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If you operate or own a web site in Las Vegas, then you know that you have to promote both on and off the internet.  You have to incorporate both factors  to be successful with an eCommerce Las Vegas business.  I have talked several large Internet retailers and they gave me a helpful insight into their internet marketing programs.  Made perfect sense, so I thought I’d pass it along to our client.

We all know that eBay is the #1 auction market place on the internet today, correct?  Millions of dollars are spent every week on their website promotions on the internet and it continues to grow every day. I’m not going to tell you to open up a store and start selling your entire product line to Ebay buyers… that would be costly with too little profit.

What I will say is to put a few of your company’s top sellers in an auction, either fixed or auction type.  This will help you attract viewers because your product is hot and people will want to purchase it.  The key to this tactic is to place links on your auction site that direct viewers to your main corporate site which carries your entire product line.  If you do it correctly, your traffic could explode with all targeted customers.  You might not be making a ton of money with eBay items that you sell, but if you do it right the profit you make from these targeted customers will far outweigh small profit margins.  Just give it a try because there’s nothing to lose and you just might be happy with your results!

If you run an eCommerce website you probably ask yourself often how many people visit your website and DON’T purchase from you. Are you confident that your site converts visitors into customers at the highest rate possible? Do you feel like you have truly tried everything possible to increase your conversion rate?

Ask yourself: Do you have a strong call to action? Have you tried different messaging with a split A-B landing pages? There are always different strategies and tactics to explore when marketing your Las Vegas website. Unless you’re 100% sure that your website has no room for improvements, then you should take some time to explore how to continue to maximize sales.

Here are some website marketing strategies you might consider:

Bait your website visitors with the right cheese

Online shoppers are increasingly more sophisticated each year. Assume that your prospects will visit several competitor websites before they make a decision to purchase. Your website needs to stand out and clearly communicate the benefit your website holds over your competitors. You might need a special nugget of “cheese” that encourages visitors to surf around your website for example, free shipping, suggested selling or a free sample offer. Decide what cheese you can use to entice visitors.

Create value-add offers

Partner up with other websites and companies with whom you can cross promote each other’s products or services. Exchange bonus offers with each other and help each other grow. You could offer a discount on each other’s services, gift cards, an inexpensive give-away, gift cards, etc.

Offer free gifts that encourage viral marketing

Think of a promotional item that your website visitors will keep in their purse, wallet or car at all times. A well thought out promotion item helps create awareness and can help in creating a viral marketing buzz. A phone card is a great example. You can brand it, people keep it in their wallet and they are design for repeated use and keep your brand in front of them several times a week.

Personalize your offers

Try to find ways to personalize your offers, make your prospects feel special, customize your offer with their name, by their city, state or country. Find a partner you could help cross-promote with personalized branded giveaways, coupons or offers.

Give away an item that is perceived as valuable

Free offers are nice, but “free” sometimes can sound a bit negative, so keep the percieved value of what you are offering a prospect high.

Here’s an example:

“Get a FREE phone card if you order by midnight.” (versus) “Receive your complimentary phone card worth 2 hours of free phone calls worldwide as our personal thank you gift for your online order today.”

With a little thought and research, you can find that perfect cheese that will help YOU convert more sales on your eCommerce website!

Evaluating Your Website’s Performance

Setting up a website for your Las Vegas business is the very first step of marketing your website on the internet. The success of your website depends on the goals you set and accomplish. 

If you expect your site to move your visitors to take some form of action while on your website, whether it is visitors filling out a simple online form so that you can contact them, or purchasing a product online, there are specific steps you can take to insure that your web site is functioning efficienctly. One of the very first ways to tell is to check on your website’s traffice. It’s a great tool to judge normal traffic vs. traffic at times when you are running promotional marketing and activities.

Having a large amount of traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that your site is successful at getting your business leads and sales. You want visitors to take action while on your website; call you, submit a form for a quote, make a purchase, etc. This is known as your website’s conversion rate and is essential in judging your website.

How to calculate your website’s conversion rate

To find your web site’s conversion rate, you take the number of visitors per month and guestimate the percentage of your visitors that actually purchased something. So, if you had 1000 hits to your site in one week, but only 10 of them purchased from you, your site conversion rate equals 1.00%. 

If your website’s goal is to get your visitors to fill out a form, make sure to figure out the difference between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. Not everyone who fills out your online form will actually become a client. However, whether your site is setup to sell a product or service, or to get them to fill a form out, your website conversion rate measures the success and/or failure of your site whenever you promote or update your website.

