==== ==== Please check out The Local Marketing Institute for great tips on Local Marketing for Profit. www.bestlocalmarketingpractices.com ==== ====
When you walk down the main street of your local town or suburb, you are walking past the main driver of the economy for all western developed countries, small businesses. These companies routinely generate the majority of tax dollars, create the most new jobs and ultimately have the most potential to continue to increase our overall standard of living. Strangely enough, these businesses are not fully taking up the opportunities presented by internet marketing. These local small businesses are doing it the traditional way, by giving good service, having superior products and working hard to build their reputation within their local community. These are all very admirable characteristics, but the truth is this presents a massive opportunity for all existing internet marketers. The skills you currently have are totally foreign to most small business owners and they are skills people are willing to pay for. In the past, a person would open up their shop on main street, take out a few ads in the local community newspaper and take out some space in the next yellow pages. These methods were effective and predictable - the more you were willing to spend on your ads or spots, the bigger they became, the more people who saw them and the more foot traffic you could expect. There was also the adage of "location, location, location" - so having a great store location meant more visibility and foot traffic. The traditional staples of local marketing for small business, the yellow pages, community newspapers and storefront location have been largely disrupted by the internet. People no longer immediately reach for the local yellow pages, they turn to Google and other search engines. Local newspapers have all but disappeared in most towns and in some cases even large daily newspapers are vanishing. For the occasional shop owner that was adventurous and would venture into local television advertising, again that market has been largely decimated by digital recording, increased internet usage and cable television. The key to working with small business successfully is to put in place a system for carrying out the work that you can easily package and is thoroughly repeatable. You need to be able to demonstrate some success to the owner and explain it in a way that they'll quickly see the benefit in and understand. Its also very important to understand that you're dealing with more traditional business owners who are used to receiving things like reports and updates, so in the system you put together, make sure that you can quickly quantify what you've done and achieved and that you can deliver high quality, tailored reports. One system that has been put together offers a great deal of flexibility and tools to make these tasks easier, in fact, it is aimed at delivering a business in a box to people who want to help local businesses get online quickly and effectively. The system, Main Street Marketing Machines
Fusion, has been several years in the making and has a proven track record of success. If you're already an online marketer, then the combination of this system with your existing skills should be enough to help you enable local small business to make an excellent start online.
Jane writes about internet marketing for a living and has seen a massive trend recent towards small business SEO marketing. She is a keen user of Main Street Marketing Machines [http://mainstreetmarketingmachines2bonus.org] and is building a growing small and local business client base using it.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jane_Dorstall
==== ==== Please check out The Local Marketing Institute for great tips on Local Marketing for Profit. www.bestlocalmarketingpractices.com ==== ====