ForumsAdvertising, Sales and Marketing

Not knowing the particulars of your business area, Ill just throw some out there. Pick the one that may suit your situation.
Advertise your business to a target market like clubs and craft fairs. The local procumbent market (city, state, federal Gov) was a good idea but you may have to float some monies before you get paid. But some gov procurement buys on a credit card right away. Offer free samples to get people in the door to try your goods. Invest in a good demographic mailing list for your area and direct market to it. Advertise in the bulletins or newsletters in churches. Try an ebay store to keep things moving while trying to get started its basically free. If you can ship try advertising in fairly inexpensive newpaper ads from www.nationwideadvertising.com they advertise to almost any newspaper around the country you can think of. If you are on the side of or near a highway theres another Free option with www.milesurfer.com they have a Free basic ad for businesses on the side of the highways it will allow travelers to find you off your exit from there mobile app. if that is the case.
I wish you best of luck in your business venture.

Hi ironbed,

Just to chime in on the SEO side of things. All things are possible with SEO, but it's not up to your SEO company to convert traffic --- instead they drive traffic. This does not mean you should be hands-off with your business, when the traffic arrives at your website you will need to convert that traffic by engaging your audience.

1) Do you have a newsletter?
2) Does your web design appeal to it's target audience?
3) Is your website navigation user friendly?
4) Have you wrote compelling content, onsite and offsite?
5) Have you wrote compelling ad copy on your homepage and sales (funnel) pages?
6) Does your brand have a social presence?
7) Are you engaging your customers?
8) Do you follow up on leads?
9) Have you set up tracking for your website? Do you analyze it?
10) Are you still endorsing other advertising vehicles, such as email marketing, graphical banner advertising, or traditional marketing (print, tv, radio)?

The above are things you should be doing regardless if you hired an SEO company or not. You should run the business and engage your audience. Now in all respects, the SEO can wear many hats and assist with all those tasks, but if you were to pawn off all those elements of your business, then in essence you don't have a business. It should be handled and managed by yourself or your full-time staff. What the SEO brings to the table should be treated completely separate from your current efforts. The SEO is in addition to what you already do, not the sole solution for your business.

The SEO strengths come in at delivering targeted traffic to one's website. Getting high rankings in the Google for one or two keywords is not going to make or break you --- in most cases regardless how popular the keywords are. Most authority websites rank for a large multitude of keywords (hundreds, if not thousands) --- short and long tail, many different variations, etc. In particular these websites rank in all search engines and not just Google. To obtain this type of noterity online it takes time, effort, strategy, and money! There is no way around those four elements, unless you believe in luck!

Here are the things a good SEO company should do for you, in addition to the things you already do to run YOUR business.

1) SEO
* Keyword research
* Analytics installation / site tracking
* Analytics monitoring
* Website analysis
* Competitor analysis
* On page optimization
* Page title optimization
* Meta tags optimization
* Heading tags optimization
* Page content optimization
* Alternate text optimization
* Internal link architecture
* On page content creation
* Sitemap.xml creation, upload, and notification
* Robots.txt create
* Periodic updates and reports delivery

2) LINK BUILDING
* Article marketing
* External blogging (blogger, livejournal, etc.)
* Directory advertising
* Profile links
* Niche resource links
* Periodic updates and reports delivery

3) PAY PER CLICK MANANGEMENT
* Google Adwords campaign management (including graphical banner ads)
* Microsoft AdCenter (Bing) campaign management
* Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaign management
* Optional: Ask Sponsored Listings campaign management
* Optional: 7Search, SearchFeed, Miva, etc. campaign management
* Periodic updates and reports delivery
4) PRESS RELEASES
* Press release writing
* Press release distribution
* Press release tracking
* Ongoing: Wash, rinse, & repeat
* Periodic updates and reports delivery
5) SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
* Social profile creation (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.)
* Social account management
* Social participation
* Create daily/weekly social posts
* Add targeted friends to profile
* Join target social groups
* Blog commenting
* Niche forum participation
* Periodic updates and reports delivery

