Yesterday, I talked about different Internet marketing channels and which ones are most important for small businesses. What I didn’t mention was how one of those channels could the most important one of all.

In fact, I didn’t even mention it as one of the important ones at all. But I should have. So why didn’t I?

I left out Conversion Rate Optimization yesterday so I could talk about it today in more expansive terms. Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO, is one of the most important Internet marketing channels for any businesses because without landing pages that are ready to close sales, you really have no Web business. You can perform the best SEO or social media campaign in the world, but if your landing pages aren’t converting sales, all the traffic in the world won’t be of much help to you.

CRO is the practice of working on your landing pages to make them the best converting tools they can be. The process involves more than SEO; in fact, it may not involve that at all. It may be something as simple as moving an image from one side of the page to another. But the heart of all CRO is in testing. The CRO professional tests various elements of a landing page to ensure that they all work together to close sales and increase conversions. After all, it is conversions that make you money, not traffic.

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz wrote an interesting blog post exploring the question, “Which Internet marketing channel would you choose if you had $1 million?” Or something along those lines.

This is an interesting question because most small businesses don’t have a million dollars to invest in their marketing plan. But by asking the question you can imagine what the most important marketing channels are for your business. Every business is different so the answer depends a great deal on what your individual goals are. But there are some principles behind each marketing channel that you’d want to base your decision on as well.

To sum up, Rand identifies the following Internet marketing channels:

• Display advertising
• E-mail marketing
• Pay per click advertising
• Online public relations
• Search engine optimization
• Affiliate marketing
• Social media marketing
• Viral content campaigns
• Conversion rate optimization

Some of these channels, like affiliate marketing and viral content campaigns, just aren’t feasible for most small businesses. But some of these are absolutely essential.

For instance, why you’d do away with SEO - search engine optimization - is beyond me. E-mail marketing is another channel that I’d say is almost essential no matter what your business is. The optional channels are PPC and display advertising. The rest of us could be left to personal preferences.

So which is right for you?

To answer the question, you have to ask yourself some very serious questions, starting with “What is your budget?” If you don’t have a large budget for Internet marketing - and most small businesses don’t - then you’ll be limited in what you can accomplish. You also need to ask, “What kind of time do I have for performing tasks myself?” Time and money are perhaps your two most precious resources. It helps, then, to identify early on just how much of both that you have to contribute to Internet marketing. Before you do anything else, those questions must be asked.

Next, what kind of internal resources do you have? If you’re not going to do it yourself then you’ll need someone who can do it for you. Will it be a staff person? Will you outsource it? *If you have more money resources than you have time or internal human resources then outsourcing it is your best option. If you are limited in money, but you have a staff person who is underutilized then you might dedicate someone internally to the tasks of Internet marketing that you have identified to be of interest to you. So you can see that it isn’t all cut and dry.

If you feel yourself to be in need of a second head then why not ask for an Internet marketing consultation to help you figure out the best direction to move?

When it comes to marketing your small business website, there is no one right way or a single wrong way. There are effective and ineffective ways. What we try to do here on the Small Business Mavericks blog is to give you an overview of the online marketing options available to you and let you choose the ones that will be most effective for your business. Since every business, and every small business website, is different, they all require different marketing strategies to maintain an effective online marketing campaign.

For many small businesses, a simple strategy of blogging and article marketing can be very effective. For others, you might be better off with an intensive PPC campaign. Or you may require a strong social media marketing effort. But almost all online marketing should begin with a well-optimized website and move out from there.

Even after building your small business website, you can probably benefit from all of the above marketing strategies. But your budget may stand in the way of performing some of the tasks you want to accomplish. That happens. The important thing to keep in mind for any small business is to work within your budget to design the most effective online marketing strategy for you. If you need help with this, we’re here to be your guide.

When it comes to online marketing do you know what your most important online tool is? The one for your small business?

Is it your newsletter? Twitter? Facebook, LinkedIn? Google? Nope. None of the above.

