Online business directories are simply search engines that are powered by people. Listing your business in key online business directories will allow people from those areas to see your listings. In addition, by listing in high-traffic directories, the web crawler-based search engines will also find your listing and add it to their search listings for free.

In the last 24 months, local search has become a major focus for most of the major search engines. Google is currently channeling more money into their local search engine business than they are on their web search.

It’s critical for a local business to be listed in as many local business directories, classified directories, online telephone directories as well as all of the local search engines as possible. This will help you cement a top ranking position within your market niche for your local community.

Your customers are no longer turning to yellow page phone-books or local newspaper classifieds to source info on new products or services. Consumers are turning to the internet because search engines are increasingly responding to the local search demand.

Are you familiar with the difference between normal and local search represents?

If you search Google.com for the term “used car”, Google knows where you live by the IP address of the computer you’re searching from. Google also has the phrase “used car” flagged in their database as a local search phrase because of the number of times people searching that phrase have ended up on local websites catering to those same words.

Google will show you results of local user car businesses that are in the closest proximity to you. Now, most small local businesses may not have websites at all, or the sites are not updated and optimized. To counter this, Google relies on “Citations” to determine a business listings relevance, to determine the most important websites to display in the search results. Citations are simply the number of mentions a business has across all of the online directories and 3rd party web-pages, that may or may not include a website link.

Some local businesses service a small geographic area and others serve larger regions and even whole cities. Crafting your business local search presence to dominate listings within your niche is just as much a science as optimizing a mainstream website’s search presence. This includes: unifying your listings keywords, to strategizing the optimum address and phone numbers for better ranking within particular postal-codes, plotting which online business directories carry the most influence when it comes to search rankings.

Social Traffic provides a service where we ensure consistency in your business listings using words that guarantee that it is shown to the right people against dead-center keywords. We also perform the monotonous work of ensuring your business address has the most citations across all of the local directories that matter, so that you can dominate local search results.

What’s important to recognize here is that local search is the next big thing online. What we know about dominating local search listings is that it is 12 months ahead of the curve. If you get us to work your listings now, you will have less competition in ensuring your listing dominates the search results. Our long term service contract ensures we will take it upon ourselves to maintain your lead. This space is dynamic. The rules are going to change every month as it evolves over the next few years. You can secure your place at the top of the local search engines regardless of the changes, by letting us maintain that presence for you.

Local search is becoming a big thing these days, where localized product and service companies are marketing to people in their regions. Think about it this way, if you’re a small mom&pop store you’ll make a decent amount every quarter to live a comfortable life. On the other hand, if you utilize the internet for driving more sales to your store, you’ll make a much greater percentage of profits, allowing you to really achieve your life long dreams. Vacations, early retirement, you name it.

Lead generation in social media is about leading a never ending, ever interesting conversation with your community.

Through these tactics you will be able to filter the hyper-responsive prospects and make the internet a source of actual sales for your local business.

Having a good social media marketing plan is becoming the life-blood of modern businesses. An adequate service with a great new media marketing plan has a greater chance of succeeding than an excellent service without one. You can have the best product or service in the world, but it’s worthless if people are not talking about it.

Local search is rightfully getting the attention it needed, with search engines filtering through the net and displaying those results most relevant to you based on your location; with Twitter adding options for searching for twitter messages against keywords coming from your region. The importance of letting your local customers find your products or services online easily is undeniable.

We don’t pretend to be a jack of all trades. We understand lead generation strategies through effective use of local search, inside out. There are some elements of your specific business or niche that we cannot predict right now. If so, we don’t want to offer you a plan which is not completely usable from day 1. To counter this we are offering you an opportunity to let us customize these lead generation plans for your business. This will help us lock down your marketing message and optimization plans for local search results for your services.

This DIY workbook is best suited for people who like to do things on their own, instead of having someone else do it for them. They are their own best consultants.

This workbook outlines all of the different sections that you need to fill, as well as shows examples of how to do it. It’s a one-stop guide that you should keep as a reference manual as well.

The best approach is to use it from start to end to map out your entire marketing strategy. Once the strategy is built, you will be able to easily follow it and start getting results for your business. This strategy will ultimately help you in growing your customer outreach by better utilizing the Internet and social media as a marketing and customer support platform.

It will take you approximately 3 weeks (full time) to build your plan using this workbook. It will also require in-depth research and analysis skills. We have defined the steps in enough detail to help you get started without requiring any background in social media or internet marketing.

