In the age of the internet, anyone has the option to be self-employed. Any skill set, with a little additional, specific knowledge, can be turned into a career online if you have the right mindset and the entrepreneurial drive. That said, when considering the options available for marketing employment, there is much to be said about a marketer looking at the opportunities available to them as an entrepreneur online rather than going the traditional route of working for a larger firm.

When you are applying for regular marketing jobs that you see posted on job sites, you are going to find that companies are constantly looking for three things. They want to see applicants that have a combination of education, experience, and strong references. However, there are many incredibly talented marketers out there that might only have two of those three factors that find themselves constantly passed over for jobs because someone with more experience or more education looks better on paper. However, these people shouldn’t let their talents go to waste. Instead, they should start thinking about the opportunities that abound for a strong marketer in self employment.

Self employed marketers can find a wealth of opportunities right out their front door, especially if they are highly skilled internet marketers. Every town, city or community is full of local small businesses that are trying to eke out a living. Very few of these businesses have a monopoly, and most have competition right in the area. Therefore, marketing is an essential part of their survival. However, small companies like these can often not afford the services of the pricier and larger marketing firms.

The self-directed marketer can turn these types of businesses into opportunities quickly. By approaching these types of companies directly and showing them how they could benefit from your services, you can go from being unemployed to being a self employed marketer with a wealth of clients in no time.

One of the most important skills that the self employed marketer needs to learn is how to approach potential clients and how to present your services to them. This can be the more difficult hurdle for many to overcome than learning the marketing techniques themselves. The key is to be confident in your approach, and to expect some rejection. That is just part of the game. However, if you know that you can help businesses sell their products, that confidence will come through, and some businesses will start to test the waters with your services.

One thing that helps up and coming marketers with this is to have some concrete proof to show clients. If you can show them sites that you’ve had success with in the past then you can really build credibility and get them interested in finding out more about your services. You can build this type of portfolio in a few ways. Some marketers will come up with an idea for a site of their own and then promote it successfully in order to have something to show for it. Others will find someone to work with on a joint venture basis perhaps, where they will provide marketing services in return for a service offered by another company that they need. Whatever the method, having something to show that includes real results will be one of the most valuable tools that you can have when trying to sell your marketing services in the offline world to real local businesses. Once you gain confidence in approaching them and selling your services though, you will quickly discover that there is really no end to how far you can grow your business if you desire.

The internet has made it possible to be an entrepreneur in almost any line of work. Before the internet, if you wanted to work as a marketing consultant you needed a very strong portfolio of work that you had done for high name employers to even think about making a go of it on your own. On the internet though, results are going to speak louder than resumes, and if you can make some sights successful, you can start to create your own work easier than ever before.

When you’re getting started in online marketing, you need to build a portfolio. There are two ways to do this quickly. First, you can build some of your own sites and promote them online. If you can get your own sites popular and build a steady flow of traffic to them then you should be able to use them as your portfolio pieces. Alternatively, you can provide some work for free for some small startups run by people you know, or for not-for-profit organizations. This is a great way to actually build a body of substantial work. This will speak for your abilities far more than a website that just outlines your marketing education. Concrete results are what will bring you customers.

In order to create your own jobs in marketing, you need to become proactive about recruiting clients. The truth is that traditional jobs in marketing are very dear these days, and many people with marketing degrees are being forced to work independently, or to go into other fields if they don’t have the online skills that companies now value. If you are a wicked online marketer though, you should have no problem marketing your own skills over the internet and quickly brining in customers of your own.

This means having your own website. A good internet marketer who can drive prospective clients to their own site is already making a strong case for what kind of expertise they can bring to the client’s job. By showing that they know how to market a great website, their own in this case, they have given the client a real world example of the type of benefits that they can offer.

Small businesses make the perfect target for someone trying to create their own jobs in marketing. There are two reasons that small businesses are the perfect types of clients for an independent marketing professional. The first reason is that a small company cannot afford to keep a marketing person on hand at all time. Many companies that try this find it to be too expensive, drop it, and then find that they aren’t getting enough customers due to the lack of marketing. Striking this balance is difficult, but someone who can provide them with real results on a freelance basis is likely to look like a very attractive option.

