Internet Expert Tacoma - Seattle

Internet Expert Tacoma

If you’re like most business owners you are probably wondering if it is actually possible for a local internet expert to get clients, customers and online sales for your Tacoma or Seattle business.

The answer is: YES.  If you find an expert with real world practical experience, a proven record of high search page rankings, and you realize that internet marketing TAKES TIME just like offline marketing. then you should be very successful provided you have reasonable goals (making $1,000,000 in your first month on a budget of $2500 is not reasonable, by the way).

Why would you want an expert with experience in the Tacoma or Seattle business markets? Because someone from Singapore who lifted your name from your website or the phone book does not understand this local market! You need someone who has themself done business in this area for years, and who knows what will work with the customers in the Puget Sound area. This is not Manhattan, but neither is it Bedford Falls. In our area (I say ‘our’ because I live here also) people are technically sophisticated but still respond to simple and honest marketing. In other areas you need a lot of flash and explosions in your ads. Here, people tend to respond to information-based marketing.

Now, this may seem “too good to be true”. Actually, it’s not.  The Internet has been insinuating itself into our society worldwide for over TWENTY YEARS, yet many business owners look at it like it showed up yesterday and parked on their doorstep without permission.

WAKE UP.  I guarantee you that your competition is thinking about this too.  I hate to use this comparison, but it’s like an old western movie ‘showdown’ scene.   The first gunslinger to clear their holster and get off a shot is probably going to survive.

Shouldn’t that be you?  I’m sure your family thinks it should be.

There’s an old saying that “the only free cheese is in the mousetrap” which means that getting positive, productive results will take work, and money.  It’s probably not remotely like anything you’ve done before and please don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can figure it out for yourself.  I have been working in and on the Internet for those twenty years, and I can tell you that the typical highly-motivated, intelligent business owner will get groggy and have their eyes glaze over after about 90 seconds of Tech-Speak from me.  I don’t take it personally: I know thoracic surgeons who can put me to sleep talking about tissue clamps.

What you need - as I said before - is an expert who has experience in ranking various keywords/websites for various businesses, and who themselves have a few pages on the first page of Google for short keywords related to their industry.

 <== Four 1st page results for ‘mobile marketing tacoma’

You need to understand basic marketing strategy to help your consultant create your solid  plan for ranking your business on Google.  Start small (get one result on the first page) and know that it will take 60-120 days unless luck and skill combine to make it happen earlier.

Typically, you will want to create what’s called a sales or marketing ‘funnel’ which consists of an item of value given away through a capture page or opt-in email marketing system.  With those basics you can start to build a list of willing subscribers who are hungry for information about your business or services.

Ideally you would write (or have your Tacoma or Seattle internet expert write) report or whitepaper which has information important to your customers, but which they probably don’t know.  A review of various products or services is ideal. You want to give away freely valuable information relevant to your customer so that your clients and customers happily sign up to your mailing list and look forward to  receiving it.   You can email to that list occaionally – about as often as you’d like to be emailed to – with more information.  Don’t sell, sell, sell.  Instead, inform, inform, inform.

Your next step is to have your internet expert scale up those efforts into parallel tracks: mobile website with a sales funnel, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, are some of the most popular and generally result in decent ROI.

And please understand that this is not something that you can learn from a post like this, or that your uncle Fred or brother-in-law who once built a website in 1997 can do.  You need expert help to do this, just as you need expert help to handle your taxes and bookkeeping for your business.

Finally, let me answer the original question – can an internet expert really help your Tacoma or Seattle business – with a question:  How will your Tacoma or Seattle business survive without the help of a competent, skilled internet expert when your competition hires them before you do?  Seriously, please give that some thought.

Internet Expert Tacoma

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Why is building a customer list important? Building a list of prospects and customers is one of the most important things you can do to make your business a success. Almost everyone has heard the term, “the money is in the list” and we have all read about businesses selling or renting their customer lists for money.

The most definitive reason however is because your most important asset in your business is your loyal customer. The person that you’ve spent so much time and money to get is not just a one time sale. Y

–>> You must factor in the lifetime value of each customer, and then you will see what makes your list so valuable.

Once you fully understand this relationship you can see why building your business list should be a main focus in your business. The larger your list becomes, the more money you will make. This is because you have more customers to sell new products and services to and because you are selling to existing customers. This is a lot cheaper than having to spend additional time and money in advertising to get new customers.

Need help with the technical part of building a list? Call me!

P.S. I can point you in the right direction when it comes to setting up the list for your Tacoma or Seattle business.

