You Must Learn Internet Marketing To Be Successful In Business

April 5th, 2011 by Greg Giovanni 2 comments »

The Internet has become a very powerful place to market your business. If you don’t get on the bandwagon and learn Internet marketing, you’ll be lost and out of business in the very near future. There are a few businesses that don’t need Internet marketing to survive, but yours must not be one of them because you are reading this article, so you must learn about Internet marketing.

One of the simplest ways to market your business on the Internet is using pay-per-click or better known as PPC. Google, Bing and Yahoo all have PPC programs you can sign up for. Google has the strongest PPC program and it’s called Adwords.

I started using Adwords for my dry cleaning consulting business just over 3 years ago and it was the reason I was successful. I had no idea if it would work and did not think that dry cleaners were looking online for marketing help. Boy was I wrong.  I get 2-5 leads every day for my dry cleaning consulting. And it’s helped my business grow into a very serious 6-figure profit business for me.

I went online to Google’s Adword site and signed up. I limited my budget to only $5/day to test it out. Right from the very first day, I got dry cleaners to opt-in on my website.

I also list my local dry cleaning pick-up and delivery business with Google and I get customers every month with that too. PPC has been very good to me. It’s a great way to start your Internet marketing without much risk at all.

I would recommend that you look up a guy named Perry Marshall. He’s the guru of this PPC stuff and he’s got a great eBook called, “The Definitive Guide To Adwords.”

If you learn Internet marketing strategy #1, which is PPC, it will grow your business like you never imagined. It worked for me and it can work for you.

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Posted in Internet Business Tools, Marketing

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What Cell Phone Marketing Strategies Can You Use?

March 14th, 2011 by Greg Giovanni 2 comments »

Marketing cell phones is not what it used to be. Cell phone marketing has changed over the years because most every one has cell phones and you’d only be changing the network they’d be on.

So what you’d have to do is pick your “Unique Selling Point or USP”, whatever that is. It might be your price. It could be that your network in your area is the strongest. You could have the iPhone.

One of the ways you could find out what your USP is would be to ask your customers. And a simple way to ask your customers is through an online survey company called Survey Monkey. I use them all the time and the level I use is free. Or you can do it the old fashion way and get on the phone and call a bunch of your customers and ask them what they like about your cell phone service. And after you get all those answers, you can easily put together your USP because most of your respondents will be telling you the same thing.

And once you have your USP, then that’s what you base your cell phone marketing strategies on. You have to hit that USP hard and strong in all the advertising you do.

One strategy is to use the Google Adwords program for your local area. You can pick your local city and you can

Cell Phone Marketing Has Changed From These Days!

pick the times that you want your ads to show. For example, if you’re going after businesses, you might want your ad to only show during the week from 8-6pm.  And the reason you want to do that is because you don’t want residential type people clicking on your ads when it’s only businesses cell phone business that you want to attract.

Another strategy is to add a blog to your website. Google and the other search engines love blogs. Set it up a WordPress blog because Google really likes these. Write a bunch of articles using the keywords that your potential customer base would use.

This article is on my blog. You got here because I targeted a keyword that you would type in. I wrote this article with that keyword in mind. And the way that you can get all the keywords you need is to go to Google’s Keyword Tool and plug in something like, “cell phones.”  Doing that will get you a ton of keywords that your potential customers will use to search for you.  One thing you must do is to localize your keywords.

What do I mean by that? If, for example, your keyword is “cell phones”, you must add your town, state and zip code.  Mine would be, “cell phones pittsford ny 14534.” By localizing it, you will ONLY get local people looking for cell phones, not people all over the country.

A blog post does not have to be long and get over the writing part of it. I flunked English in 11th grade and I make my living writing. I even have two books that you can purchase on Amazon.

I’ve given you some good ideas. Now go to work to put them into place.

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What Dental Marketing Ideas Can You Use In Your Practice?

February 23rd, 2011 by Greg Giovanni 6 comments »

There’s offline and online dental marketing ideas that you can use. I’m going to give you a list of both of those and some ideas on how to use each one of them.

Let’s start with offline first. Have you ever heard of “emotional direct response marketing?” I’m sure you’ve heard of “direct marketing?” Direct marketing is doing a mailing, running an advertisement, a TV or radio commercial and expecting a response.  That response would be a call to your dental office or sending in some kind of a response card.

