Internet Marketing skills can be very valuable to local, brick-and-mortar businesses. If a local business owner wants to develop an effective Web presence, but doesn’t know how, you could be the answer to his or her prayers.

The key is to avoid some basic mistakes that “IM” types tend to make when first approaching businesses in their locale:

Don’t expect a sale the first time you talk to a business owner. You need to develop some rapport. After all, you’re a consultant, not a “salesman”. Steer clear of having a “package” of services that you tout almost immediately. Don’t make the newbie mistake of having solutions in search of problems. Find out what the problem is first. Don’t think that you’re wasting your time if the owner wants to talk at length about his or her business. You’ll be able to mine nuggets of information from this kind of freewheeling talk. Avoid using “IM” speak. The jargon, catchwords and methods you know so well are going to be foreign to practically all local business owners. Ever try to explain what you do online to your friends and family? It’s even worse with a business owner whose eyes just glazed over! Don’t forget to ask for a referral, even if you can’t help this particular business. Some folks just don’t have the need for an online presence. However, they may be the type who talk frequently with other business owners. Make sure they think you are remarkable – and remark about you frequently! Don’t badmouth their website, no matter how horrible it is! Once you open a dialogue about their Web presence, you can find tactful ways to explain how a clean, simple, attractive Web page will do more for the business than the one that’s up there. Keep in mind, a family member or friend may have done the work. Don’t insult that person!

Here’s one simple “do” — find out how this person got into business and be genuinely interested in the answer. This will lead to understanding the business’s sales process, business plan, most profitable merchandise/services, any underused capacity and what causes the most aggravation.

In fact, that’s the biggest “don’t”. Don’t promote that which causes aggravation for the owner!

Learn to view your efforts as a local business consultant as a process, not a series of one-and-done sales. You’ll be glad you did!

If you are like most business owners today, you have found it imperative to have a website. Even if you don’t sell products online, having a web presence is part of being in business, as much as having a sign out front for a retail store. The real challenge for many people is simply getting people to visit the site after it is created. Why do you want higher traffic on your site? As we all know, if you are not on the first page or two of the search engine results, you don’t exist online, for the most part. If your site has more traffic, your site will come up higher in search listings on search engines such as Google.

This, in turn, brings yet more traffic. Even if you are not a dotcom based business, higher exposure means more visibility, and thus a greater chance of being found locally. This is more important than many people think. How many times have you typed in something such as “barbecue restaurant Houston” in a search engine in hopes of finding a good barbecue restaurant in your own back yard? It happens all the time. Even though the business may not do business online, having that website with relevant information such as a phone number, hours of operation, and directions brings in business. It is key to building a small business, whether the business has a local impact or global. So, how do you get traffic?

This can be a daunting task, to say the least. Websites can be optimized for better results using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, which would be applied by a technical development firm. SEO is essential to having a highly ranked website, without question. It requires technical knowledge and considerable work to accomplish. It is an affordable way to build a business; however, there are also things even a non-technical person can do to help boost traffic on their website.

#1 Submit To Search Engines

Go to the search engine of your choice, such as Google, and find their link for “recommend a site” or “suggest my site”. I mention Google many times in this article, as they are the industry behemoth; however these techniques apply to virtually any search engine. You only need to do this once, and you only need to submit your main page. DO NOT submit it every week, as this will be regarded as spam and will hurt your rankings, not help them. Follow the simple instructions to submit your site, and then let the search engine do the rest. You should do this for as many search engines as you can find.

There are over 300 of them out there that I know of, so this will take a bit of time, but it is worth it. Be sure you at least cover the major engines, such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and a few others. It is not absolutely imperative to be listed with all 300, however it won’t hurt. This is your first way to let the search engines know you exist. There is no reason to pay for inclusion in a search engine, as they all allow free inclusion. Be certain to choose a relevant category when asked, as this will determine where you are placed in their directory.

#2 Add Your URL to Your Signature File

Be sure your signature file in your email programs always includes your URL (which is your website address). This will ensure your URL is available to anyone and everyone that ever gets an email from you, regardless of whether it is personal or business. You want to spread the word about the website, and this is essentially free advertising. Take advantage of it!

#3 Get Back links

This is just another way of saying that you want other sites to link to you. Be sure to find sites that would be complementary, and not competitive with you. Any place you can have your link available as a link will help you. Google and many other search engines use back links as a means of determining how important your site is. If you have a lot of people linking to your site, you must be useful, therefore that weighs in on determining how highly you rank in the search engines. The algorithm used to determine search engine placement is highly complex; however this is an important factor in the mix. You can often ask webmasters of sites to give you a link. Don’t expect amazon.com or some other behemoth to link to you, but you can get them from other sites.

The other way to get links for free is to post a relevant video about your product or service on a sharing site such as YouTube. If you want people to watch the video, make sure it is useful general information, not a sales pitch. I won’t go on YouTube to search for an infomercial, however if you have a video that is a “How To” on a topic, I will watch it. If a real estate agent wanted to make a video, perhaps one that speaks generally to a topic such as “how to obtain financing in today’s market” would bring in traffic. This should be very general and appealing to a large segment of the population, as my example would. If your link appears on the description, I will probably click it to see how your site relates to the video. This is a key component to building awareness of your site. Again, you must remember that you don’t want to focus too much on selling here; you want to simply present interesting information that happens to also contain your link.

Doing this will bring tons of other hits. If it appears too much like a sales pitch, people will not be as interested in it, and it will not become viral. I have done this myself many times, and the results are certainly worth it. I posted a video about a classic Corvette racing around a track, which is very appealing to other muscle car fans. I also added my link in the description to my Corvette Restoration website, which is simply a free site where I show pictures of the progress of my restoration. I have received hundreds of thousands of hits on the video and thousands on my site as a result – all for free!

I hope you find these techniques and tips helpful in optimizing your position on the web. The tips described here are not meant to be the absolute magic formula to getting more search engine traffic, as that is a complex challenge which requires knowledge of many areas of technology. This is merely meant as a guide to help get a small business site up and running more effectively. Using these techniques will certainly help, although you should not expect results overnight. As with anything else, it takes time.