of research on Google Maps and I know what it takes to get to the top of the listing. If you look up Dayton Business Coach on Google, you can see the listing that I did for Bob Forschner. He has what’s called a “one box” which means it’s the exclusive listing for the Dayton area. Depending on the competition, there could be as many as 10 businesses listed in Google Places. But, since I optimized Bob’s listing very well, he got the exclusive.

When I started Bob’s listing, there were several other coaches listed. I bumped them all off the map! That’s the power of Google Places optimization.

The difference is how many other places you place the listing. Most people just submit to Google Local Business Center and don’t do the necessary other steps which include optimizing the listing, adding reviews, photos, videos etc.

A truly optimized listing is one where you not only do a complete submission, but you also get what’s called “citations”. With a “citation”, you get your name and business address on to multiple websites like YellowPages.com . It takes a good 20 citations to knock off the competition. But it varies by how many other businesses are there.

The Google Places optimization service is going to be bargain priced at a level that any small business can afford. I’m going to list it, optimize it and get those citations for you all for only $199. Email or call me to get started.

New Services is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

I recently read a really good book about LinkedIn called LinkedWorking by Frank Agin and Lewis Howes. If you are serious about using LinkedIn or are simply curious as to how to maximize its effectiveness, this is a book you should definitely consider picking up.

In the book, Agin and Howes give real success stories about people that have used LinkedIn to grow their business. There really isn’t a right way or a wrong way to use LinkedIn. Rather, its picking a strategy that works for you and doing it consistently.

Here are a few tips that I got from the book and am implementing now:

1. Have a plan of action and do it consistently
2. Join as many groups as possible. LinkedIn limits you to 50 groups. Make sure that they are spread among different interests for best results. Visit the groups and if the group is inactive, drop it and find one that’s better. Alternately, you can talk to the moderator and take over the slow moving group.
3. Better yet, start your own group if you have the time.
4. Use Linkedin Answers. You will meet some great people and help people in the process.
5. Find out your local events and post them to events. Invite your local connections to them.
6. Get and use the Firefox LinkedIn plugin
7. Send helpful newsworthy items to your contacts. Also post your best content in LinkedIn’s Groups. Get people engaged.

I also changed my profile since getting the book. You should add the keyword of your business to your profile in several locations. The video below explains it a lot better than I can. After using the tips from the video below, I got my profile to #3 in the US for the term “SEO”. Nice!

There is some talk as to whether its better to have a lot of contacts you don’t know well or just a few contacts that you know quite well. I’ve decided to take the “lot of contacts” approach. I joined some open networker groups and in a short time grew my contacts from around 300 to now having over 1800. It’s been well worth it as I’m getting more leads and partnership opportunities than ever before.

One of these contacts, Darrell O’Dea sent me a free ebook called Breaking the “Linkedin 500 Barrier”. It’s a great 60+ page book and you can download it here.

I hope you really enjoyed these tips and if you aren’t connected to me on LinkedIn, please feel free to contact me.

How To Leverage LinkedIn Effectively is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Here’s an interesting You Tube video that’s going around about the growth of social media. Wow, that’s some insane growth.

Interesting Video About Social Media Growth is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Google made some major changes today to its home page. As business professionals, its time to look at these changes and adjust our strategies accordingly. Here’s a great video that explains the new features.

As an SEO consultant, I am looking at these changes closely and making adjustments. Here are some adjustments that I think that you should put into action immediately:

The huge buzzword going forward with anyone’s web presence is diversity. It’s no longer acceptable to just have a website. You need to have the Twitter presence, the Facebook presence, blogs, press releases and images.

Go ahead and Google something and let’s go through this one by one:

The first new thing you will see is the images section. Images is a no brainer. Use the proper tags and file names for the images on your site and those will show up quickly in Google Images.

After images is the videos section. It’s quite easy to get ranked in videos too. Just get some good videos out there related to your business. Don’t do commercials. It’s a lot better to make the video on a how to topic related to your field. Here’s a short video that I did about web videos for SEO.

Next, there’s maps. Pretty simple. Get your business into Google Maps if you haven’t already.

Under that is news. Put out a press release every now and then and you will appear in news.

Then, we have shopping. If you have a physical product that you can ship, definitely get it added to Google’s shopping area. Here’s a link on how to do that.

After shopping is a very underutilized section, Google Books. Get some articles written and convert them to pdf and upload those to Google Books. As far as I can tell there’s not a minimum page length requirement for the book. As a side benefit, Google will also pay you Adsense royalties for ads appearing next to your book. I just added a couple items to Google Books and it’s a very simple process.