6) BLOG / ON SITE CONENT MANAGEMENT
* Website blog design integration
* Website blog account management
* Website blog analytics installation / blog tracking
* Website blog analytics monitoring
* Website blog feed directory syndication
* Website blog directory submissions
* Website blog link building campaign
* Website blog marketing
* Daily/weekly website blog posts creation

7) OPTIONAL SERVICES
* URL Rewriting
* Website redesign
* Website development
* Email marketing
* Conversion analysis
* Lead capturing
* Reputation management
* Graphical banner ad creation

As you can see there is a wealth of benefit an SEO can provide, but you must be sure you channel their strengths. If you need optional services at high quality then it might be best to outsource to someone who specialize specifically in those markets, but if you are looking for someone to drive traffic to your website while increasing search engine rankings and value then a skilled SEO is what you need. However, never put all your eggs in one basket and rely solely on the efforts of SEO, you should always employ other marketing strategies and mediums, such as traditional marketing, email marketing, conference participation, etc. A well balanced marketing strategy will always prove to be successful in the long run.

I would expect you to know everything involved with SEO nor should you concern yourself with every nook and cranny, but I would make the recommendation that you stay on top of your SEO and results. Don't get crazy about, but just design your own metric of growth --- such as looking at the number of visitors, pageviews, bounce rate, or some other metric --- keep record of this metric and look for growth patterns and trends over the course of the weeks/months. If you notice decreases or unsatisfactory results becoming a trend then its time to talk with your SEO or cancel the campaign (if applicable). Just my suggested advice for non-SEO website owners who use SEO outsourcing.

I hope this helps in some way, always feel free to contact me directly (919) 816-2764 --- http://www.antonaf.com/contact/

Regards,
Anthony Onaf
Ant Onaf Search Marketing & SEO
(919) 816-2764
http://www.antonaf.com

What a great and detailed post by Anthony. That's the kind of forum posts that drive traffic and business.
One thing that wasn't mentioned - and there weren't many - is viral marketing techniques.
How do you create viral marketing? One post, video, Tweet, blog entry, email, that is picked up and sent on to many friends.
You have to be creative and also have a sense of fun.
Contests are a great way to do this, especially if they have a unique and fun twist.
The way you write your post, Tweet, blog entry, email, etc. also has a big effect on whether it goes viral.
Fun and provacative are key elements here. Find a totally new way to look at the old.
In the drone of similar messages, find a way to stand out from the crowd.
This has always been the way of good traditional advertising.

When messages go viral, the results can be spectacular. So it's worth investing the time and effort into it.

I recently created a Twitter contest that took off far beyond what I had imagined. I had to put the whole thing on hold to re-group and fully take advantage of all the traffic I was getting. When Social Media goes viral, look out.

Now I'm creating similar contests for some of my clients.

Great post, Anthony. Nice work.

Peter

There are many ways for you to advertise , online or offline. Even in your own shop you can make good publicity. I know a way to advertise, it is to make a DVD advertisement from powerpoint youself. Here is the details: http://www.acoolsoft.com/blog/make-a-thanksgiving-dvd-advertisement-from-powerpoint.html
Hope it can help you.

If you can share the url of your website, I would be happy to evaluate and make some suggestions.

Also, provide a list of the things you have done so far and I will probably have some to add to it. Happy to assist if I can see it and understand how you are marketing.

Franklin
http://bblmedia.com/

Well I am very familiar with advertising and marketing in your area. Most of the people you caitor to is women. We have our grocery program. you can offer $100, $150, or $300 when a certain amount of linen is purchased. The cost is cheap I won't lie. But you will get great results out of it. Another way to get people is a reverse craigslist ad. Advertise in the forums in your area that you are clearing out of old stock and 30%-50% price cuts. This will get a stir created for traffic. Put a postrer in your window as well that you are having a two for tuesday sale. People love that.