Local online marketing for small businesses from Jo Dodds of http://www.counterpointmatters.com I teach, coach and support small business owners to set up their own search engine friendly websites using WordPress and to use Social Media to better market themselves online.

You don’t have a website but think you need one (you definitely do, by the way!) or you have a website but you don’t think it’s working as well for you as it should, and in any case you can’t make any changes to it without it taking more time and money. And, if you do have a website, you don’t think it is working for you or your business. It doesn’t come up anywhere on Google, you don’t get many visitors and, in fact, the ones that you do get are those that you sent there anyway, in other words, they knew about you already and going to the website was just for a bit more information.

Did you know that 80% of offline purchases are started online?

which means that many of your customers have already looked online before buying offline from you; how many potential customers have you lost through not having a website or from poorly marketing your website?

First you need to get a website

and, once you have a website, as with any aspect of your business, to get real value from it you need to learn how to market it. And by that we mean marketing it both online using things like social media (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) and offline through your marketing materials and using other strategies like networking. In both cases, we can help you.

We can help you to set up a website that is:

This Counterpoint Matters website will give you an example of what can be done. Have a browse and sign up for our RSS feed so you can get regular blog updates from us (use this link if you don’t know what an RSS feed is).

Join with 7 days’ free access to use our member only content, including our videos and step by step instructions showing you how to set up your WordPress site, and private forum where you can ask us (and our members) questions.

If that’s all too soon for you then you can request our 2 free reports ‘7 Simple Steps to Great Local Online Marketing’ and ‘5 Things Your Web Designer Won’t Tell You’ and join our mailing list to get our free weekly email tips (by filling in your details at the top of the middle column) so that you can learn more about why online marketing is so important for your local business, and how we can help you.