Web Marketing for Small Businesses 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth Quick Start Your Business
Web Marketing for Small Businesses 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth Quick Start Your Business
When it comes to marketing and competing against the giants, small businesses have always had it tough. But now there’s a way to level the playing field like never before.
Web Marketing for Small Businesses shows entrepreneurs how to take advantage of the marketing opportunities on the Internet to get the word out about their business and win new customers. Stephanie Diamond, founder of Digital Media Works, has over 25 years experience in the marketing world and served for eight years as Marketing Director of AOL. She helps small business owners through topics such as:
-Working with social networking sites
-Creating mindmaps
-Selling your story in a compelling way
-Choosing the right tactics
-Choosing the right tools
-Evaluating customer actions
-And much more
For any entrepreneur, this book provides the most potential profit per read of any recent book on the market.
User Ratings and Reviews
5 Stars Ignore the Internet for Your Business At Your Own Peril
Several years ago there was great suspicion about the Internet and websites because some of them were fake. While some fake sites still exist, this suspicion has largely disappeared and in fact, completely reversed. Now the web or Internet is often the FIRST place that people turn when they have a business need.
If you are a small business owner, you need to harness the power of the Internet to increase your own bottom line and visibility. WEB MARKETING FOR SMALL BUSINESSES is an invaluable resource. With detailed and current examples, Stephanie Diamond helps every reader understand the changing roles and the necessity of a new mindset. Then she walks the reader through a seven-step action plan to discover your niche, capitalize on your brand, tell your story, jump higher in the search engines, write good content (persuasive landing pages, minisites and sales letters), social media tactics and finally tried and true tactics (newsletters, article marketing, white papers and much more).
Stephanie Diamond is a seasoned expert in this field and writes with authority about a subject that she knows intimately.
This easy-to-digest text is a book that I will use over and over. The worksheets alone in the back are worth the cost of this book. Small business owners who follow the wisdom in these pages will profit in many ways–and I mean much more than your bottom line. You will gain a presence and visibility which will only enhance your financials and increase your business.
5 Stars Exactly what small business owners need to market effectively on the web
Marketing is probably the biggest challenge for small business owners and executives. We typically spend so much time running the business day to day that establishing and maintaining a marketing focus just doesn’t happen. The accelerating pace of Internet marketing change makes it all that much more challenging.
Happily, Stephanie Diamond has written that rare book which both forces us to think in new and different ways about marketing issues-and simultaneously provides a detailed roadmap so that we can put those thoughts into action. Once you have finished the book, you will be ready to develop and deploy a successful Web marketing strategy.
Her new book, Web Marketing for Small Businesses, is a much-needed addition to the literature of online marketing. This book enables us first to grasp complex concepts and then to put them into practice with easy to follow steps. Even solopreneurs will find significant value in Stephanie’s book. I know that I have already begun to implement several of the strategies about which she writes so knowledgeably.
Stephanie conveys so much valuable content in her book that it is difficult to do it justice in a short review. So, I will simply share some of my favorite stuff.
My 7 favorite lessons learned:
1. Making it easy for your Web visitors to buy from you is essential, but it’s even more important to make it easy for them to tell your story to others. This is the key to word-of-mouth marketing. You must tell stories that are so compelling and memorable that dozens of others will be retelling your stories to dozens of others.
2. Power has shifted from sellers to buyers on the web. This means that your web presence must provide plenty of compelling content that makes it easy for buyers to take action. Don’t give them an excuse to look elsewhere for essential information.
3. Develop a precise and in-depth understanding of your buyers. Create a `persona’ for your buyer that makes her a flesh and blood human being for whom you can craft just the right messaging.
4. Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. Make it incredibly easy for your web visitors to understand why your products and services will provide perfectly tailored solutions for their most important needs.
5. Always think of what actions you want your visitors to take. Provide content within an information architecture that will lead your visitors to take those actions naturally and effortlessly. This action-focused approach applies to every part of your website.
