I’ve created the following video to help small business owners and entrepreneurs who are looking to get traffic to their website. In the video I’ve outlined 10 simple steps you can do right now in order to drive local prospects to your storefront. If you are not using the Internet to attract new business, then you’re missing out on a BIG opportunity:

There are a lot of resources available online that will help your website to show up when people search for local services on Google and Yahoo!. With most people now looking for local services online, creating an online presence is far more effective than a print listing, and it will only cost you a fraction of what you would spend on traditional advertising.

Resource 1: Register a domain name here.

Resource 2: Get a good hosting plan with 24/7 support, 99.9% uptime, website templates, and one-click setup here from JustHost for just $3.45/month.

Resource 3: Claim Your Local Business Listing at the 3 major search engines:

The Easy Way:

GetListed.org

Universal Business Listing

The Manual Way:

Yahoo! Local

Google Local Business Center

Bing Local

Resource 4: Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide

Resource 5: Install WordPress in a ‘blog’ directory of your website. You can get WordPress for free here.

Resource 6: Track website visits with Google Analytics.

Resource 7: Track all calls from your website to your business to measure the conversion of visitors to customers. You can use a virtual phone system like RingCentral.

Resource 8: Use Aweber to create an automated e-mail marketing system in an easy to use interface. The service is just $19.95 / month and makes e-mail distribution list management and marketing easy. Other alternatives include Infusionsoft and iContact

Should you need help setting this up, feel free to give us a call at 1-888-249-0213.

If you haven’t already registered a domain name then you have an excellent opportunity to consider choosing one that is optimized for your geographic area and the type of service you provide. So instead of “www.JoePlumbing.com” you may want to register your domain name as “www.OrlandoPlumber.com”.

Although there is the pride and marketability factor of having your business name in your web address, you will not be optimized for search. In order to enjoy the best of both worlds, I advise clients to host their website on the more generic domain name that is optimized for local search (e.g., www.OrlandoPlumber.com) and then we also register the vanity domain address (e.g., www.JoePlumbing.com) and redirect it to the generic domain name.

The videos below explain this concept in a little more detail and dive into the importance of having optimized domain names.

Hopefully this second video has sparked some ideas for you. If the keyword you are targeting is already taken (e.g., www.OrlandoPlumbing.com) then perhaps you can register something similar that contains those keywords (e.g., www.BestOrlandoPlumbing.com). In general you want to stay away from domains that have more than one hyphen, and you want to register a domain with a “.com” extension in order to optimize your SEO.

Another tactic that I feel is useful is registering multiple domains within your market as a defense against SEO from your competitors. If you own all or most of the keyword optimized domains in your market, you’ll be that much more competitive in the SEO game.

You can register domain names here for as little as $6.64

Reset!

Sometimes you have to knock it down and start all over.  Welcome to the Rainmaker Blog version 2.0.   The last blog was really a temporary solution, and did not have a number of key elements that I knew should have been in there.  Expect to see a much more polished blog and some fantastic content.  Stay tuned!