The most important small business online marketing tool is a well optimized website. This is particularly true of small businesses that operate in a small geographical area. You are competing against other local businesses - online and off line. Your website is the best tool for reaching prospects online, through the search engines, and through other online marketing vehicles.

Your small business website is your hub, your base of operations for doing business online. Through your hub everything about you should flow, maybe not as a direct conduit, but in some kind of manner. Your social media campaigns should drive traffic to your website. Your website should receive search engine traffic. It should also receive your word of mouth traffic. Your networking traffic. All of your online marketing efforts should drive traffic to your small business website. And that’s why it’s the most important online tool you have. It’s your best sales tool.

Nearly every day now I see a new start up promising to help local small businesses advertise online better. To be sure, small businesses trying to promote themselves online have a lot of options. A few years ago it was OK to spend a great deal of effort trying to be in a lot of places at once. Today, not so. You’d be better off just sticking to a few places and promoting yourself through them.

But which places?

I’d recommend the tried and true for starters. Later, you can expand. But if you really want to succeed online then you need to be where your prospects are. Small businesses trying to make it online have a lot of options and there are no real right or wrong answers - just righter and wronger.

Here are some of the options open to small businesses trying to market themselves online:

• Search engines
• Pay per click advertising
• Social networking
• Twitter
• Pay to click advertising
• Traffic exchanges
• Display advertising
• Advertising networks
• E-mail marketing
• Electronic newsletters
• Blogging
• Forum marketing
• Podcasting
• Video marketing
• Directories
• Yellow pages
• Product review websites
• Article marketing
• Press release distribution

And these are just off the top of my head. I’m sure there are plenty more.

But if you are a small business then your resources are probably pretty slim. You can’t do it all. Your best bet is to choose a few of the options - the ones that will work best for your business - and spend a lot of time working those. Focus! Otherwise, you may end up with nothing at all.

SiteProNews has an article about why Internet marketers fail online. Great article except that it’s mostly talking about Internet marketers who build landing pages, microsites, and other animals for AdSense or use other “traditional” Internet marketing strategies. Small businesses using online marketing techniques do things a little differently.

That’s why I decided to come up with my own list of 5 reasons small businesses fail when they go online to market their businesses. But for the sake of comparison, here’s the summary of why Internet marketers aren’t succeeding:

1. They are overwhelmed with information
2. Lack key marketing basics
3. Not much time or few resources
4. Don’t have the necessary skills
5. They lack persistence

But do these same afflictions affect small business owners online? Aside from key marketing basics, I’d say small business owners suffer from some of the same problems, but they aren’t necessarily causes of failure online. If so then they’d be causes of failure off line and if small businesses are failing off line they likely aren’t trying to build online variations of their businesses. Or shouldn’t be.

So how are small business owners marketing online different than Internet marketers? Here is the list of top 5 reasons I can think of:

1. No persistence - OK, let’s get this one of out of the way right now. In this regard, small business owners are like other Internet marketers. They give up too soon. The old adage “you can’t win if you quit” rings true. Stay in there! Be persistent.
2. Hung up on their budget - Small business owners have small budgets. The beauty of marketing online is that you don’t need a big budget, but many small business owners fail online because they’re hung up on their pocketbooks and cede to those with more money to throw. Be stealthy. You don’t have to be Bill Gates or Donald Trump.
3. Try to bite off more than they can chew - Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was your business. And your online business won’t be either. Take your time, learn the ropes, and don’t quit.
4. Analysis paralysis - You can analyze information all day long and get nowhere. Eventually, you’ve got to do something. Don’t let thinking get in the way of doing. You’re successful off line because you take action. Now, take action online.
5. They listen to Internet marketers - Just because someone calls himself an Internet marketer doesn’t mean he knows what he’s doing. There are a lot of strategies online to use. Some of them work, some of them don’t. But if you listen to the Internet marketers you could lose. Many of them fail because they’re trying all the wrong things any way. Instead, choose your guides carefully.