Over time, you just may find that you need to implement a few additional marketing strategies if your website traffic and conversion rates are low. Some ideas that might help are implementing a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy so that you can rank on search engines for organic searches. More visitors will be able to find your website more easily. Once your SEO strategy is in place, you should monitor your rankings and make any needed adjustments regularly to keep or grow your SEO rankings.

You should also review the usability and ease of your “call-to-action” on your website. How simple is it for a visitor to take action and what motivates them to take action? If you want them to fill out an inquiry form, for example, how easy is the form to find? How is it called out on your home page. How simple is the form to fill out? If the form is too long, it may discourage your website’s visitors to fill it out.

Lastly, write the copy on your website (especially the home page) carefully and with a keen marketing sense in mind. Remember the goals of your website and gear the copy to encourage visitors to take action. The right copy writing can be the difference between profit and loss for your website.

Most of the time, the biggest hurdle that most, if not all, small businesses, especially in Las Vegas, have is a limited marketing and advertising budget. Having a small business budget makes it difficult for your Las Vegas business to have the most glamorous marketing and advertising campaign. Advertising can be pretty expensive, especially when you have so many other things that can eat up your budget.

With a limited budget in mind, you should consider some less expensive and cost-effective forms of advertising your business including:

Website

Even with a small budget, you can get a small simple website up fairly inexpensively. Good news about a website is it can advertise your Las Vegas business 24/7.

Flyers

Create a simple flyer (you can do this yourself in Word) that you can hand to potential clients, as leave behinds in other businesses. Include an incentive or special offer to get better results. You can print a simple flyer on your own printer or have it printed in bulk at a copy center fairly cheaply.

Google AdWords

Advertise on google and come up on the first page as a “Sponsored Listing” and help deliver website traffic and leads for your business. Most times, you can find relatively cheap keywords to bid on and you can set your own monthly budget.

Sponsor Community Events

Donate services and/or time to local Las Vegas community events and be recognized as a supporter of your community. Often times you’ll receive a way to promote your business through a free ad, a press release or PR event. This can help give you an edge over your competitors as well!

Hang in There!

The key is not get frustrated because you only have a small budget to work with. Small businesses are often very imaginative, especially when it comes to stretching their money and making sure that each dime is put to good use.

Ways to promote your Las Vegas website in a cost-effective manner.

So just what is the difference between promoting your Las Vegas website and a traditional brick and mortar store? It’s a common question asked by many new business owners and internet marketers. It turns out the principles are the same but the methods are a bit different. Let’s take a look at how they differ.

The primary goal of the promotion and awareness-building of both is to first create awareness of its existence. Secondly, you need to communicate to potential customers to know what exact products and services you offer and why it will make their life or running their business more easily. Next you want to show them how your products and services are better than any others others in the market. This is all to achieve your final goal of visiting your Las Vegas website or store. Making the sale is another lengthy topic all together.

If you have a sizable advertising budget, you can start by advertising in the New York Times or on NBC for a brick and mortar store or on Google or Yahoo sites if you’re on the internet. If you do not have a large budget, there are many cost-effective ways you can promote your Las Vegas website.

8 Cheap Ways to Promote Your Las Vegas Website

1. Tell your friends and family all about your website. On average, a person has a couple of hundred family members and friends. Email them, stay in touch and let them know!
2. Sign up for a leads service that will refer leads to your Las Vegas website. This will be a nominal expense in relation to the leads if you utilize the right service.
3. Post your helpful articles and opinions on forum web sites. This helps add credibility to you as an expert in your field and will refer people back to your web site.
4. Consider Search Engine Marketing (SEM). An paid advertising campaign on Google Adwords is another way to reach your potential clients. You can choose the exact phrases and words you want and set your own monthly budget.
5. Create a flyer or simple tri-fold brochure that promotes your Las Vegas business and your web site.
6. Place newspaper classifieds in local Las Vegas newspapers. You can generate a very cost effective campaign using weekly newspapers that are less expenisve and can reach your target market in Las Vegas and beyond.
7. Write and publish helpful and insightful articles just like this one that showcase your expertise and knowledge and help direct clients back to your web site.
8. Start your own Las Vegas blog on your website. Your own company blog allows you to add more pages of content to your website and more pages of rich content helps with SEO efforts.

