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Learn Local Internet Marketing

Local Internet Marketing is merely marketing a business online. Most businesses, unless they begin online, are local. For example, a local bakery may service a small community and an airline may service an entire country, or a few countries. These businesses have borders. However, generally speaking when referencing local internet marketing, one considers a business that provides products or services locally, dealing directly with customers, sometimes face to face. These businesses typically have other marketing vehicles to drive patients, clients and customers and consider investing money and effort into driving more business from the Internet.

Almost all businesses these days can benefit from marketing online. There are several options to pursue business from search marketing to social media marketing. These follow traditional marketing principles, from push to pull marketing. The Internet is merely another vehicle to gain business exposure to the target audience.

Whether you’re a local business owner, manager or consultant aspiring to learn to provide such services, proper education in this field is critical and one needs to learn local internet marketing.

An entrepreneur or business manager must have the education to learn how to manage those executing the various services, knowledge in knowing which strategies work and where to invest their budget.

There are experts vying to provide their education that don’t have the fundamental marketing principles to relate the computer era of marketing to basic principles of human psychology. There is such a vast array of information that provides false promises of instant rankings and systems that are fail proof. Many people are becoming rich selling information that simply does not work, or has worked for a short time to fool the search engines. Someone promises a system that instantly provides 1000’s of followers, people who are waiting by their computer for you to speak so you instantly will get leads.

It doesn’t happen. Ever. Never has, never will.

Listen to your gut. In a perfect world, the businesses that provided the best service for the best price and was able to sustain such a level of service in exchange for a fair profit, should flourish. Those companies that continue to get repeat customers, the ones that get the most word of mouth advertising should grow. Not because of large marketing budgets, or political influence. Businesses should grow because they continually strive the be the best at what they do, not to have the largest bottom line. The money usually follows.

So, why can’t this perfect business world be created online? Eliminate the corporate push, provide a democratic playing field for everyone.

It is being created, however it is not perfect. There are always thieves, scammers, crooks, short-cutters, those that want the easy road. The framework for this perfect business promotion world is here, it just needs some tweaking.

See, a local business can be found in a search engine, preferably number one for a relevant keyword. A company can thrive on Twitter and get a great following or run a very successful profitable advertising campaign. This business can flourish for the short term by exploiting the many vulnerabilities these online advertising avenues currently hold. However, as a search engine for example improves it’s search results, such as yesterday’s announcement of caffeine, such strategies begin to lose it’s effectiveness.

People devise these strategies simply by trial and error and then this information get’s distributed around the Internet as the Holy Grail of strategies. These are essentially reserved engineered. The motivation is simply to trick a search engine into showing what it thinks is the right result. You need to learn these online marketing strategies, understand what strategies exist, which work and those basic marketing strategies that work online, offline and for decades.

Bottom line is that considering what the Internet as a whole is and what companies like Google are really trying to do, then acquiring results is challenging. Their suggestions merely are much more challenging than the strategies the experts have devised. The thing is, following exactly what a search engine wants us to do is a lot of hard work, effort and dedication, these are the results that yield the longest term results. There are really two words that best describe online marketing for a local business, Transparency and Exposure.

Consider the Marketing Local Business Online coaching course to learn more about marketing a business online, regardless if you’re a business owner, manager or consultant.


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Written by

Scott Gallagher is a founding faculty member of Local Marketing Source and owner of WON Marketing, Inc. For over 14 years Scott has provided consulting and online marketing services to hundreds of businesses.

2 Comments Published

Carl Gates / 1 July 2010 / Reply

Hi Scott,

Can i just ask a quick question – were you at the Simon Coulson training course on the 29th June in the UK?
Only reason i ask is that i think i saw you (complete with hat!) but i’m not sure, and would like to ask your honest opinion on what you thought of it?
Please feel free to email me

Thanks

Scott Gallagher / 9 July 2010 / Reply

No, I wasn’t there. I wish I were! What did you think of it?

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