It’s not all about the money. And it’s not all about time. It’s about how effective you use both time and money (the little you do have) to reach the audience you want to reach. The most important thing is this: Be persistent!

Marketing Maven Seth Godin has a few words about free. I’ll have to say that I agree. Free offers can get a little too much. And we’ve probably reached the tipping point where offering something for free has lost a lot of its luster. That doesn’t mean that you can’t make free offers any more. But online shoppers have been desensitized to free.

So what should you do instead? Offer value? How much value? One way is to present premium value for high dollar. But is that the best option for your small business?

When you put together your marketing plan, and plan your marketing funnel, you need to consider how you’re going to bring customers in the door. Will it be through a free offer, an e-book download or a podcast, or will it be through establishing yourself as the place to go for premium services? Know where you stand and what you have to offer. Then make it stick.
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You’re a small business owner trying to build yourself an internet presence. Should you focus on SEO or social media? Which is more important?

Well, first, you need to understand the benefits of each. SEO - search engine optimization - offers you free search engine marketing. Today, still today, the search engines are the No. 1 source of website traffic so it’s difficult to ignore them. If you don’t do any SEO on your website then you are going to have a difficult time attracting visitors and converting them to customers.

On the other hand, there are plenty of websites that have achieved high rankings and lots of traffic but weren’t profitable. That doesn’t mean that social media can save your profits. Obviously, the sale is made (or lost) on your website. If you aren’t getting sales then you need to revamp your content.

But what about social media?

Social media marketing is about engagement. It’s about building relationships. If you can establish rapport with someone somewhere other than your website and because of the relationship you have built with them elsewhere they decide to visit your website, that’s a huge plus. It means they do not have to look for you in Google. They’ve found you and didn’t even know they should have looked.

Social media marketing is the online equivalent of word of mouth. If you convert one person then he/she will tell his/her friends. Most likely through online forums, blogs, social networks, etc.

So is it a question of either/or? No, I think it’s both/and. The most effective online marketing is the marketing that combines good SEO practices with effective social media marketing. It’s all about building relationships.

There are several ways you can use gadgets and one of those is to create one that can be distributed to other webmasters. The benefits are multiple. First, if you brand your website with a back link then every time your gadget is used it will create a back link to your website. Those are great for SEO purposes. Secondly, since the initial information within the iframe exists on your website, you actually help the search engines find you better and crawl your website more.

An iframe is created from existing information. The information is your site. Even after the iframe is placed on another website that information still exists on your site. And the back links from the other sites to yours will get the search engines to your site to crawl that information more often. The combination of the often-crawled content and the back links to that content (with highly valuable anchor text) can help your search engine optimization efforts tremendously.

Another way iframes help you is through marketing. It gets your content in front of more eyeballs. Every time a website uses your gadget you are getting your content and website in front of more human eyes. And that’s good marketing!

One of the most misunderstood aspects of doing business online is the entire nature of it. Many businesses are still stuck in the 20th century where marketing is concerned. They believe that marketing is all about positioning their company in the market place. That is true, but online marketing is so much more than just market positioning. It’s content positioning.

So what does that mean exactly? Well, it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. But in a nutshell it means that you’re in the content marketing business. You aren’t just marketing your business. You’re marketing your content.

Content is defined as anything that holds value for someone else whether they do business with you or not. That’s pretty well all encompassing isn’t it? I mean, an ad that simply says “Buy this widget” isn’t really content because it’s a sales message and that holds value only for you, the seller. But an article that explains the benefits of owning a widget like yours (sans the sales message) is content. So how does that benefit you, the seller?

It benefits you when the reader of your content has trusted you enough to visit your website (based on the value of your content) and decided to do business with you.

Your job as a business owner doing business online is to create valuable content. Make it valuable enough and people will do business with you because they trust you, like you, and want more value. That’s content marketing at its best.