The other advantage to working with small businesses is that they can help you form a niche for yourself. Many small businesses are looking to attract business from their local area, so you can position yourself as an expert in local search engine marketing. This is a very valuable skill to have, as Google is trying all the time to provide results that are more relevant on a geographic basis, knowing that more and more people are using Google Maps and Places to find the stores that they want to do business with.  Learning local search techniques is a great way to find clients, as you can approach small local businesses in your area with a very strong argument as to why they could benefit from hiring you to assist in their marketing efforts.

If you’ve been reading up on ways to promote your small business online and have been browsing marketing tips for small business, you have probably heard that a local internet marketing consultant may be able to help your company. However, it might not be clear exactly what a local internet marketing consultant does. Understanding what these people do can help you see why hiring one might be beneficial for your company.

There are several different elements to a full-blown internet marketing campaign. An internet marketing consultant can provide you with help on all of them. Although there are actually more types of internet marketing than these, some basics are search engine optimization, email marketing, social media and social networking. If your consultant can help you with these four areas, it will quickly make a difference in how much traffic you are driving to your websites.

Search engine optimization means that your consultant will help your site to rank higher in the search engines when someone searches for terms related to your site. They will do this in two ways. First, they will help you optimize the content on your site with keywords so that the search engines know that it should be listed when people search for certain terms. Next, they will build links using anchor text and keywords from other trusted sites to help positively influence how highly Google thinks your site should be listed when they provide search engine results to searchers. As a local search specialist, a consultant needs to focus their efforts on ranking high when people are searching for physical businesses in a certain geographic region.

Email marketing is the next thing that an internet marketing consultant needs to be able to do. When consulting with internet marketing, it is critical that the consultant is able to provide the client with the means for building a strong email list. A large list is one of the key components to a successful online business. This means setting the client up with a means for collecting customer email addresses, and then with a good method of mass emailing them while staying compliant with all the applicable laws and regulations.

Social media is another area that an internet marketing consultant needs to be engaged in. With a focus on local marketing, they need to create content that is going to be posted on social media sites that is focused on brining in searchers looking for local content. This in turn will raise the general profile of your business in the online world, especially among those searching from the local area.

Social networking is another very important tool of the local internet marketing consultant. Anytime there is a local group on Facebook, or a group of local people to follow on Twitter, a consultant should make sure that a local company inserts itself into those communities. Local communities on social networking sites might be smaller than the communities at large, but news travels much faster along those channels, and will reach people that are actually qualified to come in and be a customer at a local business.

A local internet marketing consultant needs to focus all four of these types of efforts on qualified traffic. This means people that are actually in the geographic area that the business is located in, unless the business is also trying to sell product online, unless a broader approach is taken. The goal is to make sure that when someone uses an application like Google maps to search for a certain type of business that your company is near the top of the list.

I’ve got some great news!  Local Marketing Source, LLC is growing and is now the new sponsor of Local BIZ Builders, the leading local internet marketing forum for Local Internet Marketers.

Recently we have become the new sponsor’s of Local Biz Buidlers, the leading local internet marketing forum.  Our goal is to continue in Keith’s, LBB Founder, original vision of creating a large, powerful community of local Internet marketers where newbies and experts alike can give and take information in our special niche.

Everyone at Local Marketing Source has been really busy, and we’re really excited for the coming year.  We have some great things planned for local marketers and local businesses.  Go ahead and become a free member of Local BIZ Builders and network with other business owners, marketers, both newbies and experts!  You’ll get a ton of free information and make some new friends.  If you’re not on our list, then you’re missing out on some sequential training material…you know, the stuff that is created specifically to learn in a focused fashion.  You don’t like it, opt out!

I’ve been busy.  Right now I have three different projects I’m building along with two ‘secret’ ones!  I’ve already introduced Local Marketing Source, but next is my Local Internet Marketing agency, CCS Internet Marketing.  We provide Internet Marketing services to a few different niches, including the transportation industry.  Third, I’m a partner in a National Same Day Delivery company, NAPAREX.  We are an online platform providing same day delivery to 1000′s of consumers in the United States daily through integration of 100′s of local courier companies.

I look forward to 2011 and it’s going to be a great year, will it be for you too?

If you want to expand your small business, Internet marketing online offers a lot of exposure for your business. Not realizing the power of word of mouth and the many ways that a local business can be promoted online, they often use it in the same context that they would use a listing in a phone book.  Although someone might find the business, there are many diverse ways to interact with customers and grow your customer base.