After books is the blogs area. Pretty simple there. Get a blog and keep it updated and you will be all set.

After blogs is updates. Keep your Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook accounts up to date. Link it to your blog with one of the many tools available like Twitterfeed.

Finally, there’s discussions. Go into a forum every now and then and submit some content. It will be extremely valuable here. Yahoo Answers is another goldmine for help in getting your discussions ranked.

Follow these tips and you will get found. As always if you need help in any of these areas, we are just a phone call or email away.

What Google’s Site Overhaul Means For Local Businesses is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Today’s blog post gets a little personal. I’ve had some challenges the past few days. The first one is with hackers. Unfortunately, if you have a website, it will probably get hacked eventually. It’s a royal pain to fix and often it will get hacked again because the first cleanup didn’t fix everything. I spent most of my weekend working on this and everything seems to be a ok at the moment. Yea!

One thing that I do suggest for everyone is that they list their site on Google’s Webmaster Tools. If you get your site listed there (it’s free), Google will email you when you get hacked. It’s a nice warning. Also, check your site often. Luckily, I do check my sites quite often and usually know about these things fairly quickly.

If you do want extra protection, it might pay to use a service like SiteLock. They will monitor your site and alert you if there are any problems.

While fixing the hacks I stumbled on an even worse problem. I was doing extensive Google searches on my name and discovered that someone filed a false Rip Off Report on me.  It had been there since last August but I just now found it. It said some pretty nasty things about me that are 100% made up. Even worse, Rip Off Report won’t even remove it without a court order.

So, how do you fix these types of things? Unfortunately, people get pissed off and do stupid things. In my case, it was a lead generation company filing a Rip Off Report on me as “payback” for a Rip Off Report that I filed on them the day before.  However, their “payback” just made me madder and I’m planning on getting an attorney as a result of it.

The crazy thing is that my order wasn’t that big. Maybe $100. They could have quietly refunded my money and I would have gone away. And that’s exactly what I recommend that you do if someone files a bad report on you for any service issues in your business. Quietly and rationally do what you need to do to get the negative report removed voluntarily.

Another mistake that many business owners make is using unsolicited email to drum up business. If you see a company offering up x number of email addresses for you for cheap, don’t fall for it. Yes, it’s cheaper than direct mail. Yes, it’s easier. But in the long run, it’s just not worth it.

And don’t believe for a minute that just because you are giving something away for free, that you won’t get a spam complaint. Prospects can complain and often they will. I  had a situation back in 2006 where I gave away an ebook for free through one of the send “100,000 opt in email address” emailing services like I mentioned above. I wasn’t even trying to sell anything. 100% free. Yet, bam, I ended up on some spammer complaint site. I’m still there to this day and there’s not a thing I can do about it. Just don’t do it. Take the time and pay for direct mail or blog or better yet send them a card.

I hope you learned a thing or two from these tips and I would love to hear your feedback.

How to Protect Your Online Reputation is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

Ron Harper of Videosonyourwebsite.com recently interviewed me about video marketing. Enjoy!

How To Use Video Marketing for Local SEO is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

We are pleased to announce a new service here at Dayton SEO Services. We are now offering a Website Leasing program. You’ve certainly heard of leasing cars, copiers and many other things. We are one of the few companies here in the Dayton market to offer this unique program with websites.

If you’ve ever priced out web design, it can be several thousand dollars just to get a website online. Then, you have to promote the website, get backlinks to it or spend even more money on pay per click programs like Google Adwords. You can be out a lot of money before you even make a single penny.

Or the other option is to buy leads from a third party leads source. If you’ve ever done something like that, you’ll soon discover that these sources often either resell your leads multiple times or send you a lot of fraudulent,  unqualified leads and are very expensive.

Or you can do Yellow Page or pay per call type programs that can be very expensive. Some of the quotes that we’ve gotten from these places are quite shocking.

Website Leasing solves all these frustrations and more. It is more cost effective with lower risk than any of the above mentioned ways that companies use to get internet leads. In fact, we estimate that on average your investment per website visitor will be less than half of what it would be using a pay per click service like Yodle.

Here’s how it works:

The first step is to invest a small set up fee to get your website set up. This investment of less than $500 is a fraction of what you would pay to a traditional web design firm. This helps cover our programming and labor expenses. We will build you a fully featured website that is search engine optimized to the keywords that are best suited to your business. You will have complete control of the items included on your leased website and will be encouraged to include your photo, bios, logos etc. We will also provide you with a tracking phone number so you can easily determine how many leads your site is producing.

