Does Yellow Pages still work in Birmingham?

For some businesses in Birmingham, absolutely!

All business owners are aware that Yellow Pages has reduced in physical size, dramatically. There have been a lot of local business owners who have struggled with this as they had no back up plan.

Now small local business owners, whose main role in life is to control the business, find themselves in a confusing state as they are constantly bombarded with sales people who will:

• Rank them higher than anyone else on Google
• Deliver leads every day through their Google Adwords Campaigns
• Have their office produce an amazing website and video at hugely discounted prices that will have customers calling daily
• Create a Facebook business page as social media is all the rage

And you wonder why local business owners are so frustrated and perplexed!

In spite all of this what remains is the fact that whilst technology evolves at an incredible rate, the process of marketing remains the same.

What do I mean?

Business Marketing Strategies for Birmingham – What Is A Marketing Strategy?

The biggest single mistake most small business owners make is that they don’t understand marketing and the majority do not understand the financial power and clout of a database.

Let me explain.

Marketing is getting potential prospects to know, like and trust you so that when they are ready to purchase they choose your products or services.

They prefer you because they first made contact by going through your website, Facebook, Twitter , an online directory, etc. (the different routes to your door) and after they made that initial contact you kept in contact using emails or Facebook posts and all the other different ways you can stay in contact.

Perhaps you could think of it like this.

Every person that enters a shop is not necessarily a buyer. Maybe they are there just to get a comparison.

But it is how you interact with them that determines whether they will return to your shop when they are ready to buy because the time is right.

The real power of the internet is that you can build the know, like and trust factor on auto-pilot when you have collected the potential customers email address or got them to ‘LIKE’ your Facebook business page.

All business owners in Birmingham need to fully grasp that working hard to put a system into place will make the journey from browsing prospect to paying customer that much easier.

Businesses Marketing Using a Small Database

What is really sad is that the majority of business owners in Birmingham will not have a ‘back end’ system in place.

Without a ‘back end’ system you are always fighting to make a profit when it was within easy reach all the time.

’Back end’ … What am I on about?

The back end system to which I refer is your customer contact database and the automated system you build into your business to continually market to these red hot customers.

The simple fact of the matter is that the majority of business owners move on to the next prospect after a customer has completed the purchase and miss the single biggest opportunity to increase profits.

Here’s a typical situation.

After working hard you finally get 500 prospects to your business website.

Out of the 500 prospects 50 fill in your email optin box for your newsletter etc. and now receive emails from you.

Finally 1 purchases your goods or services and is now a customer.

You now ignore them and move on to driving the next 500 to your site!

I don’t believe this! … Your new customer has just proved they know ,like and trust you but you cast them aside looking for new prospects!

The reason most businesses ignore this massive profit potential is simply because there is no system in place!

Here is a simple way to show a back end system.

A plumber receives a call and attends an emergency, a leak, a boiler breakdown, something. The customer is happy he has fixed the problem so whilst the customer is happy and grateful the plumber presents the opportunity for the client to save 20% on the bill if they join his monthly maintenance contract scheme.

Delighted with his work today they take up the offer and he now has a new monthly paying client.

Their details are added to his customer database and the system he has set up automatically sends out an email 1 week later to the new customers asking if they would leave a testimonial on his Google Places listing, or Qype, Yell, Free Index.

So he now starts building up real testimonials, automatically.

His database system automatically sends out an email in May with a special offer to existing clients who want an external tap fitting.

Are you seeing how easy this can be?

Build a back end and the money takes care of itself.

As a local business, marketing to prospects in Birmingham, what are you doing to dramatically change your profits from people who have already indicated they know, like and trust you?

Only a few years ago completing a Google Map’s listing and being ranked on page one without a website was quite easy.

However, with over 20% of all searches being local Google has taken notice.

That’s an awful lot of potential customers.

According to one source Google now exceeds over 2 billion searches each and every day so at 20% that’s 400 million local consumers!

Another trend is that sometime in 2013 there will be more mobile devices than desktops.

With this growing trend and even in today’s market it doesn’t take a genius to see that those local businesses taking action will be the ones that profit.

Think about any normal situation.

It’s evening time, your in the city centre, and plan to have an Italian meal. Because you are searching with your mobile Google determines your location.

Google displays a local search result on your mobile.

Google also shows you that some of these local restaurants have a special offer in place.

You like the look of one and there is a button on their mobile website that will automatically ring the reservation desk.

Once booked you click on another button on the mobile website and Google presents you with a map on how to get there.

This is here and now, not some futuristic fantasy.

Local businesses need to understand that in a world that is getting faster and faster people want information now.

Each and every year Google makes changes and continually increases the performance of local search results.

It was only a couple of years ago that you had to use the town or city in the search to get the correct results.