Much like standard advertising for your small business, Internet marketing online is simply a digital version of print advertising.  Instead of ads in newspapers, magazines and fliers, your advertisements are in digital format that also allow customer interaction. Very powerful information can be gathered from customer feedback on blogs, social sites and forums.  When it comes to marketing your small business, Internet marketing online is easy and relatively inexpensive.  Most services are free to sign up for and offer a simple interface to get you started.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that you have to make whatever web presence you choose easy for your customers to find. You want your website, twitter account, or Facebook page to be one of the first things that shows up when people search for a particular product that you offer.  As an example, if your business is to provide chimney sweeping services, if someone does a search for chimney sweeps in your area, you want your business to be the first one to show up in the search engine result pages.  There are several ways to accomplish this. An easy way to start would be to use Google’s keyword research tool to determine just what terminology people would use to find a chimney sweep. These terms that searchers use are referred to as keywords and are the cornerstone to advertising online.

Once you have determined what people are searching for related to your business. You can then set up a website, Facebook page or other social network site built around these terms. This makes sense to Google and it is more likely that your page will show up when someone is looking for services or products that you offer. Although similar to an ad in a newspaper, digital forms of advertising can be changed on the fly to accommodate promotions or sales.  This provides a unique opportunity to keep up with customer demand and feedback.

Social network sites are a great way to get the word out about your local business and in a lot of cases these sites are free to use. Sites such as Squidoo, Hub Pages and Weebly all offer a free website service with a very easy to use interface that does not require any web programming or special knowledge. By putting your digital “fliers” out on the Internet, you’re casting a wider net to a broader audience.  Some consumers shop strictly online and, even though they’re local to your small business, Internet marketing online lets them know you even exist.

With the convenience of being able to search online, fewer people are using traditional phonebooks. When promoting your small business, Internet marketing online should include a listing in Google Places.  Google Places is a free to use service that acts as an online phonebook that can be found easily by searching for a product or service in the searcher’s area.  Having a listing in this free to use directory pays large dividends with people being able to locate you quickly when they need your services.

When promoting a small business, Internet marketing online is the next logical step in expanding your business. Inexpensive to get started, once your business grows you can expand your small business online presence to include mailing lists or online store.  With this growth potential, small businesses need to step into the digital age.

In the world of online marketing, not all businesses are created equal.  When it comes to marketing to small businesses, your SEO and local online marketing strategies will differ from business to business. A lot of this is dependent on whether the business offers a product or service.  If the business offers a service, the focus of the online marketing campaign will be geared more towards the review type strategy, where as those offering physical products will have an online campaign that is a little more complex and diversified.

With service based small companies, it is more common for customers to patronize local businesses as most services cannot be offered from long distances.  This is where the customer review strategy comes in to play. When a customer is researching companies locally, they want to know that the business is not only competent, but offers the best value for the money.  This is very simple to do by allowing customers an avenue with which to provide positive feedback. This feedback can then be converted to reviews that can then be published online.  The bottom line is, these reviews will make the small business name stand out in the crowd and sets it apart as the premiere business for a particular industry.

Local businesses offering physical products however, have more competition. Many products can be purchased online with the customer never having to leave the house. This requires the online campaign to have a little more focus. Often, this requires the local business to offer something of value that precludes the customer from purchasing online.  In most cases big name products are everywhere and the customer is inundated with offers.  A local business could use the review strategy to set themselves apart, but in the case of most physical products, consumers are looking for the best value.  This is where local online marketing becomes a bit more complex with the implementation of an online store.

An online store allows the small business owner to compete with the big boys on a smaller scale. While large retailers have a large catalog of products, small local businesses would do best to focus on a specific product or niche within their industry.  It’s easier to achieve rankings for specific products or niches than a generalized category that would cause the small business to compete with sites such as Amazon, Best Buy or Wal-Mart.  These large retailers are trusted names and it’s difficult to compete with them for the customer’s business.  By presenting the local business as an authority in an industry, a consumer might be more likely buy from them based on knowledge and experience.  Yes, they can buy that particular fishing pole at Wal-Mart, but is the Wal-Mart associate going to know anything about bass fishing and what bait would work best?

