Business Journey to Local Internet Marketing Success

It started out as a straightforward idea really. My business is one the best resellers of Cisco telephone systems in the Southeast, and we are headquartered in Atlanta. All I desired was that if someone conducted a search engine search for Cisco Phone System Atlanta that my company’s website would show up on the first page of results. That definitely was not the case when I first began the activity. What was required to do was create some online business marketing capabilities.

The learning process was slow in the first stage. It took about a year to have our website ported onto a content management system instead of the static HTML pages that it was first deployed on. After a couple of false starts we found an outstanding web development company that recommended for small business online marketing purposes we use the WordPress platform.

Since all the advice I had received recommended starting a blog, I had began that a year previously. I moved the blog over to the new website, and set redirects from all the old articles so that traffic would continue to have a place to go. Unfortunately the readers on the blog were only a few, and it appeared that none of them were local. I realized that the blog was effectively not doing any good from a business web marketing point of view, but was not sure what to do about that at the time.

I figured out that my next thing to do was local SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. The information I read on the topic were written well, and mostly discussed optimizing the page itself, starting a blog to get new content on a regular basis , and getting links from other websites. I had accomplished the first two recommendations, but had utterly no clue how to get links from other websites effectively. I asked some other website owners that I knew to link to our site, but that was difficult and I had the sneaking suspicion that it was not going to amount to much.

Meanwhile our other marketing initiatives were going well. Our salespeople were generating customers, our marketing campaigns were proceeding well, and our sales seminars were well attended. I still had the idea that if I could get the our company onto the first page of search results ranking it would bring us more opportunity, but my online marketing strategy would have to be delayed until I could apply more study to it.

So I took a breather from my local SEO research. I streamlined some the operational procedures of my company, assigned some more of my day-to-day responsibility to my managers, and had my design and deployment guys start writing short articles once a month on a new blog that I set up that was not associated with our company website. I did it this way so there was no pressure on them to be politically correct or write from the sales and marketing perspective.

The articles that those guys wrote ended up being the main part of the Internet marketing initiative that I created that would end up getting me the first page ranking I was trying for, and much more as well. The process of learning Internet marketing that I went through was basically an apprenticeship to the actual leaders in the field, the prosperous affiliate marketers.

Read more about local internet marketing and small business online marketing at Priority Cue.