The most common types of emotional direct response marketing ideas for dental practices is the sales letter or postcard. There are some essential parts to a postcard or sales letter that you must do for it to be successful and here they are:

  • Headline
  • Story
  • Offer
  • Call To Action
  • Deadline

Let’s start with the headline. Your headline could be something like this:

Miami Dental Gives Away It’s Teeth Whitening Service ($250 Value) Just To Introduce It’s Dental Office To The Community!


Story would go something like this: “Dr. Joe just opened this new office in Miami and has other offices spread throughout Florida. Instead of spending thousands of dollars on advertising, he has decided to give away (against his accountant’s wishes) a $250 Teeth Whitening visit. Dr. Joe reasoning is, ‘why not give the money to our patients to introduce our practice, not the advertising companies.’”

And then you would tell something more about your practice.

The offer: The offer is the $250 in FREE teeth whitening. You’ve got to have a reason for your potential patients to pick up the phone and call you. Get creative. You can use this one or come up with something else.

Call to action: The call to action would be something like this: “Pick up the phone now and call 888-555-1212 to get your FREE whitening visit, but you must do it my Friday, February 25th (which is the deadline)”

So that’s the skinny on “emotional direct response” marketing.

Online Dental Practice Marketing Ideas

There are four areas online that you must conquer to get a constant flow of new patients. They are your SEO’d (search engine optimized) website, your blog, Google Places and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.

Your Website: If you haven’t already done this, you must find out what terms people are searching for in the area of dentistry that you specialize in. Go to Google’s free keyword tool and it will find them for you. Once you have the keywords that people are searching, you must create a page on your website for each keyword and use those keywords throughout your article. This is the article that your prospective new patient will be reading. On every page of your website should be your name, address and phone number.  It’s best to use a WordPress formatted site because you can make the changes yourself very easily. This site is a WordPress site.

Your Blog: Writing articles for your blog are the single most important task you can perform online to get your practice ranked high on Google and the other search engines. Take each one of the keywords you found using the keyword tool and write an article about it. Make sure and include the town, city and zip code of where you want your patients to come from.  Using a WordPress theme blog is best for this. You can get a plugin that does all your SEO work called All In One SEO.

Google Places: Within the last couple of months, Google Places has become paramount in marketing ideas for dental practices for your online strategy.  When someone is looking for a dentist locally, they might put in a keyword something like this: teeth whitening miami fl.  When they do that, a bunch of local dentists will pop up with little red pushpins next to them. See Google screenshot below.

There will either be a 3-pak or a 7-pak of dentist names.  Your goal is to be number one for all the things you specialize in with your practice. There’s not enough room in this article to go into this in detail, but you must get your business signed up in Google Places properly. And you must get some reviews from your patients. You can offer them something for them to go online and say some nice things about you. Don’t fake this, only real patients that really like you and your practice.

PPC or Pay-Per-Click Advertising: These are the ads to the right of the organic listing and sometimes on the top too. Google Adwords is the place to start. If you search around online, you can find $50 up to $100 of free Adwords credit to get started with. Again, take those keywords you found with the keyword tool and get them listed in Adwords.

I’m exhausted! How about you? I just covered lots of material and it’s a lot to let sink in. I can tell you this…you MUST become an expert with this Internet stuff for your dental office marketing ideas. If you don’t, your competition will. You must get really, really good at this. I hope you enjoyed this article. I enjoyed writing it.

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What Is Your Google Marketing Strategy?

February 22nd, 2011 by Greg Giovanni No comments »

Thank goodness for Google. This Google marketing strategy saved my life—Adwords!

Whoever thought dry cleaners were looking for marketing advice on the Internet? I didn’t. Boy was I wrong. I’ve come to find out that four or five dry cleaners a day opt-in and because they want my information. And that has provided me a 6-figure income in the last three years and it’s growing every day.

Adwords is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. You’re gonna want to look up this guy: Perry Marshall. And you’re going to want to get his book, “Definitive Guide To Adwords.” It’s only 50 bucks.

I was investing $1,300 per month with Adwords and it was bringing in over $15,000 per month for me. After I read Perry Marshall’s book, I reduced my spending to $300/month and my income remained the same. And besides saving me all this money, Perry has lots of great ideas based on what your company is selling.

Try a bunch of Google searches that your prospects would use and see what your websites it brings up. Go to Google’s Keyword Tool and put those search terms in and see what other search terms this tool comes up with.

Take the top dozen or so top keywords and open up an account with Adwords. The most important thing with this is to get started. Don’t procrastinate! Get going today. You will make mistakes, but making mistakes is better than taking no action at all.