As with any market, research is essential in qualifying a small business for online marketing.  Knowing the customer behavior in any given industry will help you gear the online local marketing in a direction that benefits the small business. Having a successful marketing campaign involves a lot more than putting up a website and hoping customers find it. A good way to find out where customers go is to browse forums that customers in the industry frequent.  Customers will say what they want and where they go to get it. This helps you when marketing to small business for online campaigns. You know exactly who buys these products and how to get them to buy from your client.

When meeting with prospective clients, do your research first. This way you can approach the meeting with the best strategy for marketing the business online. This allows you to establish realistic expectations on the part of the customer, building their confidence in your online marketing abilities. Qualifying the business for online marketing insures a positive outcome in the future.

Useful links related to using Google Places

Link to Google Places account login page.

Link to Google Places User Guide.

Business listings in Google Places must have correct information about physical, local businesses, as they appear in the real world. Adhere to these guidelines for best results.

These are the items you need to comply with to avoid issues with Google such as denial of access, removal of one or all of your listings, being blacklisted from adding future listings, or deletion of your Google Account.

Useful resources from Google for business owners and consultants working with Google Places.

Guide to reporting and correcting incorrect listings and/or data within a listing.

Link to the YouTube channel for Google Places.

Link to the Google Places help form.

Link to known issues with Google Places.

Details and application instructions for getting Google business photos.

Includes hundreds of studies, videos and webinars about local business industries for Mobile and Search

Internet marketing small business techniques are about much more than creating a website and taking it online. You cannot just carefully create a website and expect it to be a success overnight. Creating a successful website requires careful planning and strategic decisions. Without this, your website is almost guaranteed to fail. But this doesn’t mean that you have to give up. With the right planning it is possible to create a website that gathers a great deal of web traffic and leads to successful sales of your products.

Before you worry about marketing strategies, you need to strategically create your website. Begin by thinking of the products you are going to sell or offer on your site. Decide what audience is suited to these products and services, and what you can do to attract these potential customers. You also want to target these customers’ needs in the design of your site.

Don’t just build a website that is based on gimmicks and scams. People may visit your site, but they will quickly leave without making a purchase if they do not trust its legitimacy. Creating a legitimate website that potential customers can trust is the only way to make sure your web traffic leads to purchases on your site. Consumers want to feel like they are buying from a well-established company, and not just some random site on the internet. You want to make your online business seem as legitimate as one with an actual store that you can go to visit.

There are many ways to do this. Provide actual contact information so customers have a way to contact you with questions or concerns. Be upfront about all details of the business, including the payment options, return policies, and shipping costs. Make sure to offer payment methods that are well secured and from trusted companies.

Also consider what it is that you are trying to sell or offer. You have to offer a product that is unique and different from the competitors. If the product isn’t something different, then you should make sure that you at least offer a very competitive price. After you are sure that you have a product that is rock solid and a web site that customers will be willing to shop at, you can begin to implement the internet marketing small business strategies that will lead your business to financial success.

One of the internet marketing small business strategies that has been proven to increase web traffic is search engine optimization. Search engine optimization focuses on incorporating commonly used search terms for your business industry and products into your website. This helps draw customers looking for your product to your site by improving your web site’s ranking with various search engines.

Search engines have a vast influence on the way people navigate through the pages of the internet. It is much easier to type a common phrase into a search engine such as Bing or Google than remember an entire website URL. As a business, you want to research the phrases that people would use to get to a product or site like yours. Incorporating those keywords is a sure fire way to make your site appear higher in search engine results, which will help you draw in more web traffic.

Internet marketing small business strategies, such as SEO optimization, help you to increase the web traffic to your site, but this increased traffic will not lead to sales unless you also have a legitimate website that builds trust with potential customers. Using both of these methods is the best way to guarantee that your site becomes a success.

While it is true that the marketing employment sector is tight these days, by no means does it mean that there isn’t room for a dedicated and driven young marketer to find huge success. However, if you do expect to make your mark as a marketer, when looking for jobs you are going to need to find ways to make your expertise stand out from that of the competition. With that being said, here are some things that you can think about which can help you get those marketing jobs instead of your competitors.

In today’s marketing world, the internet is by far the most important area for you to have expertise in. The problem is, there are still too many marketers that pride themselves on all their marketing expertise in offline marketing techniques. While off line marketing still has its place, if you want to jump to the front of the line, it is going to be all about being an expert internet marketer.