Today, with or without you entering the town or city Google will present you with relevant results.

Using your IP address as the basis for its results, Google will now present local business results first before giving the national results.

It has now become a must to get your Google local business listing optimized and submitted.

One of the very first things we want to point out would be that unless you have an enormous down line, or if you’re planning on using these sites 12 hours or more a day, you will be wasting your time. But when you spend some time to build a down line and you surf the exchanges for around an hour a day you may realize that you can get some good results. You must understand that having an enormous down line can mean the difference between you getting results and wasting your time.

The reason it’s so important about building a down line is the fact that you’ll be earning views of your site when your down line makes use of the exchanges. The credits that you generate from your down line isn’t massive, which is why you must have a big down line earning you credits. If you do not possess a down line earning you credits you’ll be wasting your time. When you get a lot of men and women in your down line and they are surfing continuously, you’ll be able to end up earning plenty of extra credits.

Something else that other men and women do wrong with regards to traffic exchanges would be that they promote the wrong kind of web page. The type of page you ought to be advertising and marketing in these exchanges are lead capture pages so you’ll be able to get peoples email addresses. You can do this by offering the men and women a free download of an e-book or even software program once they join your list. The reason you’ll want to do this is simply because in case you are just promoting a cash site you’ll not be making any revenue. When you use a lead capture page and you get peoples email addresses you’ll realize that you will have the ability to market to these folks whenever you want.

If you plan on developing a large down line and additionally you plan on surfing at least an hour a day yourself you may realize that traffic exchanges can be worth your time. However if you just plan on using these sites yourself without a down line and without marketing a lead capture page you may discover that you’re wasting your time. So when it comes down to it you’ll discover that traffic exchanges can be both a good thing as well as a bad thing at the same time.

One outstanding feature of this software is the fact that you can create accounts at multiple social bookmarking web sites automatically. This program can also go in and verify all of the activation emails for all of the sites. You will also be able to open a number of accounts at each bookmarking site thus giving you the ability to have a separate account for each of your websites. This also keeps a record of the different memberships you have so you don’t have to figure out a way to do it yourself–and this is a terrific feature if you have numerous web sites.

As you would expect, the software will systematically submit your various webpages and sites to the social bookmarking sites. If you choose to, you can set up your submissions to happen randomly so that a certain blog post is submitted to only 20 of the bookmarking sites. Then the next blog post you make, you can have submitted to 20 different social web sites. This is one of the best ways to see to it that your social accounts don’t get canceled, and so Google doesn’t think you are doing anything suspicious to get these backlinks.

And don’t forget that when you put everything in place, the social bookmarking occurs automatically. Your only job is to add the subsequent page to be bookmarked into the software. Something else you will notice is that you are alowed to add proxies so that the social bookmarking sites will not know that you have multiple accounts at one website. You will find that most social bookmarking websites will only allow you to have one account and if they discover that you have more than one, they may deactivate all your accounts. So you can see how important this one little feature is.

At the moment, the software is available for $147 which is a bargain when you realize how much time you will have available to do something else. In addition, if you are not happy with the software, you can ask for your money to be returned. You can be at ease when you buy this product because of the no questions asked 60-day money back guarantee.

The heart of the online course comprises of 15 modules, which are in video format but you also get written transcripts of the videos. Researching niches and products and what being an affiliate marketer is will be more geared to new marketers and that is presented in videos one to five. Nonetheless, there is always something you can discover from viewing these and you might be interested to do the exercise in module three. For the financial lifestyle you desire, they have a technique for finding out how you can attain that. Researching your market is going to be discussed in greater detail by the time you reach the sixth module.

In affiliate marketing, how you obtain traffic is critical and the next section of the training course discusses methods to get you rapid results. There are videos on how to obtain traffic from email marketing as well as writing articles and video marketing. Now, you may believe that these areas are not new but the strategies taught here are more innovative. There are instances where investing a small amount of money is necessary but this helps to quicken your progress. The goal is to look at carrying out things a little differently to majority of the marketers out there.

The following step is to look at actually investing on advertisements to drive traffic. It is perhaps good to put these modules towards the end of the training course because it is really something you want to build up to as you gain experience. Facebook and in a number of ways the lesser known Gmail ads are discussed in this part of the course. The final course module on paid traffic is the most advanced since it explores contextual advertising and media buying. This is a topic where you truly have to know what you are doing and it is explored in some depth.

There is one separate course module that stands alone in this online training course and is aimed at providing you a method for generating quick money. It offers you the chance of rapidly vying for keywords for high search engine rankings. It may be temporary but hopefully you will generate some cash rapidly. There is no reason why you shouldn’t give this a go since you do not need invest anything besides being prepared to follow all the steps over the course of two days.