I limited my liability to only $5 per day, so my risk was only $150/month. That’s not a big risk depending on what your payoff would be. And mine was big!

The next thing you have to do is set up a simple website. I did this with GoDaddy. I now do it with a WordPress site. All you have to do is have some bullets on what your product or service is offering. And then write a short report as a giveaway to entice your prospect to opt-in.

I used Aweber when I first started out to fulfill all my emails. I started with a sequence of about 20 emails to get them to purchase my $2,000 product. My email sequence is now up to over 80 emails. Start with just a few and build it up over time. You don’t need all 80 now, just get going.

So that’s how marketing strategy of Google saved my life. I have other methods of generating leads now, but that’s all I had three and a half years ago when I started. Thank goodness for Google!

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Posted in Internet Business Tools, Marketing, Online Marketing

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How To Get Website Traffic With Ease!

February 21st, 2011 by Greg Giovanni 3 comments »

If you’re looking for traffic locally, I’ve got a great way to get website traffic fast and cheap. And if you’re not looking for website traffic locally, go to this other article.

Are you signed up for Google Places? If not, get signed up. It’s free and it’s your biggest and best chance locally to get tons of traffic.

I’m in the dry cleaning consulting business and I have 300+ members all over the world and they tell me that this one Internet marketing tool gets them boatloads of customers with NO cost. Now there is an investment of time, but no cost. I’m going to give you the basics of getting your account set up on Google Places and some of this stuff is inside information. I’ve been testing Google Places, formally Google Maps and formally Google Local for 5 years. This is the middle ages in Internet time.

The biggest tactic I’ve found over these five years is that you must have a Google Places location for every town, city or suburb that you want to serve. If you’re a plumber, painter, dry cleaner or a company that goes out to your customers, you must be everywhere.

If you’re a doctor, dentist, attorney or any business that attracts clients from many miles away, you must get listed in all the towns around you.

How do you do that? It’s a little tricky or a little black-hat as they call it in the Internet biz. But stick with me and I’ll show you how to do this.

I know you don’t have locations in all the little towns and suburbs around you, so we’ve got to create some. This is how to generate traffic to your website for free and lots of it. The best way to do this is to get a client or customer to agree to use their home as your remote office. No, you don’t have to set up shop there, they just have to agree to let you use it as a mail drop. Lots of companies have remote mail drop offices all over the world. This is the same concept, but it’s around your town. The next best way to do this is to get PO Box in all those small towns. But when you do, you don’t use the PO Box address, you use the post office’s actual street address and use the PO Box number as the suite number. For example: 123 Main Street, Suite 174. You got this?

I have a member that has set up 23 of these remote offices with PO Box’s and customers’ homes. He’s killin it!  He’s bringing in 5-6 brand new route customers each and every single week and it’s not costing him a nickel. It took him some work to get this set up, but after it’s done, it’s automatic. Take this idea, don’t tell your competitors and work it hard.

Special note: I put this together with a plumber 5 years ago in my home town and it’s generating more customers than ever. This is a solid tactic, one that your competitors don’t know about and if they did would be scared to put it into action.  If you put this to work, you will blow him away.

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What Are You Looking For In Email Blast Marketing Campaign?

February 20th, 2011 by Greg Giovanni No comments »

Are you looking for customers or are you looking for prospects that you can put in an email sequence?  Depending what you’re looking for in an email blast marketing campaign, this article will help you out.

Whatever you do, don’t pay good money from these email blast marketing services online and buy their email list. I’ve tried it a couple of times for my dry cleaning marketing business and they failed miserably. Never got a lead or a customer after spending thousands of dollars.

The best way to do an email marketing blast like that is to contact a company similar to yours and work out a joint venture (JV) with that company. I contacted dry cleaning software companies, magazines, and associations and asked them if they would email their list on my behalf.  Most said yes, but there is a price. You could work out something based on every lead or every sale you get. I’ve done it both ways and I’ve made thousand and thousands of dollars this way.

Besides doing JV’s, you could gather your own emails through the Internet. There are several ways to do that. When I first started out online, I Googled “dry cleaner pick up and delivery” and got lots of searches. I went to each one and if they had a new customer contact form, I filled it out and dropped my message in. I figured that they’d always be checking for new customers from their website. I was right! The first week I tried this, I generated $6,000 in sales.

The next thing I did was to set up an Adwords account with Google. This is called Pay-Per-Click advertising or PPC as it’s known in the industry. I never thought dry cleaners were looking online for help with their marketing, but tons of them were. In three years I’ve built up a list of 5,000+ dry cleaners that I email 2-3 times every week. This has been very profitable for me. I spend about $350 dollars a month and it generates $10,000+ in sales for me.

