Do You Really Need To Be In The Search Engines?

Before you spend time and money on search engine optimization, you need to decide if your small business really needs to be in the search engines. It all boils down to answering one basic question: how do your customers usually look for your products and services? In other words: will customers be looking for you on a search engine?

If your business has a local clientele, it is probably not a very effective idea to dedicate resources to getting top search engine rankings.

For example, if you own a restaurant, you may be better off by advertising in the weekend section of the local paper; if you still want to take the online route, you may get better results by submitting your restaurant site to a specialized online directory or city guide.

To give you another example, if you own a car repair shop, you may obtain better results by getting listed in the AAA directory, by mass mailing discount coupons, or by paying referral fees to complimentary, non competing services (for example, a car-wash).

Most small businesses are in fact locally focused (they operate in just one city or community). Usually, their web presence is limited to an "online-brochure": five or six web pages with basic information about the business.

Most of the time, small local business owners just want a domain name that they can print on a business card, so that prospective customers can go to their website if they feel inclined to get more information.
These small businesses usually don't sell anything online, are not looking for customers in other cities, and get most of their business deals through referrals, trade association meetings, chambers of commerce contacts, or local advertising. To them, good search engine rankings are not really important.

If your small business specializes in exporting, or deals extensively with international markets, good search engine rankings are more important. A search engine is probably the first place a foreign prospect will go to look for businesses in your city and area of expertise. If this is your case, you may want to dedicate a larger portion of your marketing budget to search engine optimization.

Finally, search engine placement is very important for small businesses that offer online services like web design, web hosting, email marketing and search engine optimization. These services may be effectively conducted through the internet, between suppliers and customers located in different parts of the world, and whose only contact is through a web page form or by email.

Good search engine rankings are also crucial for companies that sell products online to a global audience. Credit cards and next-day shipping have made it possible to sell all sorts of products to customers that previously were out of reach.

Search engine optimization may in fact be the most cost effective way to reach a global prospect base.

We can't possibly go through each particular case in this article. The idea, however, is to encourage you to think strategically about your customer acquisition strategy, and to invest in those marketing vehicles that give you "the most bang for your buck".

Search engine optimization may very well be the latest trend in online marketing, but just because "everybody is doing it" doesn't necessarily mean that it is what you and your business need.

Selling ebooks is one of the most lucrative on-line businesses. Electronic delivery means zero logistics costs. Furthermore, tools like auto responders, shopping cart software, merchant or third party payment services, and pay-per-click advertising allow you to put operations, marketing and sales on autopilot.

If you have already done the hard work and developed an ebook, here are a few tips on how to market it:

Build a mini-website or sales page
The best conversion rates are achieved through a mini-website having only one purpose: to sell your ebook. This mini-website should be a long, persuasive sales letter, with few graphics and no outbound links. At the end of the sales letter you must place a "Buy Now" button or link. Alternatively, you can also provide an input box where visitors can leave their email address to subscribe to your free newsletter. Through this vehicle, you will have more opportunities to promote your ebook, especially among those visitors that need to "warm-up" to your offer before they buy. Also, this mini-website should have its own domain name, and that domain should include keywords that describe your ebook's topic.

Offer unlimited free updates
With knowledge changing so quickly, people are reluctant to pay for information that may become obsolete in a short period of time. This is especially true, for example, in areas like internet marketing or search engine optimization. A great way to offer long lasting value and increase your conversion rate is to offer free updates of your ebook, so that every time you make a significant revision your customers receive the updated version for free.

Provide samples of your work
Prospective buyers will like to know if your product if right for them before they buy. You can help them by:

-Writing and posting free articles on your main website, to give them a taste of your work. You can also license these articles so that they can be posted on other websites for free, provided that they include your resource box with a link to your sales page.

-Post a sample chapter of your ebook (this is a very successful technique used, among others, by Amazon.com).

You can also eliminate risk by offering a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee.

Drive traffic to your mini-website
An excellent strategy is to drive traffic to your site with Google Adwords or other pay per click search engine. An ebook will give you a very good gross profit margin. You should invest part of your profits in buying targeted, well written ads to drive traffic to your site.

Use testimonials
Visitors will be more inclined to buy if they see that other people just like them have benefited from your product. The one million dollar question is: how do I get testimonials before I start selling my book? Aside from the obviously simplistic tactic of getting people you know to give you some feedback, an effective way to get testimonials is to offer a free beta or trial version of your ebook to a very selective group of people. If you run an ezine you could send that free trial version to your subscribers, although I do not recommend this strategy, since your own subscribers are your best prospects for the paid final version. What you can do is contact another ezine publisher and ask them to place a link to the free trial version of your ebook on their next mailing. You should keep that link active for a limited time only. This will create a win/win situation, where the email publisher will give their subscribers something valuable for free, and you will most likely receive plenty of testimonials that you can later use on your sales site.

List your ebook with Clickbank
Clickbank is an excellent online distribution service of digital products that allows you to set up an affiliate program easily and with no hassle. You just have to give Clickbank access to your product, and they will give you an HTML snippet for a "Buy It At Clickbank" button that you will place on your sales site. Clickbank will then promote your product to their network of over 100,000 affiliates, the affiliates will refer traffic to your site, visitors will buy your ebook by clicking your "Buy It" button, and Clickbank will then pay you and your affiliate. It's that simple.