6. Your website is effectively a direct response mechanism. Therefore think like a direct response copywriter and ask “so” questions. For example, “our widget is the lightest in the industry.” So? Then finish the equation… “so you can carry it with you wherever you go.”
7. You must do usability testing no matter how small your marketing budget. It’s really just a question of recruiting several users who know nothing about your company, your products or your website. Put them in a room in front of a computer and let them figure out what your company and your products are all about-and what action you would like them to take. Keep repeating the process until even the most clueless user instantly and intuitively understands what your website and your company are all about.
7 step plan for “explosive business growth”
Plenty of variables may affect the business growth you can achieve by following Stephanie’s seven step plan. But, because so many of us will never create a thoughtful and realistic plan on our own, her seven steps are just what the marketing doctor ordered to spark significant growth.
Stephanie devotes an entire chapter to each step with description, references, and examples. I think you will find just about the right amount of information in each chapter to begin developing and deploying your strategy. Here are bare-bones descriptions of the 7 steps:
1. Niche-precisely define your perfect customer and developer niche to match.
2. Brand-make it “obvious, repeatable, and ready for storytelling by the customers who will carry your message.”
3. Story-tell stories about your company, its people and its products that are true, compelling, and unique. Make sure these stories are easy to retell.
4. Search-be easy to find on the web. Craft your content so that it is search engine friendly and so that it can be found quickly by your ideal customers.
5. Tactics-social media-carefully consider core social media methods such as business blogging, videos, podcasting and the social networks. You can experiment with each of these inexpensively and should probably choose one or two as a starting point to avoid straining always limited resources.
6. Tactics-tried-and-true-although for some small businesses these tactics may be somewhat unfamiliar, they have been effective online for a decade or more. Among these tactics are: eNewsletters, article marketing online press releases surveys and loyalty programs.
7. Results- you must continually reassess each of your online marketing initiatives to determine what’s working, what’s not, and what to change accordingly. Measurement online is easy and essential.
Plenty of practical elements in the book
Stephanie gives just enough description and explanation so that those of us who are not steeped in Internet technology and leading-edge marketing practices can understand fundamental principles. And, most importantly, she teaches us just how to put those principles into practice.
Throughout the book she provides worksheets that enable readers to begin laying out a practical plan for a successful Web marketing strategy. These worksheets lead you from where you are today to the new kind of thinking you’ll require, to a definition of your customers and your niche, and ultimately to the action plans to execute your Web marketing strategy.
Thanks to Stephanie’s book, developing a successful Web marketing strategy has now become eminently doable for even the smallest organization.
5 Stars It is a fantastic book!
I am a web developer and I deal with issues described in Web Marketing for Small Businesses every single day. I would spend hours and sometimes days researching things that are presented in this book in a simple, clear and very well organized format.
This book is packed with practical recommendations for the small and not so small businesses who want to make money online.
Whether you are a small business owner or a search engine optimization marketer, in this book you will find tons of information you can use every day.
I am rating this book as 5 stars!
5 Stars From Small Business to BIG Business
If you have a product and/or service worthy of selling, please do us all a favor: Right now, buy this book. When it arrives, USE IT IMMEDIATELY!!! And yes, I know I am yelling, thank you very much.
As far as I know, there is no other book out there that has such useful information that is this easy to implement with such immediate results. Measurable results are the gold standard in business. An increase in profits and return business are two of the side effects of using Stephanie’s book. Thank you Stephanie for sharing such a gem with us.
Cheers,
Stephen
[...]
5 Stars A must read for any small time business who want to expand.
The internet is a powerful tool for many things, such as marketing. “Web Marketing for Small Businesses: 7 Steps to Explosive Business Growth” is a guide for small time entrepreneurs who seek to use the internet to turn their companies around. With advice on finding the right tools and methods to doing so, using the concept of ‘Web 2.0′, connecting with your customers, online selling, and keeping track of this massive monster, “Web Marketing for Small Businesses” is a must read for any small time business who want to expand.
Filed under: Making Money On the Internet Books