The Internet at its most basic is one way we communicate.  When small businesses choose not to be present, they choose not to participate in this medium to the loss of their customers and often to the frustration of their customers.

What should businesses do?

- Put up a website – www.linkytown.com.  Put your site on your business cards, in your store front, on the yellow pages, your brochures, on the radio… Put your website address whereever you advertise.

Spend time figuring out how to make the medium impact your business.

Linkytown is about people, groups, and businesses who have little or no interest in global markets, global communities, or global connections getting value from the Internet. At www.linkytown.com we measure value in customers, sales, and the results you want and not in hits alone.

A good way for folks to get this value is to keep track of information from some of these blogs and websites:

www.ecommercetimes.com

http://www.toprankblog.com

http://www.jimboykin.com

And there are many others.

Also, if you are interested in a couple blogs that have produced tremendous sales results and are producing great internet results take a look at:

http://phcconsulting.com/WordPress/

http://www.cecsearch.com/WordPress/

These sites get hundreds of hits per day and produce real live high margin sales on a consistent basis.

I’ll keep expanding on these points in the future, because www.linkytown.com is designed to make getting on the web easier and more a part of your everyday business than it ever was before.

Google Adwords and Google Analytics are a tool that can grant special market advantage for small business.  Most look at this product when they can appeal to a national audience.  Unfortunately, this view misses a great deal of opportunity.

The key to whether Google Adwords works for your business can initially be assessed along two lines.  First, does your product produce one time or recurring revenue making the click investment worthwhile.  Second, does a sale regularly produce a long term customer justifying a seemingly high one time click cost.

If the answer to either of the first two lines proves true, a more detailed analysis is needed.  There are many sources on the web to support this, or you can consider beginning with a Linkytown website and letting Linkytown help you make the most of Adwords.

The newest edition of Linkytown is really the next version. With this step, Linkytown has made a huge stride to make websites easily available to every group, every organization, every cause, every business, and every individual.

We have much to do, but this version allows someone to create a website without ever becoming familiar with a web editor. You can fill out your initial account information hit activate and your first website exists.

Your new site allows someone to use all the Internet marketing tools really as soon as an account is created. Literally, Linkytown makes it possible to start selling almost instantly.

Happy Valentines Day

Not only is today a day of love but it’s also a day of Linkytown updates. Today we rolled out a lot of new features, bug fixes, and interface changes that should help you get on the web even quicker and easier than before.

Some of the major changes include the ability to easily add a Google Maps page that shows where your business is located and also a Contact page so your website visitors can email you by filling out a form. The signup process is even better as well, you now have to ability to create the first 3 of your 5 free web pages while you signup. It doesn’t get any easier.

We are also pleased to announce our affiliate program. For every new Linkytown customer you refer we will share 20% of their revenue….every month. That means if your friend signs up for a Deluxe account you will receive $12 for as long as they have their website. So tell your friends and let the cash roll in. We even allow you to upload your contacts from email programs like Outlook, write a personalized message, and invite them all with a single click.

We hope you enjoy all the improvements. Keep an eye out because we are making Linkytown better every day.

New online business owners you could benefit the most from not repeating some of the mistakes I have made.

1. Never ever accept a free lunch, it is too good then its not true – All apply in real life and for an on-line business. 2 years ago I paid a SEO firm to get my better rankings. They set up a site and liked to mine. They key word spammed and set up back doors, set up non-quality links (all of which I didnt know about then). They promised results, I saw a dribble of traffic and then the company was gone, I think Google droppped me from their index and I was out of alot of $$$. But time heals all wounds, I learned from the people on this board and set up good content on my site, learned about key word optimization, internal key links and if you type into Google: NFL Towels Johnny Lew’s Sports is number 1. Yahoo NFL Merchandise and we are in the top 5. Wow!!!

2. Dont try for the most traffic. Get the most quality traffic. I once bought Dallas Cowboys as a key word . Do you know how many times Dallas or Cowboys is searched on Google and Yahoo??? I do, thousands of dollars worth of CPC, and I had almost no sales…Why…because people are searching for Dallas Cowboys news, player updates, game days and to see pretty picutres of Cheerleaders. Refined my keywords to what I sell Dallas Cowboys Flags and I was back on track.

3. Focus on Conversion. Quality traffic means that someone looking for what you sell or offer comes in to your site. Now you need to get them to buy from you. Buying is the conversion from a browser to a buyer. If your not taking your CPC campaigns and making sure you have the best landing page (not just your front page) your losing conversions. If your not making sure the order button is above the fold (ie not hidden below the screen) and your order process is clean and un-inhibited your losing conversions. Make it simple. Make sure your giving that customer a sense of security to buy from you. We are all not JC Penny or Dick’s Sporting goods, so our brand name and recognition is almost nill. So make sure you have a phone number, guarantee, and a good about you page.