For more ways to promote your website for free, consider doing a google search for “free ways to promote my website” and see what other helpful tips come up. It takes a little time to do the research, but the benefits can be very beneficial!

When you first start your Las Vegas website, promoting it is an essential way of getting visitors to your website. If you don’t promote it, then chances are very few people are going to find it, and receiving a lot of traffic to your website can be absolutely critical, especially if you are running a business and need to generate revenue from visitors clicking on ads or buying your products. There are plenty of websites that claim to promote your website for a price, but there are plenty of methods you can use to promote your Las Vegas for free.

The first method is one that you’ve probably already thought of, and one that any website owner can and should do. That is promoting your website through word of mouth. Tell everyone you know, and tell them to tell people they know. This can actually be very effective if the chain is kept going. Also, if someone is asking about a service you offer on a forum, you can make a post there telling them about it. Also, speaking of forums, put your website in your signature.

Another way of promoting your website is becoming an affiliate of other websites. If you offer to put a small banner of their website on your website, they might allow you to put a banner of your own on their website. This can be a great way to promote your website, since, unlike the paid ads you see on many websites, people will actually end up clicking on these with genuine interest, especially if the website caters to a similar group that yours does.

You’ve probably heard of websites such as Stumbleupon and Digg. Millions of people use these social bookmarking sites. You can generate massive traffic to your website by adding your website to as many social bookmarking sites as you can. It’s a guaranteed way of getting your website noticed.

Of course, the most common way people find websites is through search engines such as Google. Most search engines actually will add your site to their database automatically, so you don’t have to do a thing. However, if you look around you find less well known search engines that may not. Most of these will have some way of submitting your website to them free of charge. Make sure you do so.

Perhaps the most important way is by creating content that visitors will find interesting. After all, if people come to your website and then leave, not liking what they see, then they won’t buy from you or tell other people about your website. Less visitors also means a lower spot in search engines.

Blog marketing in Las Vegas is a comparable new form of Internet marketing, which depends on blogs as the main attraction of advertising. Blogs are fantastic at alluring search engine traffic in Las Vegas. Their format advances itself to the search engine so it can be updated frequently and easily. Many companies find that blogs are a great way to keep in touch with their customers and increase search engine exposure all at once. Blog marketing is a cornerstone of a strong advertising crusade, and has become a substantial vehicle for public relations.

Blogs are basically websites that show information in a specific way. Blogs allow themselves to be updated quickly and easily by members of a company. They stimulate customer participation, viral marketing and feedback. For these reasons, they are perceived as a strong supplement to existing business websites, but in various ways a greater power in terms of connecting to a new or existing customer.

Businesses want to use blog marketing because it easily brings in inbound links from other sites. Sites can be hesitant to link to a corporate site. A blog usually feels interesting, and therefore other blogs and online guides may be attracted to link to it. Blogs solve one of the ample problems of businesses trying to adjust to the world of online marketing. The best kind of advertising does not come from paid ads. It comes from word of mouth.

It is important to create a blog that is interesting. Businesses have found that by letting employees discuss the business openly and freely fascinates people. People love to see the inner workings of major corporations. Blogs give you an uncensored view in to that thrilling world. Some businesses even have the CEO’s blogging. People are interested in hearing from individuals who are at the peak of an organization.

Blog marketing is also a great way to reach out to customers. For example, new product releases can be written about on a blog and regular readers will be informed instantly. The reader will link to his or her own communications, creating a promising buzz about the product before it is even released. Blogs have also been used in place of press releases.

People involved in blog marketing may also want to participate in the company through honest feedback. There are commenting tools on blogs that allow customers to give their feedback instantly. This can help businesses to improve on their products. Blogs are great tools for businesses to get honest and direct customer feedback.

If you’re interested in having a blog designed and built for your Las Vegas company or business, please contact us here at Perkolate at 702.341.0085.

For More Information on Blogs and Blog Marketing, see:

• What is Blog Marketing and How Can it Help Your Las Vegas Business
• RSS Feeds and Marketing Your Las Vegas Blog
• Submit Your Las Vegas Blog to Blog Directories
• Promote and Syndicate Content from Your Blog or Else

The Great Equalizer
The Internet provides equal access to it users, whether you are a small business, organization or a Fortune 500 firm.

Improved Customer Service
Your web site is a great place to publish your own list of “Frequently Asked Questions”, contact information, and even discussion boards!

