Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Increase Your HIS Business Profile Online

There are two things I know to be true in marketing your Home Inventory Service business:
  • All business is local
  • You need to promote your HIS business online.
You may think that those two items are contradictory.

After all, if someone locally is looking for a home inventory service business, wouldn't they just look in the Yellow Pages? (Well, yeah, they would if there were a Home Inventory Service category. But there isn't.)

If I have a website, won't I get inquiries from people in other parts of the country? (Yes, you might, especially if you don't define the area you service [geographically] on your site. But you can turn those inquiries into *cash* by referring them to another home inventory service business in their area.)

The key to meeting those two objectives (marketing locally, and marketing online) is fulfilled by using what's called "Local Search." That means creating a website and then getting it to the top of the list when someone types in "Home Inventory Service" and (Your City") into their search engine.

You could do this yourself. There are a ton of books and websites out there to teach you Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to get your website to the top of the list "organically." (That is, without paying.) But just as we are encouraging our customers to pay a professional to handle a complicated task (a professional home inventory) for them, I think we should recognize that this is an area where paying will yield performance.

One of the best services I've found for this is called Innuity's LeadConnect. You pay by the month ($39.95) or by the year ($199.95 -- save more than 60%!) to have your business information and/or website submitted to the major search engines and sites.

If you are just starting your home inventory service business, sign up for this service even before you have your website ready to launch. It takes about 4-6 weeks for your information to become active on all the sites, so you'll want to sign up with LeadConnect immediately, in order to start yielding results by the time you're ready to launch your business. Register your domain name right now, and put up a simple home page with your business name, your contact information, and a paragraph or two about the business. That's all you need for now. Submit your website URL, along with your business information, to LeadConnect. Then, finish building your website in the following three weeks, so it will be ready when your site is listed at the top of the local search engines.

Why choose a third-party firm to do this for you? You’ll save hours of time, effort, and individual submission fees every month. Your current online search listing is probably found on one or two of the major search engines. LeadConnect ensures your complete and up-to-date business listing is submitted to all the major search engines and online Yellow Page directories—more than 35 in all. You publish it once, it appears everywhere!

When you need to update your profile with new services, brands, or seasonal promotions, you just update your information once in the centralized master profile, and LeadConnect automatically distributes your updates across the Internet—rather than having to go to each individual search engine or directory and manually update each one.

Learn More:
""Advertise Locally for $39 a month!""

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