4. Costs less to Sell to existing customers. Once you convert a customer NEVER EVER forget about them, because they will surely forget about you. And thats too bad, becuase if your a reputable firm and provide a good service that customer will likely come back. If you give them a reason. Send them a post card from time time. Remind them that your still around, ready to help them. From my top ten converting key words johnnlew.com or Johnny Lew’s Sports is in 4 of the top key words. People are searching for our company, how cool is that.

5. Start Small and be real good at that first. Dont try to launch a huge selection of products all at once. You will be out of capital quick as you try to stock all those different items. Here is a great way to optimize your Cost Per Click campaings. If you sell Wall Clocks for example, start by focusing on your best selling wall clock. Optimize your key word for wall clocks. Once that is going well and you want to expand products, dont go for something totally unrelated like Playstations, but branck out to Alarm Clocks. Take advantage of the CPC traffic your getting from Wall Clocks, and you will be offering your customer more choices (they love that) you have a chance to get more items sold, you can link from Wall Clocks to Alarm Clocks and vice versa, helping your organic SEO efforts and get higher ranked in the natural search results, and you will save some $$$ in CPC because you wont have to fund and entirely different set of terms.

We are always working to improve the experience of our users. Our new landing page is a big step in this direction. Check it out at www.linkytown.com and get a sense of how our service is evolving.

Linkytown is dedicated to making having a web page for your business, organization, charity, or group easier. When you check out our site, you will see we’ve made it easy to choose a basic color banner.

For those of you who are looking for a more sophisticated website, soon you will be able to send the images to us and for a small fee, we will create and post a custom banner for you. In the meantime if you want to create a cool banner, you can use Power Point to create a high quality banner on Linkytown. The steps are as follows:

1) Open Microsoft Powerpoint;

2) Go to page setup;

3) Change the page layout to landscape;

4) Change the page size to 2.2 inches high by 8.5 inches wide;

6) Copy in logos or image to the power point slide, size and arrange to suit your needs;

7) Select save as;

Scroll down on file type to jpg (JPEG);

9) Save your file; and

10) Upload to Linkytown.

We hope everyone enjoys the new changes.

Small businesses should consider the size and continued growth of ecommerce for consumer spending. eCommerce-guide.com reports that ecommerce grew a robust 19% this year to $28 billion. While down from last year’s 26% given economic worries among consumers, this is quite good.

Very few small businesses currently really tap into this market. Small business needs to be looking for ways to make it easier for their customers to buy their products and services over the web.

Make it easy for your customers to go online and point and click to purchase from you.

However, there is much more to the trend than simply wanting to see your service or product on the web. If you’ve been on Amazon or Ebay lately, you may have noticed that you are able to see pictures, reviews on product, reviews on sellers, links to consumer information. The fact is buyers want to know more information about the purchase before handing over the cash.

As a small business owner, you are often better positioned to provide more information. Even more exciting, you can provide information that doesn’t require face-to-face time for improving service and taking advantage of the special personal knowledge you’ve developed running your business.  Best of all, you will save time taking the step.  An affiliated apartment community Linkytown serves finds that online customers require only about 15% as much time to complete a sale as walk-in applicants need.
To make all this work to best effect, you need a website, and you have to develop a strategy allowing local customers to access your business online.

If you need a website, try www.linkytown.com.

2008 is an important year for small businesses on the web. Almost 70% are projecting they will gain revenue from eCommerce according to the Federation of Independent Businesses. Surprisingly, almost 70% don’t have a web presence making this leap a difficult one.

Linkytown can help with this challenge. Our service allows a small business to quickly and easily put a site on the web. If you are afraid of the process, we will send you a template and post your initial site for you and teach you how to modify the site from that step. Or, if you, just need some advice to get started, contact us. Our sales executive can be reached at sergio@linkytown.com.

Linkytown is a new website creation and marketing service for small business. The service is built using tools and marketing techniques that have helped win business for us.

The service is intentionally simple. While elaborate templates can be attractive to choose, consumers and businesses don’t make buying choices based on complexity. Choices and preferences are mainly a product of clean clear presentation of services or products and the support that your business offers.

Next, the service is intentionally designed to focus attention on small businesses only.  National and regional chains will not find a home on our site for their advertisements and information.

The service is designed to allow customers, whether they are businesses or consumers, to find local companies to serve their needs. Much of this design will become more apparent as we gain subscribers.

Linkytown recognizes how difficult using “pay per click” sales and building organic recognition is. Because of this, 25% of every dollar you pay for service at Linkytown is devoted for direct marketing to subscribing businesses. Your subscription fees will drive potential customer to your site. Whether they buy or not will then lie with your ability to convert once they are there.

Finally, keep checking the blog. We will be posting information telling our customers about techniques to gain better results from their sites, trends among small businesses, and explaining the importance of websites and web marketing to small businesses.

Welcome to Linkytown.