Low Cost Advertising
When compared to the costs associated with traditional advertising methods such as direct mail, newspaper or magazine ads, or radio and television, the cost of a web site is nominal. A Web site is easier, cheaper and quicker to update than print material, like a printed brochure. Its capacities are almost limitless which allow you to provide users with more comprehensive information. This will save you money on printing and distribution costs as well.

Great Demographic
Surveys have shown that the average Internet user is 36 years old, has a college education, and an annual income of $65,000.

24 X 7 Availability
The time of day is now irrelevant. With a web site your products, services and information become available to anyone with Internet access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Product and Service Demonstrations
Multimedia presentations allow you to provide your customers with an in-depth, interactive experience with your products and services.

Gather Information and Generate Valuable Leads
You can gather information about your customers and potential customers by using forms and surveys. Rather than going out and getting leads, let them come to you. This is a great tool for prospecting targeted customers looking to use your products and services.

Your Competitors Have One
As more and more businesses and organizations get online, those who don’t will increasingly be putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

Present a Professional Image
For a small business, a well-designed Web site is a great way of instilling confidence and looking bigger than you actually are. In this day in age, customers assume that you already have a Web site. By now, your primary competitors probably already have a presence on the Internet. If they do, keep up with them and find ways to make yours better. If they don’t, your will be the one out in front.

Promote & Sell Your Products Services
Promotion of businesses on the Web lets customers see that they have a choice. Millions of users are referring to the Web and are using company’s Web sites to make major decisions when they need a specialized service like yours.

If you’re interested in help with your website design, marketing or promotion, please contact Perkolate at 702.341.0085 or email us at fullsteam@perkolate.com.

If there is something an Online business or Las Vegas website could live without, it could be anything but not Search Engine Optimization (SEO)! This is so true, especially in Las Vegas. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is no longer an enigma for websites, as it was years ago. This should be implemented along with your new website or be added onto your existing website in order to increase traffic and organic search engine results.

A consolidated SEO effort is important for you to work sales to your website. Remember, at the end of the day, that is what you want from your website, unless you are running a charity.

Here is why SEO is important for any website

• Allows people to see your company in the crowded Internet marketplace – years ago, you did not have to do a lot to get your website noticed. The internet those days wasn’t as popular and you could get your website noticed pretty easily. Unthinkable these days!  In any niche you mention, your website runs a risk of getting lost in the thousands of other websites in the same niche. To avoid all of this, you should optimize your website. And SEO is the best tool for it!

• SEO, the best way to drive Search engine traffic. Love it or hate it, the fact is that 70% of your website traffic comes from search engines. It is thus important for you to cater your website to the search engine spiders. Of course, you could promote your site directly or through word of mouth, but how much traffic would you be able to get to your site?

• SEO allows you to be profitable in a competitive niche. Your website would still be able to survive the test of time, if you are not working in a competitive niche. Competitive niche essentially means that the products from that niche are in high demand. With the products in high demand, you can be sure of one thing – A lot of people will be interested in your products and services.

The importance of SEO for an online business is not something that can be expressed in a matter of some words. Remember, every time a website goes live, the business owner or company’s aim is for sales and without SEO, hitting that sales number will be more challenging.

If you are considering doing your own SEO/Search Engine Optimization, then here are some links for further explaination:

Free Keyword Research Tool for SEO

As a marketing professional, you might consider radio advertising to promote your Las Vegas business or company. Radio advertising can be effective and cost-efficient. It can help you widen your brand awareness, advertise specials and promotions and gain more clients.

Radio stations are a great place to reach your specific target market because radio stations are formatted for and marketed to very targeted audiences. Think of the difference in audiences that listed to talk radio vs. oldies vs. top 40 vs. hard rock. Furthermore, a radio station’s audience is broken out further into specific times of day a particular segment listens, morning drive time vs. late night, for example.  The demographics are also broken into age groups as well.

In a nutshell, radio offers a very highly targeted way of reaching a specific audience in the Las Vegas market.

If you are considering radio advertising in Las Vegas, you might think ahead about:

• Who will create your radio spot/s?
• How many times will your ad/s run, on what stations, and at what times?
• Will you work with a marketing/advertising agency or try to set up the ad campaign yourself?
• How will you judge the results of your efforts?
• What is your budget?
• Who will write your ad?
• How will you negotiate the ad rates offered?