When it comes to internet marketing, you should be both well rounded, and have a particular area of expertise to offer. For instance, to market yourself convincingly as an online marketing expert, you are definitely going to need to know a considerable amount about search engine marketing. Although there are many other ways to make sales and drum up traffic online, even someone with only a passing familiarity with the internet knows that most people find websites through search engines. Learning about search engine optimization and Pay per Click marketing is critical for the would-be internet marketer.

Being a social media and social networking guru is also very important. In some cases, this might be enough to get you a marketing job on its own, because many companies find themselves hiring a marketer whose primary job is to promote their social presence online. Even though social networks may not yet bring in as much sheer volume in traffic as the search engines do, many times the traffic that they do bring is more trusting of the company because of the nature of social networks, and therefore more likely to buy. Having a strong knowledge of Twitter and Facebook, and knowing how to use them to promote a company is a great way to really make yourself valuable in the marketing job market.

The newest trend on the internet is of course the movement towards using the internet through mobile rather than desktop devices. The Smartphone experience on the internet is different than any other, and a cutting edge marketer that was familiar with mobile advertising, in app advertising, and with online marketing to mobile platforms is going to quickly stand out as a candidate that many people are going to be eager to hire, because it could give them the edge in this quickly emerging marketplace.

If you choose to make yourself stand out by promoting yourself as being an expert in any one of these areas, remember that you still are going to need some familiarity with all of them. Also, it is important that you stay on top of the latest developments in all the industries. Online marketing is a quickly changing field, and the marketer that is keeping pace with the current changes is always going to get more work than one that is falling behind the times.

Remember, that how your market yourself is going to be one of the things which makes you get the job. If a company can see clearly that you’re an expert at marketing yourself, they are quickly going to realize that you might be able to do big things for them as well.

When a good client of mine took on an account that become a problem account, before they knew it they were receiving 28 voice mails very two hour of yelling and screaming. I was told “FIX IT”.

Upon my initial research, I uncovered that this is expensive and that the right systems should have been put in place in the first place. In any event, what I learned there is VERY little on the Internet in terms of a strategy for Online Reputation Management. There is A LOT in terms of content for explanation of this, but little for execution.

After two months of studying and recognizing that this is information that needs to out there, I decided to implement and test Online Reputation Management and Online Response Management for a Local Business.

In any event, I’ve created a very high level overview strategy. You bet your dollar that we’re on top of this and have tested, or are continuing to test, to create the best strategy for any, and almost all locally based businesses.

I orginally posted this on the Local Biz Builders forum here.

Online Response Management Strategy Overview

1.Monitoring Online Reputation complaints and inventory complaints and put system in Place
a.Twitter, Blogs, Forums, News, *Complaint Sites (like complaintnow.com, ripoffreport.com), Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch, Yahoo Local, Angie’s List, OpenTable and Epinions
i.TweetDeck
ii.Google Alerts
iii.Monitor This allows you to monitor and track keywords over multiple search engines.
iv.Domain Ranking for keywords (I use market samurai and WebCEO – free trial for both)
v.Manual searches using search engine tools ([allintitle: company name] – check blogs, forums, web 2.0, [site:www.facebook.com company name]
b.Inventory Negative PR –create inventory file, one week dated
c.Email – update website email flow for customer service, ops, sales

2.Push Down complaint sites off front page for search phrase [COMPANY NAME] – via SEO (Web 2.0 content works great). Create 2-3 sites with COMPANYNAME in domain (.org, .net, COMPANYNAME-reviews.com)

3.Respond to negative complaints online within 24 hours
a.Twitter, complaint boards, forums, email
i.Copy and paste responses – there are 4-6 catagories.
b.Need to track what we do.

4.Remove online complaints
a.Complaint boards, Wikipedia, (manual removal is very difficult and time consuming, better to direct to customer)
b.ReputationDefender.com – A service that attempts to help you get things being said online about you removed

5.Publish Positive Content (updated phase II to aid in this)
a.Blogs, forums, web 2.0, local reviews sites, complaint boards,
b.Blog Strategy on COMPANYNAME (weekly CEO voice, weekly customer service voice, COMPANY video content) – Implement Share features – T & FB
c.Ideas for content that would be shared among our courier industry – funny video, reports, industry analysis, (such as an extensive blog post), be the ‘camera person’ at events.

6.PR Campaign