Next, you will invest in our Easy Local SEO subscription based website promotion service. With your Easy Local SEO package, we will promote your leased website with articles, press releases, directory submissions and much much more to rocket your site to the top of the search engines. Our team at the home office in New York has over 10 years experience in SEO and knows exactly what it takes to get your site to the top of the search engines.

Your Easy Local SEO  subscription is on a month to month basis. There is no contract required. You may turn off your Easy Local SEO website promotion package at any time. However, the longer you are a member of Easy Local SEO, the more we will promote your site and the more leads you will get. So, you will not want to turn it off, especially when you see how much money you can make.

However, if you do decide to cancel Easy Local SEO, here are the buyout options. If you have been a member of Easy Local SEO for a full year or longer, you may cancel the service and the leased site can be turned over to you at no charge. If you have been a member of Easy Local SEO for less than a year and want to buy the site, we can make arrangements to do so for a small fee. In the unlikely event that you no longer want to take advantage of the Easy Local SEO package and do not want to do a buyout option, we can arrange to take the site back with no penalty to you.

The domain name of your leased site will be city name combined with your industry. An example of this would be DaytonRoofer.com or DaytonPlumber.com. This will assure us maximum visibility in the search engines and maximum traffic to your website. Domain names are one of several factors that search engines use to determine who to place at the top of the rankings. We will pay for the domain name for your leased site and will also cover all hosting expenses on your behalf.

You are encouraged to also buy a domain name for your business with your company name (costs less than $10/yr) and we will get that forwarded for you to your leased website. It’s actually quite common for sites to have more than one domain name. For example, both DaytonSEOservices.com and CarlosScarpero.com go to this website.

We are only going to build one leased site per city. So, if you are DaytonPlumber.com, the next plumber that contacts us will either have to hope you don’t keep the lease or will have to get one based on a suburb name. This protects you from the competition and will make you more money.

As you can see, this presents a great opportunity for both of us. We anticipate that the Website Leasing service will be quite popular in the home improvement niche but it can be applied to any industry. Email us or contact us today for more information about this exciting opportunity.

New Website Leasing Program For Dayton Area Businesses is a post from: Dayton SEO Services

There’s been a debate brewing around the net as to whether using sites like Facebook and Twitter is more effective than good ol face to face, belly to belly networking.

To me, the debate is as silly as saying whether a ground game or a passing game is more important in football. The team with a ground game that can’t pass will lose and the team with a passing game that can’t run will lose. The team that is merely above average at both (assuming they also have a decent defense) will win every single time.

The same thing applies with networking. I’ve had online businesses where I didn’t know the people on my email lists. I’ve also had offline businesses where I didn’t use a lot of social media. The results from both were mediocre and frustrating.

Recently, with Dayton SEO Services, I combined the two worlds. Wow, when you truly, truly get this, you will be amazed at what you will find.

Here is my process now when I meet someone….

1. Attend events, meet people and get their business card
2. Enter their contact information into an Excel spreadsheet
3. Upload the spreadsheet into SendOutCards and send my new friend a card
4. Upload the spreadsheet into my email autoresponder and invite them to join my email list. Make sure to get your new friend’s permission by using double opt in. I use Get Response, but I hear Constant Contact is better. It’s a royal pain to move an email list so I just haven’t done it yet.
5. Import the Excel list into Facebook, Plaxo and LinkedIn to add them to my friends list
6. Paste the email addresses from Excel into Twitter and follow them
7. Blog on a regular basis and automatically sync it with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
8. Send emails to the autoresponder list on a regular basis to invite people to read the blog. Constant Contact even has a way to automatically sync this with the blog through the blog’s RSS feed. Once it’s set up, you dont even need to log into your Constant Contact account. It just goes out automatically every time you update the blog.
9. Get people’s birthday from Facebook and Plaxo and add that info into SendOutCards so I can send them a birthday card. Facebook has a really cool calendar app (I think it’s called Hallmark Calendar) that does this. SendOutCards has a very slick set it and forget it feature called campaigns where I can set it up once in under 10 minutes and birthday cards go out to everyone on the right date.
10. Schedule one on one appointments to get to know my most important contacts. I just go to meet and learn more about them. I’m NOT there to sell anything.

I hope these tips help you out. If they do, please leave a comment below. I certainly didn’t make this stuff up. I want to thank Kody Bateman and the team at SendOutCards for teaching me this at their very powerful Treat Em Right Seminar. I also want to thank Tony Scelzo, Larry Kevin Adams and all members of the amazing Rainmakers team. I’ve learned so much in just the short time that I’ve been with them. If you haven’t checked out Rainmakers yet, what are you waiting for?

Combining Offline with Online Networking is Explosive is a post from: Dayton SEO Services