• I know about my business. I don’t know (very much) about marketing on the Internet.
• My web designer just designs sites. She doesn’t know how to sell.
• I don’t have time.
• I’m not a teckie.
• I have no clue where to even begin.

Lesson 1: Keyword Research

Keyword research is step number one, yet most small businesses, have done no keyword research at all. As a result, they are leaving money on the table as potential customers type in search terms that lead them everywhere except to their web site.

In most cases, their web sites are a complete waste of time and money.

If they guessed at a handful of keywords that they think may be relevant to their business, they are fighting a battle they cannot win 99% of the time. They may be competing with a million or more other pages and sites that contain that keyword.

The first page of Google only has ten sites. If you are not on Google’s first page, you have a next-to-nothing chance of someone finding your business. It’s like David and Goliath, except David left his sling at home.

The lesson on keyword research shows you the simple tools to use to find the small handful of keywords that represent diamonds in the rough for your business. Just 5-10 of these keywords can instantly increase the traffic to your site so much your jaw will drop.

Lesson one will show you how to find these keywords and the four attributes each must have to produce traffic. Leave out any of the four and you’ll just be twiddling your thumbs.

Lesson 2: Web Site Optimization

Nearly all web sites are not optimized with their customers in mind. It’s like taking your life savings and every dime you can borrow from a bank, friends and relatives, hiring the biggest ad agency in town and creating a massive advertising campaign – but never telling anyone the address or phone number of your business.

The goal of any search engine – Google, Yahoo, MSN and others – is to provide the most relevant sites possible when someone types in a search term. They even tell you what you need to include on each page of your site so they can accurately tell what your site and page is about so they can serve it up to the person who is searching for what you have.

Yet most businesses don’t optimize their site according to these guideline. In defense, it’s really not all the business’ fault – in most cases, they don’t know what these guidelines are or how to implement them.

Lesson two will resolve both these issues. I will tell you exactly how to design your site and what you need on the site to not only attract more visitors, but convert visitors into qualified prospect and ultimately into sales.

Lesson 3: Online Business Directories

If you are a local business, chances are you have a listing in the Yellow Pages and that’s about it.

But did you know that today 82% of people looking for a local product or service start their search online? If fact, when the new phone books are left by everyone’s doors several times a year, many don’t even take it out of the bag and dump it right in the trash.

And did you know there are in excess of 25 local business directories that you can list your business in for free? If your business is not listed in all these directories that’s like driving down the street throwing money out your window.

In lesson three, I not only tell you what 25 of these directories are, but show you step-by-step right on your computer screen how to set up your listing. Equally important, I’ll tell you what to make sure you include in each directory and the options that you can ignore. Knowing what to include is just as important as being listed. Not including the right information is the same as not being listed in most cases.

Lesson 4: Testing & Tracking

Success is where Preparation and Preparedness meet.

If your goal is to improve your time in the 100-yard dash, there are a couple things that are essential and a number of things that would be helpful.

For example, how could you tell your improvement without a stopwatch? It would also be nice to have a distance of 100 yards accurately marked off, running shoes and a speed coach.

The same is true for your web site and the business it produces. You have to know where you have been, where you are and a way to measure traffic, leads and conversions.

I’m suggesting that the techniques taught in the course can increase your traffic very quickly. But you need to know your starting point and how to measure your increases.

Here’s the bottom-line importance of testing and tracking…

Here’s a “sales cycle” each advertising source will have, an example of some of the improvements you can make that are taught in the course:

Please note that the following example is to illustrate the value of testing and tracking any marketing campaign. It is totally made up. I have not run a campaign like this, nor have I experienced these results. I am not suggesting that by employing what I teach in the course about testing and tracking you will experience these kind of results either. This is purely to make a point.

Assume you are offering a coupon in an ad to be redeemed at your place of business. Here's what tracking can do for you...

Let’s assume that by knowing your initial numbers and by making changes that produce improvements, you bumped your key actions by the percentages shown in red:

As you can see, you just made a small improvement in three steps of the sales cycle which resulted in a whopping 62% increase in sales! And the best part is the amount of money you spent to get this return: zero!

And it was all made possible through testing and tracking. I’ll show you how to do this in Lesson 4.