About a year ago, I set up a blog to teach dry cleaners how to market and get customers. The blog is through WordPress and it was free. This little blog generates lots of sales for me to. Just yesterday, a dry cleaner found about me through my blog and ordered my $2,000 marketing package.

To capture my leads, I use autoresponder companies, Infusionsoft , Aweber and Constant Contact. You could start out with Aweber and it will only cost you $20 a month. Same with Constant Contact.

Email is a great way to market your company’s products or services. I would put into action all the things I talked about in this article. You can’t do just one, you must have a variety of methods to bring in leads and sales.

And remember this. if you blast email marketing, you could also get into trouble with spam. And then no email autoresponder company will take you as a customer.

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Are You Looking For Direct Marketing Solutions?

February 19th, 2011 by Greg Giovanni 1 comment »

If you are, you’ve found the right article. Direct marketing solutions is my middle name. Everything I do is direct marketing. There is no image advertising in these bones.

As you probably already know, image advertising is only for the big boys like McDonalds, Pepsi, Coke, Burger King and the rest of them. As a small business owner, you and I can’t spend millions just to get our businesses in the top of someone’s mind, but the big boys can.

You need something that you can measure. You need something that you can take to the bank and deposit. You need customers and you need them now. You can’t wait for some image advertising ad to kick in. You need those customers calling and walking through your door.

Part of direct marketing is direct mail marketing solutions. Direct mail is still alive and well, even though the Internet is getting so much attention. In my business I use both and I’ve been using direct mail more in the last year or so. Why? Because the Internet is so cluttered and it’s hard to get your message out there. If a mail piece of yours shows up in the mail, it’s only competing with the other mail pieces, not 50 million things on the Internet.

Let’s talk about how to structure direct marketing ad or sales letter.  The most important in either of these is the headline. The headline is 90% of your ad/letter. Tweaking your headline can double your sales. Check out the 100 best headlines ever written.

So working on your headline is the first thing you should do. Take the list of headlines from above and use these ideas to come up with your own headline. You should come up with a list of 6 or so that you can work with. This will take a half an hour or so. This is the beginning point. This is the first thing I do when I’m developing an ad or sales letter.
And then take your top 2 or 3 headlines and test them. I test them several ways. The first test I do is the Starbucks test. I make up 10 sheets with my 6 headlines on them and ask random people at my Starbucks to tell me which one they like the best. I gather all of those and take the top two.

Next I develop two Google ads through my Adwords account and run them side-by-side and see which one out pulls the other.  This little exercise will get me a very accurate idea of which headline will work.  But the final exam is testing it on your market.

The next step in your ad/letter is to have an offer. My dry cleaning business offer is: “10 In FREE Dry Cleaning Just To Try Us Out.”  It’s simple, but effective.

And the last part of this is the call to action. You must tell them to pick up the phone or come in to see you.

This does not cover everything in using direct marketing, but it’s a start. Good luck with your direct marketing endeavors.

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How To Generate Website Traffic

February 18th, 2011 by Greg Giovanni 5 comments »

This is the big question today in business. I’m going to tell you about the primary way to generate website traffic and it’s free. You’re going to have to do the work, but it’s free to you. You won’t have to hire a soul to get it done or you can hire someone to do certain parts of it.

I have 200+ websites. Most of my sites are only 4-5 pages. Some are 250+ pages. Depending on what you want your website to do, will determine the number of pages and how you should structure it.

One thing is common with all my websites and that is all of them are built with the WordPress platform. Why? It’s simple to build and update and Google likes WordPress. It’s simple to rank in the search engines if you follow some very easy instructions and you’ll generate more website traffic. And the best part about WordPress is that it’s FREE! They have a bunch of free themes too.

Pick out a WordPress theme and go get it attached to your website or if you don’t have a website, make it your website.

If you want to generate free traffic to your website, start a blog. Blog’s are used differently today that they were when the Internet started. Most people think that a blog is used only as a journal or a way to rant and tell things about you that you want to get out there. Not today. Blog are used by smart businesses to get high rankings in the search engines by talking about their businesses.

Why does Google and the search engines like blogs? Because blogs are constantly being updated with fresh information and the search engines like that. They are never static, they’re always fresh. If your site was built 3 years ago and nothing was ever added, the search engines think it’s dead, so they won’t look on it favorably and pass right by it.