CBCash Grenade can either get you off and running in affiliate marketing or take you to the next level as long as get started practicing what you learn.

There’s two different methods for building your own e-mail list and one would be to obtain a software that will keep track of your list for you. Your second choice with regards to building your list is using a web based service like Aweber. While using a service is the simplest way to get started you are also going to realize that they will charge you each month for using their service. If you don’t wish to pay a fee every month you’ll need to buy a software program to do this for you.

One more thing you are going to have to do is add a permanent opt in form in the top portion of your internet site, possibly in the top portion of your sidebar. Another thing that loads of folks have plenty of good luck with, is using a pop up box that will also have your opt in form inside of it. If you have your opt in form at the bottom of your site there’s a good chance that men and women are not going to notice it. You have to understand that this form has to be in a prominent place where individuals see it otherwise you will not be getting subscribers.

You might also need to leave a bribe for the folks who see your opt in list get them to subscribe. This can be simple things like a free E book or perhaps a free report that these folks will believe has value. When you offer something of value you going to discover that men and women will be more than happy to present you with their e-mail address to get this free gift. At this time they’re going to receive an e-mail with the confirmation link that they’re going to need to click on to get this free product.

Although you will have the ability to find other ways build your e-mail list even faster you will recognize that this suggestions above will be a terrific way to get started. Of course, if you’re one of the Internet marketers which have not yet started to construct your own list, there is no time like the present. Simply because obtaining your own e-mail list can mean the distinction between online success and failure.

You may be interested in the content of IMA and itching to know if it can actually make you into one of the top rated internet marketing earners. As this membership has developed, then so has the interface as increasing numbers of applications and also training are added. The actual IMA web pages have a lot going on inside them as far as content is concerned and the creators have had to face the challenge of making it easy to browse through the site. It probably is impossible for just about any website to become a one stop source of information for any individual wanting to do well online but IMA makes a very good effort at doing just that.

The primary areas we will look at are instruction and tutorials and then software programs and also applications. One really useful aspect of the home page is you can immediately see what is new in IMA as any of the latest additions to the membership site are clearly highlighted. Therefore if something is trending or Steve and Tim have included some new resource you can immediately see just what these latest changes are. The training and tutorials really do deal with a lot of topics that may very well be stand alone coaching products independently. For example you will find segments on affiliate marketing, social networks, marketing via email and eCommerce.

Should you look inside a few of these training areas you will see complete training systems such as Commission Blueprint 2.0 and Niche Blueprint 2.0 which were introduced originally as complete training programs in their own right. Steve and Tim are also really happy with the fact that they have introduced their own selection of software and tools which can take care of tasks such as keyword research and back links. You will find ten programs in all although if you have performed any online marketing work before you might find there is some overlap and you won’t need all of them. Even so, to have all of these obtainable within one particular membership will be both valuable and convenient.

As a novice internet marketer there is lots of new information to get your head around while you utilize the site for the first time. It really is easy to keep bouncing in and out of different elements of the training area which in turn just ends in hopeless confusion. The recommendation here should be to first check out another section on the website referred to as the newbie action plan. Additionally, there’s a community forum available which you could acquire help and advice.

If you’re content buying a monthly membership, you truly will get access to a valuable resource aimed at helping you succeed and from two internet marketer’s who have gained a track record of great customer service.

If you hope to earn money from your blog, you have two options. One option is to buy a domain name and create the blog on a site that belongs to you. The second choice is to promote AdSense and other affiliate programs from a free blog created at blogger.com However, you will not want to use a free WordPress blog because if you try to promote affiliate programs, WordPress will end up canceling your account. But as I mentioned earlier, you will be able to set up a WordPress blog on your own domain, if that is the way you prefer to go.

If you make the decision to purchase a domain, you can easily install a WordPress blog with a pushbutton option in your cPanel account. This option is better so that you build up your individual site and not something that is owned and controlled by Google. But you can, of course, use the free blog if you want to get going without spending the few dollars a month for your own web hosting account and domain name.

Once you decide how you want to begin, you will then be able to add Adsense to your blog and start blogging about different affiliate programs. Try to begin blogs that cover subjects you enjoy so you will not have any problems adding posts every day. This will be instrumental in attaining high rankings in the search engines. Another thing you need to do when promoting affiliate programs is never go for the hard sell. Tell people what the product can do for them and leave a link for the product, but never, ever try to push people into purchasing as you will end up just pushing them away from your blog.

It’s imperative that you promote each blog post as well. The best way to do this is by using article marketing to create links to each post or you can even use social bookmarking because this will also provide you with valuable links. Eventually, you will be known as an expert in your particular niche which will give you required credibility when it concerns affiliate promotions. You will soon have your very own lucrative blog if you take the time to implement these uncomplicated steps.