The survival of your business depends on how well you can integrate it into your business activities as time goes on. It’s important to set a strong foundation with ongoing promotions to maximize the results that you get from your website.

In this web competitive analysis service, we compare your website with your most successful competitor websites using your main dead-center keyword phrases.

All of this comparison is represented in the from of tables, text and graphs in a powerpoint slide deck. Other deliverables include spreadsheets with keywords that your competitors are using; list of top advertisers in your niche; list of top organic traffic competitors in your niche.

The end gain is that you not only dominate the search engines for your main phrases, you become the celebrity supplier of your niche. You will effectively be seen everywhere online – throughout web 2.0 platforms, social sites, article sites, image sites, directories etc for your chosen three phrase keyword set. Anyone in your market searching for those phrases will know about you.

Remember once dominating search, the cost of traffic is not by click or by thousand page impressions — it’s by your monthly subscription to Social Traffic for maintaining your search engine dominance for your three chosen keyword phrases which will amortize to a fraction of the cost of PPC with the added benefit of your business being known as the business that owns the search engine for the best three long-tail keyword phrases in your niche.

Direct response or performance advertising is about solving specific problems for a consumer at the time they need it solved. We do this by asking a prospect who sees our Ad to respond to it in a particular way.

Through this strategy you need to get your solutions in front of people looking to solve a specific problem that your product or service can solve. Our solution cannot be a one-size-fits-all methodology. It must be niche specific to solve your prospect’s immediate problem at whatever stage in the research process he/she is at in the moment they are searching for a solution.

Optimizing PPC campaigns is the opposite to optimizing a content network ad campaign. We start with a very wide keyword list in search of phrases and Ad copy that converts well. Once we isolate small pockets of success in certain phrases, we drill in deep to optimize that success. We focus on one or two keyword phrases that convert well and work towards optimizing every step in the process. This helps us increase not only our conversions but the profit per click on each Ad campaign.

Once optimized, we scale our Ad spend on this phrase. If our profit margins allow for it, we increase our bid rates to secure the most traffic we can get because we know we are earning off it. We look for as many phrases that are closely associated to our converting phrase in order to drive us much traffic as we can. Once we have exhausted all avenues to maximize this campaign, we let it run and generate profits.

Unlike direct response advertising, the objective is not to get a customer to act in a certain way. Our objective here is to get your brand into the minds of potential customers. The idea is to instill a notion about what you do that will lead them to choosing your brand over others, whenever they are ready to purchase your product or service. The wider our reach when brand marketing, the better our brand advertising campaign.

Brand advertising throughout the content network is different to performance or direct marketing through PPC in the search network. We start out having the entire internet to select for our Ad placements. Our management service includes a process in which we continually monitor your campaigns, breaking down the exponential Ad placement opportunities across the open web. Most of these placement opportunities are only going to lead you towards an empty bank account. Our job is to use our experienced eye to isolate the placements, ad copy and corresponding landing pages that are going to work for you in achieving your desired outcomes.

Our true value is in the speed by which we are capable of achieving these results versus the cost of doing so. Costs every brand advertiser must endure before benefit is enjoyed. The question our clients must ask themselves is what is it going to cost them in additional Ad spend to get to the same point of optimization.

You can buy ad runs through the Google content network or through the smaller ad networks, and let them serve your banner advertisements from their Ad servers. These smaller content network companies work much harder to help us achieve our advertising goals than Google.

They actually treat customers like they want our ad business and because of that, work with us to reach our ad goals using their networks. To achieve the best advertising results through any content network is by continually monitoring your campaigns, and breaking down the exponential Ad placement opportunities across the open web. Most of these placement opportunities attract specific target markets including yours.

If you have already done your keyword research and due diligence then you will need to provide us with the top keywords of your choice. We will use them to source the highest ranking sites, blogs and video hosing services on the internet for each of those dead-center keywords.

We utilize specific ad placement software to identify categories and or sub categories of web domains (websites), specific web domain addresses and URLs (web pages) across the internet that accept 3rd party advertisements where we have confirmed your target market is spending much of their time online.

The compounding benefit of researching this list of websites is that in the most part they are being lead in thought by authorities (leaders) in your market niche. This makes this list not only a fantastic resource for identifying ad placement opportunities. It’s also a great resource for listening to the early adopters in your market and in so doing, identifying all of your biggest competitors in search marketing.

Once we have a list of those sites, we can perform a competitive analysis on some of them to determine their reader/viewer demographics. This helps us calculate and categorize their visitors in percentages based on age, gender, income brackets, race, and education levels to further refine our list of sites for ad placements.