Lesson 5: Lead Capture

The lesson on web site optimization emphasizes the fact that the purpose of your web site is to build a list and make sales.

The money is in the list.

If you build a list, you can write your own ticket. Not only are you building a relationship with potential future customers, you can get to a point where you can literally create money on demand.

For example, let’s talk about build a very small list of 10,000. You could send an email message out with an offer for a new product or service or a discount on a current one. It could be a joint venture partner’s product or an invitation to a teleseminar or webinar. The possibilities are endless.

If only 1% took you up on your offer, that’s 100 sales. In just several days you just changed your next vacation destination from the Grand Canyon to Hawaii.

What if your list was 50,000? Taking it to the next level, I can show you how to get a 15% conversion rate with a 1-hour teleseminar or webinar.

But most businesses don’t have a clue about the many ways they can build a list. You can be sure that only maybe 1 in 100 has the proper page on their site that is set up right to have visitors opt-in at the rate of 15-40%.

In lesson six, I’ll show you exactly how to do this plus refer you to the tools that puts this process on complete auto-pilot.

Lesson 6: Pay Per Click Marketing

The quickest way to drive traffic to your site is by using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. This is available at a number of places, but the most traffic comes from Google, Yahoo and MSN (now Bing).

Pay Per Click is not only fast, but it’s simple:

Pay Per Click’s simplicity hides its dangers. You can pour a ton of money down a rat hole in a matter of minutes if you don’t know what you are doing. For example…

You can’t just throw together a list of obvious keywords for your market. You will be disappointed with your results or, more likely, you won’t receive any results. Furthermore, keywords must be properly separated into groups and tied to an appropriate ad.

Ads get the best results when written in certain ways. In addition, your landing page must have five key attributes. Google gives each ad a quality score based on the keyword, ad and landing page. This quality score plays a major role in the minimum bid required by Google. Mess up and what you thought you could pay 50 cents for now requires $5 or $10 a click.

Ads and keywords must be tracked and split tested if you want constantly improving results and decreasing bid prices.

When I started using PPC (2000), I could routinely pin down bids for a penny. Now it is so competitive that many keywords require $3, $5, $12 – even as high as $20-30 per click to be ranked in a position where you are going to get any clicks at all.

But you can make PPC click work if you know what you are doing. There are companies that spend $20,000, $30,000 even $100,000 a day with Google PPC.

That being said, there are two other PPC models at Google. One is almost universally used in the wrong way and the other is hardly known. Both of these can provide all the clicks and visitors you could ever need for a dime (sometimes less) a click.

Granted, Google gets the lion’s share of the traffic. But I cover Yahoo and MSN AdCenter as well. Both are quality PPC resources and, in some markets, deliver a more targeted prospect per click at reasonable prices.

When you finish this lesson, you will know the proper way to set up each of these types of campaigns.

Lesson 7: Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the best free ways to drive traffic to your site.

There are thousands of article directories that web site owners, blogs, authors, reporters draw on for material on every subject under the sun.

Not a writer? Don’t have the interest or time?

Not a problem. I’ll show you where to get articles written very inexpensively. Furthermore, I’ll show you a tool that can distribute your articles out to hundreds, and in some cases, thousands of article directories at the push of a button.

What could this one technique be worth to you? Let me give you an example from a professional article marketer. Here are his simple steps.

Lesson 8: Video Marketing

Are you aware of these statistics?

#3: That's the ranking of web video in a list of the top 10 most influential marketing mediums compiled by Deloitte LLP (it was beaten only by television and magazines).

70%: That's the increase in web video viewership from 2008 to 2009.

20: That’s the number of hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.

84%: That's the number of U.S. based Internet users who watch web video.

11: That's the number of hours, on average, that every U.S. based Internet user spends watching web video each month.

6 and 57: The first number is the average time, in minutes, visitors spend on a web site with video. The second number is the average time, in seconds, visitors spend on a web site without video.

12%: That's the average increase in conversions rates for web sites using video vs. text-only sites.

Are you sold?

When I became aware of these stats, I was. So I embarked on a path to learn how to use video. And just so you know, I never owned a video camera. In fact, I didn’t even own a regular camera. I didn’t know the first thing about it. But I knew that I was going to be left behind and so I found some educational resources and dove in.

You may share this same interest in learning, not only for your business but also as a hobby. On the other hand, you may not have any interest or time.

