Every now and again I get someone asking me if I can teach a course on how to become a local marketing consultant. I have certainly thought of the idea because I have been told my local marketing skills are quite savvy.  But when there is already a great training course available from a guy who taught ME how to be a local marketing consultant – I will gladly pass the information over.

And that is Howie Schwartz with his IM Leadership program…

Howie has been involved with internet marketing for several years now and has generated some amazing results with his social media marketing. We’re talking about owning 80% of the first page of Google for various competitive keywords. This is not an easy accomplishment to achieve.

When Howie saw the need for a local marketing consulting course last year, he jumped on it. Taking all his skills including social media, seo and copywriting – and applying them to the local market, he was ready to teach local search marketing to 50 students.

47 successful case studies later… (including me)

Out of the 50 students who signed up to the training, 47 ended up becoming full time local marketing consultants. That is a 94% success rate.

Why is IM Leadership so successful?

Well, he only takes on a few students at a time to ensure a small virtual classroom and leaving more personal one on one training time for each student.

So, if you are interested in becoming a local search marketing consultant – be sure to check out IM Leadership with Howie Schwartz.

Well, Google has done it again. They tweaked the flux capacitor and made local search results even more goe-targeted than it already is. I have found this new emerging trend by implementing postal codes into local search, thus making the results very geo-targeted.

These days, when customers search for a business or service within their local area, usually they query service + geographic area as seen in my example below.

In this example, I am searching for restaurants in Victoria BC.  The seven local search results at the top are restaurants listed with Google’s local business centre. A free submission that any business with an mailing address can own.  Now that’s awesome, but…

Let’s say though, I am staying at Bear Mountain and want to know what restaurants are located near where I am staying. So, I search for restaurants and then add a Bear Mountain postal code.  Here are the results.

See how all those local results have changed? Google is showing me all the local search results that are within the postal code area.

As a customer, this is great because I can find the service I am looking for that is very close to where I am. As a business owner, this is a huge opportunity to attract local customers by implementing your postal code within your own website.

How can you take action with these postal code local search results?

Well, if you haven’t already, get your business listed within the Google local business centre.  You are required to have a Google account to be listed.

The other action I suggest you take is have your postal code listed on your own website.  The contact page would be the most suitable place. What will happen is Google will index it and when someone searches for your business category and that postal code, your business will be shown not only within the local results – it will be shown below in the natural search results.  Now you then own more than one spot on that first page.

For you visual folks, I have made a quick video explaining all this in plain language. Enjoy!

Have you ever had a customer that continues to buy from you over and over again?  This is what we call a power customer and you have cracked their oyster shell.

Huh!? What does an oyster shell have to do with marketing and my customers? Well, my friend Kyle (a Victoria BC resident) over at Wealthy Affiliate puts it best:

“This is the home for the oyster.  The bigger the shell, the more the meat there is within the oyster.  The longer you leave an oyster on the beach (ie, the more time you invest in it), the bigger the oyster grows and the more money it is worth.”

This translates into customer value in the Internet marketing world.

The more patient and more care you give your oyster (customer), the better the opportunity you will have to earn not only the first sale from that customer, but multiple sales.

While I would love to take credit for this great business concept and metaphor, Kyle is the one who came up with this concept.  And he knows his stuff, Kyle has become a tremendously successful internet marketer and has taught thousands of people how to become full time internet marketers.

I want you all to head over to Kyle’s blog post and check it out yourself.

==> click here to visit the Oyster Shell Marketing post

For Immediate Release:

Announcing IMeye Keyword Research Tool

The Revolutionary New Internet Marketing Tool That Spotlights The Cash-Rich Markets, Niches and Opportunities You’ve Been Crying Out For and Delivers All The Profitable Keywords You Need.

The creators of Niche Blueprint, Commission Blueprint and loads more infamous Internet Marketing products, have just spent $100,000 and recruited a work force of 120 people in order to produce the most game changing tool in Internet Marketing since Word Tracker arrived all those years ago.

A Few Powerfull features of IMeye:

• Easily discover massively profitable markets and niches
• Quickly identify the highest paying Adsense markets
• Pin-point super-profitable ecommerce niches
• Highlight high volume keywords $.05 a click on Google
• Effectively market Clickbank (or any other) products through SEO
• Profitably promote CPA offers through Adwords

IMeye is an incredible new Internet Marketing / Keyword Research tool that has the potential to multiply your income in the remaining months of 2010 and beyond. It works in a completely different way to other popular tools like Keywordspy, Spyfu, Market Samurai & Keyword Elite – as excellent as they all are.

IMeye uses a proprietary method (which means exclusive) of gathering the very best keywords out there, doing all the analysis and

research on them, then storing them in a HUGE database ready for your call.

All you have to do is tell IMeye what criteria you want for your next big opportunity and IMeye delivers the top maching keywords instantly. This means that almost all the tiresome search work is eliminated and with a push of a button, you will be able to:

• Rake in tons of cash by identifying the highest paying Adsense markets and then being shown targeted low competition keywords phrases that you can dominate on Google almost immediately.
• Pin point super-profitable ecommerce niches that have minimal competition but have the potential for millions of dollars in sales.
• Find high volume keywords which are just 5 cents a click on Google so you can drive tens of thousands of interested prospects to high converting Affiliate offers.
• Get access to vast sources of untapped traffic that you could use for any number of affiliate or online marketing projects.

Right now, IMeye is offering a limited 3 Day Trial to essentially ‘kick the tires’ and see the power of this new application. If you are interested, we have a demo video of IMeye ready for you to view.

Click Here to See IMeye in Action

Search Engine Marketing vs Search Engine Optimization

It seems there is a big misunderstanding as to the difference between Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

So let’s clear this up by first defining what each term or service is:

We will start with Search Engine Optimization.
This is defined as optimizing your website so the search engines feel that it’s a friendly website (technically speaking) and will rank well based on it’s optimization.

So what does that all mean? Basically, search engines like websites that play by the rules which are quality content that have keywords that relate to your business within the content, a simple navigation with a clear definition of what each page is about. I can go on and talk about sitemaps, h1 and h2 tags, keyword density but I think you get what Search Engine Optimization means now.

Another term for search engine optimization (SEO) would be on page optimization the area of search engine optimization that applies to the content and structure of the website itself.

Now what is Search Engine Marketing?

I have to admit, Search Engine Marketing is my favorite because it deals with the outside world of your own website. Search Engine Marketing basically means promoting your own website from other websites to drive traffic to your own website.

Websites such as Squidoo, Hubpages, Social Bookmark sites (like Digg), YouTube and other external website that would drive massive amounts of traffic to your own websites by providing a link (by using anchor text) to your site from these external sites.

Another term for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) would clearly be the antonym of on page optimization and that would of course be off page optimization.

So Which One Is Better?

One isn’t better than the other, it’s more a matter of which one should be done first then followed by the other.
In my opinion, Search Engine Optimization should be tackled first once your own website is optimized, then focus on Search Engine Marketing. This is essential because you want to prepare your website for all the traffic that SEM will bring in.

I hope this has cleared up some questions you may have had in regards to Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing and wish you the best of success in all your online markeing efforts.