Accompanying this service with competitor analysis is not needed, but it will take our research to another level. After identifying the web properties hosting those viewer demographics, we filter those that accept advertising.

There is no point adding all of your customers to the same bucket, when you know that some of them are distinctly more interested in you than others.

I used to visit a small corner pizza shop a lot in my neighborhood. It was owned by an old couple with opposite personalities. The lady was stingy and counted every penny of change. The old man was extremely generous and gave away free refills for coffee and such. Being an obsessive-problem-solver by nature, I calculated just how much their business could grow only based on attitude adjustments.

Instead of looking at me as a $10 customer (who is buying pizza and coffee), they needed to notice that I’m a regular customer valued at a $10,000 per annum. I go there often with family, and sometimes for coffee breaks. By getting better treatment, I would spend a lot more time and money there out of will. Just by identifying their hyper-responsive customers, they could have taken their earnings to the next level.

By monitoring conversations across the web, you will be able to find people who are more responsive than others. Through listening to public conversation you hear what problems consumers are facing. These conversations will tell you what products and services are needed to satisfy the market.

You will learn that consumers search hard to find the right solutions these days. They turn to trusted authorities in different niches for advice, who review the very products and services your business is selling. By listening to these conversations you can also note the buying mindsets of the participants.

We will pull every conversation across the internet into a dedicated Google account for you to monitor those conversations daily in real time. This account will not just become the best source of information for identifying your prospect’s problems. It is also perfect for content planning and creation, website development and product design. It will benefit your marketing efforts on search engines, social media and paid search channels.

We accompany this service with a conversation monitoring strategy document on how to best read, monitor, analyze, and utilize the conversations.

The problem is that any person can learn new media tactics on the surface. In fact, most self-proclaimed marketing gurus teach those shallow tactics. Just applying those tactics, without keeping the overall strategy in mind, will keep you on the surface with a chance to drown the minute you stop investing time in it. Additionally, tactics that seem to work today may not work tomorrow.

Unfortunately people who do that end up in a mess, because copying tactics will not give them the experience or insight to know what to do when the tactics no longer work. To top that off, the constantly evolving internet makes sure that specific tactics keep on changing so that it is tougher to game the system. A mini storm in a tea-cup will blow them over, leading them to hunt for more tactics to copy — more e-books, more trainings, more this, more that. Always staying on the surface without realizing that they need to dive deep.

In order to avoid the pitfalls of the surface people, you need to wear your oxygen mask and dive deep. Always remember, the farther down you go the more pearls you will find.

Marketing strategies comprise of a lot of tactics that are all in-line with the overall goals and objectives. Investing resources into marketing strategies is like farming. You build traffic and leads through following a strategy; by doing so your sales sales continue to flow months after employing that particular strategy. If you continue to tend to the crops, mend the fences and keep your breeder cattle healthy you will have food on the table without necessarily having to go out and hunt for it each day.

Our marketing plans have multiple strategies for achieving your long term vision. It’s the equivalent of a farming enterprise that consists of land, stock, transportation for selling. If you have a plan mapped out, your strategies will offer greater returns and bigger margins with time. It’s a basic economic and marketing principle, with time you will have diminishing costs and more revenue through efficiencies and increased brand value, because of a consolidated customer base and recognizable brand.

Usually, this involves communicating through direct mail or e-mails. Direct mail marketing is focused on driving a specific call to action response from the reader, in order for it to be effective. The responses of the receiver should thus be trackable and measurable in order to gauge the success of the campaign. Our direct mail marketing plan is geared towards helping businesses push more leads from this channel into their businesses.

Lead generation in social media is about leading a never ending, ever interesting conversation with your community.

Through these tactics you will be able to filter the hyper-responsive prospects and drive actual sales for your business. Having a good social media marketing plan is becoming the life-blood of modern businesses. An adequate service with a great new media marketing plan has a greater chance of succeeding than an excellent service without one. You can have the best product or service in the world, but it’s worthless if people are not talking about it.

Email open rates are so poor these days, where as cards with hand writing represent something nice that we don’t receive all that often.

We don’t pretend to be a jack of all trades. We understand lead generation strategies through direct mail marketing, inside out. There are some elements of your specific business or niche that we cannot predict right now. If so, we don’t want to offer you a plan which is not completely usable from day 1. To counter this we are offering you an opportunity to let us customize these lead generation plans for your business. This will help us lock down your marketing message, marketing collateral needs, and more.