Either way, I got you covered. In lesson 8, I’ll tell you what kind of camera to buy, the lighting you need, the proper microphones, how to edit like they do in Hollywood – all the equipment you will need so that you don’t have to guess or become confused by all the choices. And it’s not as expensive as you might think. For example, the video on this site was shot with a video camera that only cost $240 – and it’s a Canon.

How to make a video without a camera...

There’s a better than average chance that some are not going to share my enthusiasm for learning all about shooting and editing video. So I’m going to share resources where you can make your own videos in about 15 minutes without a camera, lights or video editing software.

Bottom line: If you are not using video in your marketing and on your web site, you are missing the boat.

Lesson 9: Blogs & Web 2.0

Are you taking advantage of social networking? Not up to speed on what this is all about? It’s simple. Social networking is nothing more than old-fashion word-of-mouth adverting using present-day technological tools. Word-of-mouth advertising is the oldest, least expensive and most reliable form of getting the word out—period.

Why is this important?

First, it’s free.

Second, many people today will check with their friends within one or more of the social networks to get their opinion before they buy. Even though you are the expert.

Third, one of the most important elements that has a bearing on where your web site shows up in the search engines (that is, on the coveted first page or buried deep within several hundred thousand other sites where no one will ever see it) are the number of links to your site appearing on other sites. One of the easiest and fastest ways to build hundreds of incoming links is through blogs and social media sites.

I’ll show you how to tap into all the social networks so your business has a presence that will translate into sales.

Lesson 10: Media Buys

While Google Adwords (Pay Per Click) can provide quick traffic, it has several major problems and one big limitation.

Cost per clicks has skyrocketed. You will find that you just cannot compete and make any money with certain keywords. Second, Google AdWords has stringent rules (in some cases, known only to Google) that can change in a heartbeat and stop your campaigns instantly.

Second, Google, Yahoo and MSN have limits on the traffic they can deliver. It’s all a function of how many people search for a given keyword.

So it’s a good idea not to put all your eggs in Google’s basket.

Fortunately, there are alternatives. Big time alternatives. As well known as Google is, it only provides about 15% of the available traffic.

Fortune 500 companies figured this out long ago. They can literally drive almost infinite amounts of traffic to an offer through media buys.

Media buys are text ads and banners that appear on high traffic web sites targeted for your audience.

This used to be very complicated, time consuming and expensive because you had to hire an ad agency to negotiate ads on each site on your behalf. Today, through a myriad of companies, these same types of ads are available to you, the local business or professional, at a reasonable cost and are drop dead simple to set up. Most of these companies also have tracking so you can track your ROI on a daily basis and make changes quickly.

The good news is that the inventory for banner ads far exceeds the supply. So the cost of banners is at an all-time low. Plus, some of these companies have internal banner creation software where you can create a professionally designed banner in a matter of minutes.

And, did I mention you can target by demographics (men, women, seniors, teens, sports, technology, etc.) topics (entertainment, automotive, education, food & drink, etc.) and by locality (city, state)?

Clearly, media buys can provide more traffic than you can probably handle and at a price that can be lower than PPC. Few even know about it, much less who the quality companies are and how to go about setting up campaigns.

After this lesson, you will know everything you need to know to jump in.

Lesson 11: Outsourcing

Before you throw your hands up and tell me you don’t have time to implement these techniques, read this:

You don’t have to do any of this yourself.

Sure, you may have someone on your staff that can do some or all of what’s necessary to increase your business 10-fold. But did you know that you can outsource it all?

I’ll show you how to tap into college-educated, English-speaking resources that are thrilled to work for $3 an hour.

Not only do you work with someone who is a veritable professional in the area (web design, graphics, writing, video, audio, blogs, Web 2.0—and on and on), but in most cases they are bidding for your work.

Best yet, you only pay them for what they do. There is no contribution to a 401(k) plan, no workers comp, no health plan—these outsourcing resource individuals are true bargains.

There are a number of outsourcing companies. I’ll tell you which ones are good and which ones specialize in certain areas in lesson eleven.

Lesson 12: Mobile Marketing

Can you name the first six mass media?

Did you know there is now a 7th mass media? And it’s bigger than all the first six put together!

#7 is mobile. Take a look at these stats…

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