A mobile optimized site can bring customers to your business and multiply your sales. Let’s see how this works out.

–>> Jack is in a new city. He is hungry. He wants a restaurant that has reservations available. He opens his mobile phone browser and searches restaurants in the area. He finds the website of a restaurant that offers online reservations. The website also had a phone number. He can reserve a seat or seats by calling the contact number or by using the online reservation form.

In either case, Jack has a positive experience. It happened because the restaurant’s website was fast to load and easy to find what he was looking for. That is a website optimized for mobile.

What happens if Jack reaches a website that is slow to load, difficult to navigate and impossible to find contact information or a reservation form? He will decide not to open the website again. A customer lost for the restaurant.

The above example fairly sums up the importance of mobile optimized websites. A mobile optimized site has the following features.

- Fast to load
- Easy to navigate
- Easy to find what visitors are searching for

Benefits to Website Visitors:

The visitors to the mobile websites will be thankful because of the following factors:

- They can find what they need immediately
- They don’t wait for heavy flash video or images to load
- They can reserve a ticket, order pizza or buy stuff in two or three steps

This clearly is beneficial for the business too. Businesses can make more sales by actually trimming down their mobile websites. Plus, Google Adwords has now started given preferential treatment to mobile advertisers with a website optimized for mobile viewing.

Now, that is a strong case for optimizing your web pages for mobile phone browsers.

P.S. I can help you get your Tacoma or Seattle business website into the mobile world.

In this day and age, the internet is becoming an important sphere in the daily lives of people. For businesses, this can be a good way to market their brands and improve sales. This allows them to target as many people as they can since there are billions of internet users that are active in a given day.

Engaging on social networking sites is a strategy that many businesses can use for online marketing. Facebook and Twitter are two of the most famous sites. More and more businesses, from national to local brands, are engaging in the social web like Facebook.

Facebook is becoming a sort of everyday life for a lot of internet users. They connect with people, talk to friends, and even play games through Facebook. There are 800 million active users of Facebook which makes it a viable means for marketing and advertising. It is the largest portal, and having a presence here is important and beneficial.

To do this, you can start your own Facebook page and connect with your clients. The importance of connecting with your customers is that you create a strong relationship with them. It allows you interact with them and to address their concerns. This shows that you are transparent in your business. It also adds to your credibility. Not only does your integrity improve with your current clients, but with your future clients as well. With your Facebook page, you make your clients even more secure when they are dealing with you. This is also a way for improving customer relations and service.

Once you’ve already started with your Facebook page, this can be one of the major sources of traffic and sales for your main website. This also helps in the SERP ranking and strengthening the flow of visitors.

The key with being successful with the Facebook fan page is to update your page and be active daily. Promote your brand with newsletters, promos and even with news. Creating a raving group of fans and let all your fans do the marketing work for you .Making sure that you engage your fans will improve their brand awareness.

Need help creating a successful Facebook page? Call me. I am here to help!

P.S. Having a Facebook page is only half the battle. Making it a Facebook marketing machine is the most important part for your Tacoma or Seattle business.

When a company creates a blog, it is creating an individual voice for their business. Clients can leave comments and receive feedback quickly promoting the idea of personal customer service. A business blog creates an atmosphere of trust and openness, which in turn generates a greater brand loyalty to a company.

A business blog can also establish a business as a leader in its industry. A business can lend credibility to their knowledge and character by providing information to educate its customers. By continually updating a blog with new articles, a company shows it is committed to its product or service and provides customers a reason to continually return to a website.

In this day and age, a blog is a very important part of building your online presence and driving traffic to your main website. Do you have a blog? If not, I can help!

P.S. Don’t go with a “free” blog that isn’t hosted by a company you have hired because you have no control over what happens to all of your work and content put into your Tacoma or Seattle business blog design.

I wanted to talk to you today about the idea of using Web 2.0 to increase traffic to your website to get more prospects and customers. You have probably heard the term Web 2.0 and wondered what it really meant.

It actually refers to a set of sites that is outside of your own, but allows you to interact with others in a meaningful way. Social media sites can be thought of as a type of Web 2.0 property, as well as certain bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Squidoo.

These sites allow you to post content such as articles, videos and blog posts so that users of the community can vote on them, forward them to friends and interact with you. The number and names of Web 2.0 properties changes frequently. The way that they work within Google also changes since Google is known for altering the way that its algorithm works from time to time.

