Essential Small Business Internet Marketing Tools

In my last post I referred to supporting your business website with the proper tools to help with your Internet Marketing plan.

Well the next obvious question is what are these tools. Listed here are the essential tools that I recommend all small business owners incorporate into their IM plan.

1. Fresh website - To reiterate what I spoke about in my last post, that does not mean going out and spending a pile of cash on a great looking design. Fresh simply means that if you currently have a website that is more than couple of years old then you should build a new site with a simple and clean design. Remember visitors are looking for info!

2. Web Site Opt-In Form - While you will be working hard to get visitors to your site it is essential to get more for your efforts than just seeing another visit in your website stats. You want to create the opportunity to market to those visitors again and again through your email list. Your email list will be comprised of visitors/customers who have requested to receive more information from you. But how do you get this list in the first place...through your opt-in form. Your opt-in form will be a simple form on your website that visitors can complete to receive more information from your business. This could be a monthly newsletter, or the top ten list of important points they should know before buying your type of service or product. Once they complete this form then the rest is handled through your autoresponder account (see number 3 below).

3. An Autoresponder - Many may ask what is an autoresponder account. This is a tool that is used for email marketing. An autoresponder will allow you to contact your clients via email to notify them of your latest news, upcoming promos, new products/services you are introducing, or just providing them with information related to your business that can help them. Now an autoresponder is different than an email marketing application. With an autoresponder you can create a return email that will be automatically sent to a subscriber. For example you have an opt-in form on your website where visitors can sign up for your monthly mail out on your latest promos. Once a new visitor signs up through your opt-in form they will immediately receive a confirmation email sent by your autoresponder thanking them for signing up as a subscriber. The key is that you create the thank you message once and your autoresponder delvers this automatically without requiring any manual intervention on your part. You can take this a step further and create a series of responses that will be sent out at varying intervals to your subscribers. So they would receive your than you message immediately and then on the second day receive another message, two days after that another, each message building on the previous. This allows you to keep in touch with your client and deliver valuable info without you having to manually send this info each time to every customer. There is much more to an autoresponder than I discussed here but this is one essential tool to have in your IM plan.

If you want more info then visit AWeber who has one of the best autoresponders you will find in the market.

4. Twitter Account - Twitter is a social networking service that allows you to post what you are doing many times a day so that your followers can keep up to date with you. Now if you have never heard of Twitter before, not likely, or at least have never used it then this may seem like a lame thing to be at but Twitter is taking the business world by storm. The cool thing about Twitter is that there is 100% deliverability...if you post it your followers will see it. Just think about having thousands of followers who you know will see every message you post.

Check out Joel Comm's latest book called Twitter Power - It will make you a believer.

5. Google Analytics Account - Google analytics will allow you to see vital stats about the visitors to your website. Basic, necessary information such as the keywords that visitors used to find your site, what pages are visited most often, bounce rate, how long visitors stay on your site and much more. Analytics allow you to measure various parameters and then adjust your marketing campaign accordingly. There is too much to go into in this blog post but web analytics is a vital component of your IM plan.

6. Pay-Per-Click Account - Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, for those who do not know exactly what I am talking about, is a form of Internet advertising where you create an ad that will be posted on the search engine of your choice and the best part is that you only pay for the ad when someone clicks on your ad to go to your website. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is an essential component of your IM plan because it is the cheapest and fastest way to get visitors to your website to see what you are offering. You can have the best offer on the web but if no one can see it then it isn't worth much. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is much talked about when we discuss Internet Marketing and some view it is the pinnacle of your marketing plan but SEO needs to be complimented with a PPC campaign. SEO traffic also referred to as organic traffic doesn't cost you anything but the it takes work to get your site listed in the search engines where searchers can actually find you It isn't much good to be on page 552 of 1,000,000 pages as searchers rarely go beyond the first three pages of their search results. PPC offers business owners an opportunity to get your site listed on the first page of a search engine results within minutes of posting your ad. So while you are waiting for your site to gain ranking within the search engines you still have an opportunity to get visitors to your site.

The number one search engine for B2B is Google but YaHoo and MSN work very well for the B2C model and they are cheaper than Google.


While these are not all the essentials these are the ones I recommend to business owners who do not have a marketing plan in place. I will discuss others in a future post.