So what do you write in your blog? You write about your company, but you do it in a way that the search engines will notice you and that is done with keywords. This article is a blog post. You wrote some words in the search bar and hit search and you found this article. This article is written around a keyword and it’s cousins. Cousins are keywords similar to the keyword.

This is the beginning of generating free traffic to your website (just used a cousin keyword). Do your homework and it won’t be long and you’ll be getting listed high up there in the search engines and people will find your website.

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Are You Looking For Computer Consulting Services?

February 2nd, 2011 by Greg Giovanni 1 comment »

Are You Looking For Computer Consulting Services?

First of all, do you have Apple Mac’s or PC’s? When you’re looking for computer consulting services, you must find out if these guys are good at what they do. You can pay $30 bucks an hour for someone who stinks or you can pay $75/hour for someone that’s good. You usually get what you pay for.

I would not contract with a computer consulting services corporation unless they come highly recommended. If you just pick someone based on their presentation, you really have no idea how good they really are. You must contract with a company that has done some work for someone you know.

If you can’t do that, I would hold back 25% of the contract price for 30 days after the installation is complete. Why? Because something unforeseen could go wrong. You never know, especially with computers.

I used to have PC’s. John was my PC consultant. I met him at Starbucks and I liked him as a person, so I decided to give him a try. He was able to figure out my problems very quickly and solve them with accuracy. And then he was around if anything went wrong down the road. If I had a small challenge he was able to get into my computers through LogMeIn.com and do it from his home office. This saved lots of time and money.

He is such a nice and fair businessman, that I would sometimes pay him more and I would also give him some of my homemade soups and wine.

I trusted him with my computers, all eight of them.

I now have a mix of PC’s and Mac’s. I did not switch to Mac’s until I found a computer consultant I could trust. Ken came to me from my cousin Billy. Billy switched to Mac’s and was using Ken for about 6 months. I met with Ken before I purchased my first Mac and he helped me to decide which one was right for my business.

Ken is just like John. I actually had both of them in my office when I was transferring all my data from my PC to my new iMac. John liked Ken and said he knew his stuff. This confirmed that I made the right decision.

If you’re in business, you need the right consultant before you decide what you want to do with your computers. Having the right computer consultant made it easy to make my computer buying decisions.

Thanks goodness for John and Ken. Thank you boys!

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How To Use Car Wrap Advertising To Get Sales For Your Business

January 31st, 2011 by Greg Giovanni 2 comments »

I’m in the dry cleaning pick-up and delivery business. I use car wrap advertising to get new route customers. I do more than just put my dry cleaners name and phone number o

Car Wrap Advertising

n my van and hope that someone calls me.

This is what I do: on the back of my van I say, “Try Our FREE Pick-Up & Next Day Delivery. Why Waste Time & Gas! Use Ours—It’s Easy & It’s FREE! Call 234-4400 to find out more. Free Recorded Message Reveals Details.”(And don’t let the car wrap company talk you out of saying something like this. You’re the marketing guy, not them.)

When someone is driving behind me and they use dry cleaning, they might pick up their cell phone and call our recorded message.

The recorded message is designed to qualify the prospective dry cleaning customer and tell him or her about our service. It does three things: weeds out the not-so-good prospects, saves lots of time and it delivers the same consistent message time and time again.

It’s an almost free sales person. I’ve got to pay for the voicemail service anyway, whether I use this feature or not.  Go to your local phone company or go to Kall8.com and get their business voicemail service that you can put on your car or van.

To find car wrap advertising companies in your area, search online for them. Or better yet, when you see an advertising car wrap you like, go talk to the person driving the van or car and ask them where they had their advertising wrap done.

How much does a car wrap advertising cost? It depends if you want a partial wrap or the full car or van wrapped.  To have my van partially wrapped, it cost me $800. If I was to get it totally wrapped, the price was around $2,500.

You can always start with the magnet stuck to the side of your car or van until you get your first sale. That’s what I did. Once I found out that my company was viable, I got my van wrapped.

Go slow. Don’t spend too much money up front. Walk before you run when it comes to expenses with your business. I call it Italian math (because I’m Italian). There is always a cheaper way. If your business permits, you could trade your services with the person doing the wrap.  And you could also find someone who just got into the advertising car wrap business and get it really cheap. Use your noggin and get it cheap or creatively financed. My name is Greg Giovanni and I’ve started 33 companies. I definitely know what NOT to do and I know a few things to do. Follow my advice and you’ll save some money, time and hard-ache.

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