Using Web 2.0 is another great way to vary the types of links that you are sending to your site. Google likes to see variety when it comes to links. In other words, you don’t want ALL of your links to come from one place as that would look unnatural.

So, make sure that Web 2.0 has its place in your online marketing plan!

P.S. Give me a call if you would you like a list of more Web 2.0 sites to use for your Tacoma or Seattle business.

You have probably heard the term SEO a million times. Maybe you already know that it stands for search engine optimization too. But, do you really know and understand what it means for your business website?

You see, I talk to business owners every single week who have the same misconception they think that they only have to set up their site ONE time and Google will keep it ranked forever. Unfortunately, that is a MYTH.

–>> Google moves rankings around ALL DAY LONG. Unless you know that and understand how to work with it, your site is doomed.

SEO is not a one time event. You should definitely optimize your site when it is built, but that is also an ongoing process that needs to be going all the time.

Did you know that you need to do extensive keyword research before building out your site’s content?

Did you know that you need to add certain keyword phrases to your headings and content?

Do you know how to use images to create better SEO for your site?

These are just three of the many important things to think about when it comes to on-site SEO. That does not even include what needs to be done off-site.

I would be happy to answer any questions your have about the SEO of your Tacoma or Seattle business website or blog.

What is podcasting and how can it help my business? This is one of the questions that a lot of online business owners ask. Indeed, podcasting has grown so much as a marketing tool that it is already too significant for many business owners to ignore.

Podcasting is basically an online radio show, a way for you to get your audio message across via the Internet. Like a blog, a podcast also has its subscribers who are regularly informed when you have an update. Unlike a blog, a podcast is an audio recording, which means you will have to flex your vocal muscles and speak to the world. Literally.

Not all people are interested in reading blog post after blog post but they are more than willing to listen to podcasts because they give voice (and increased reputation) to the broadcaster. If you are a business owner, this is a good way to establish yourself as an expert in the field and promote your way to increased revenue and a larger client base.

–>> Want more ideas about how to create your own podcasts? I can help!

P.S. There are many options when it comes to podcasting, so make sure your Tacoma or Seattle business uses the right ones.

Today, I wanted to tell you about on-page SEO because I think that many business professionals don’t understand this concept well.

On-page (or on-site) SEO refers to the things that you do to your pages/posts/website/blog that will make it more attractive to the search engines. Think of it as dressing up your website to impress the search engines so that they want to rank your website or blog higher than your competition for certain keyword phrases.

–>> Let’s use this example: You are in the real estate business and want to market your services to first-time home buyers. You want to rank well for the term buy my first home. If you are using proper on-page/on-site SEO, you would do things to your content to make it rank better in Google and the other search engines.

What kinds of things are important with on-site SEO?

Bold headers with your targeted keyword phrases
Appropriate ALT text on your images
Using keyword tags properly
Using SEO plugins (if using WordPress)
Using the proper keyword density in your content

Of course, there are other on-site SEO factors that I recommend, but the topic is a bit more in depth than a short email! I would love to give you more information that will help your site’s pages rank well and stay there. Give me a call or shoot me an email to chat.

P.S. Did you know that on-page SEO is only PART of the puzzle for ranking your Tacoma or Seattle business website design?

As you may know, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It simply means that you want to do things both ON and OFF your website or blog that attracts the search engines to rank you higher.

The first thing to understand about SEO is that your site does NOT rank. It is the individual PAGES or POSTS within your site that will rank. The way that site’s rank is a combination of many factors, and Google definitely won’t tell anyone their secret algorithm. However, we do know some of the important criteria that they look for when ranking posts and pages.

For off-site (or off-page) SEO purposes, it is all about back linking. What is back linking? Let’s look at a fictional example so that it makes more sense.

–>> Let’s say that you love Italian food, so you go on Facebook and ask if anyone knows of a good Italian restaurant in your area. Two people answer. One of those people is your best friend, John, who you have known for 25 years. You know John loves to eat, and he always knows the best places to go.

The second person to answer is your mom’s cousin, Mary. You don’t really know her except for the one time you ate dinner at her home and got sick with food poisoning.

Whose opinion do you take? Of course, you are going to take John’s opinion, right?

Back linking is much the same. Google looks at sites, sees that there are links on these sites pointing back to your pages and then decides if these links are from sites with GOOD reputations or BAD ones.

You may be wondering how to get links back to your site on another person’s site… and how do you find these sites?! That is a long answer, so I would much rather chat with you personally about your particular situation. Give me a call or drop me an email today!

P.S. I have some tips about back linking for your Tacoma or Seattle business website design!