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Internet Marketing and the Small Business

The internet marketing landscape has changed quite a bit in the

past 3 years and has further defined itself further in the past

12 months. With Google raising $4 Billion from new stock

offerings in 2005 we will see more changes underway over the

next 3 years. Unfortunately, I fear the small business is going

to be left out in the cold in this process. Perhaps a better

statement would be that the small business has already been left

out in the cold.

This writing is certainly not designed to provide a solution to

the growing problem. More so, it has been written to raise the

awareness and acknowledge the difficulty small business has on

the web. Certainly the small business does not receive any

sympathy from the major search engines in their quest to provide

quality information for those that are searching the web.

Let's review how the situation has been created. We have to make

the assumption a small business does not have the financial

resources for a proper advertising campaign on the web (even

though it is less costly than offline advertising) and they do

not have the man-power to devote time for the non-costly methods

of marketing. Yes, I have distinguished between advertising and

marketing.

Marketing is the process or technique of promotion, selling and

distributing a product or service. Advertising is to make your

product or service publicly known; an announcement to call

public attention by emphasizing qualities to arouse a desire to

purchase.

Can the small business market at no cost? Yes, absolutely,

however, the issue at hand is not expenditure but time. Time

they are already spending on their business and do not have more

time to spend on non-costly marketing methods on the web. What

are these non-costly but time-consuming marketing methods? This

would include but not limited to writing articles, maintaining

newsletters, maintaining email addresses with auto-responders,

submitting their articles through a variety of methods and

resources over the web. Let's not forget standard search engine

optimization issues and HTML coding. Oh, the best one of all is

"natural" link exchanging as defined by Google. If you have not

already been there, manual link exchanging is a time consuming

process even if you do decide to spend money on lost cost

services that can assist. You cannot use "link farms" as that is

against search engine policies and will cause your listing to be

down graded.

In order to reach top ranking on the search engines it all boils

down to links (or link exchanges, link popularity) and content.

Inbound only links better than reciprocal inks. Writing content

for your site, articles, news, newsletter is time consuming to

properly write a 500 word article and the submission process is

not easy either. Some services and software exists to help you

in your submission of articles, but just like link exchange

services they can only do so much. Could you create a blog and

place your articles, certainly. However, you can see the "things

to do" list only keeps growing for the small business owner.

Could they engage in pay-per-click campaigns? Sure, however, you

now are entering in a financial issue and one that does not

necessarily provide a great return on investment. Pay-Per-Click

campaigns are good as an overall marketing strategy and if you

use it in combination with a variety of other internet and

search engine marketing methods. On its own it cannot provide

the returns the small business is seeking. Searching the key

phrases (no longer key words) and understanding which ones to

select is equally not an easy task. It requires due diligence,

research and analysis to understand the information and make an

informed decision. Assuming they can get past this part of the

pay-per-click process, the next phase is writing the

pay-per-click ad headline and content. Unfortunately we see many

small businesses flocking to pay-per-click advertising in hopes

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of a quick return. They might as well go to a casino!

There is indeed another problem associated with Pay-Per-Click

campaigns. The ratio of exposures to hits is equally a problem

when you are supposed to keep a certain percentage ratio between

the two. When search engines like Google are allowing your ad to

be placed on other websites with their Google Adsense, your

exposures are indeed going up, however, how many people actually

click on the links? From Google's perspective probably a lot,

but from the individual advertiser's perspective this is not

necessarily a good situation. Google is now dictating what key

phrases you "should" bid on and ultimately consolidating the

bidding war into small key phrase groups and larger number of

advertisers.

Lastly, at least for this writing, but not necessarily on the

subject, is time to see revenues. There is no doubt that it

takes months for a website to propagate through the Internet.

This is by no means a short-term situation and expectations need

to be set accordingly. Just because you have a website does not

mean that you will see rewards anytime soon. Once again we get

into the dilemma of time resources to do the necessary internet

marketing work in order to see benefits 6 - 9 months later.

Requirements set by the search engines as they seek to provide

quality responses to those that are searching are making it

increasingly difficult for small businesses to compete on the

web. So, who will end up on the first page or in the top

position of searches for key phrases? Unless something changes

and the small business is given a chance, it will be the larger

corporations that have the man power time and the money.

About the author:

Melih Oztalay is the CEO of SmartFinds Internet

Marketing. SmartFinds Internet Marketing provides a variety

of business internet marketing services including research,

analysis and planning.