The small business owner with a limited budget for advertising often wonders how much of that budget is wasted. Here in Scranton, PA, there are thousands of small businesses that deal with this reality every day. After all, you can't count on someone who found you in the Yellow Pages to tell you that that's where they found you. Even if you have coupons, promotions, free stuff, etc., for just mentioning where your customer found you, they often ignore such stuff. They want what they want when they want it and your selfish desires come second!

Enter local websites. Plenty of "offline" businesses have one. The problem is, the websites themselves don't really work hard at getting people to take positive action and patronize the business. Instead, they're usually vanity pages that extol the virtues of the business, its owners and the person who designed the websites. Even worse, the owners seldom track the ROI of their online presence. They just don't know how to do that. At best, there's a "hit counter" that shows all 361 of the people who ended up landing on the site since 1999.

Here's where an Internet Marketing expert can help turn a simple Web page into a hard-working, measurable part of an overall marketing effort. By helping tech-challenged shop owners get:

- Good ranking in search engines

- Effective call-to-action sales copy

- Automated capture of customer information

- Valuable statistics that measure the ROI of every page

A skilled online marketer can turn ho-hum websites into a powerful means of driving customers to the shop (or create a website that outperforms "stunningly designed" but hard to find websites).

While SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a bit of a mystery to anyone who doesn't work with it, getting websites on the first page of search results for specific, local keywords is not magic. Internet Marketers refer to "long-tail" keywords as hidden gold. For a local business like a used car lot, "used cars Scranton" is telling. At the time of this writing, only one actual local business shows up on Google. The rest are national directories with a sub-heading for just about every municipality in the nation. All it takes is a few "tweaks" to a new or existing website to get another used car lot onto that first page, too!

Have you ever seen a Web page that just screams "vanity"? Practically every sentence contains references to "I, We, Us". Frankly, who cares? Where's the benefit to the reader? What a difference when you come across writing that talks mostly to you and only changes focus to describe an actual benefit for you (not unlike this article does)! Solid sales copy that gets results is part and parcel of an Internet Marketer's direct sales campaigns. Those same tactics, techniques and methods work equally well for brick-and-mortar businesses with a website.

Of course, if all 361 views of your website did nothing more than get people to look at it and wander away, you lost! Suppose there was a brief form on your page that potential customers could fill in and get automated emails that they actually want to receive about your business? Once again, a marketer with some savvy about autoresponders could put such a form on your page that made readers feel safe in giving out their contact information. Nobody likes SPAM. A simple technique will assure the contact that nobody else will be contacting them about certain dysfunctions, girls looking for hookups or the like!

How about ROI (Return On Investment)? With even simple websites, business owners can track how they are doing online. Web hosting services usually include detailed tracking of every single visitor to the website. This includes things like where they came from (like a search engine or another website), what browser they used, where they went on the site, how long they viewed it and where they left. There are also free tools that have even more sophisticated tracking metrics for the advanced user. A website may be the first method of advertising that can instantly measure the ROI of this method of advertising, right down to the local level.

Even if you're not in Scranton, PA, it's possible to find an Internet Marketer who'll help you develop (or create) websites that works harder for you than you do! That's because your site will work 24/7 with no time off for vacations, holidays, sick leave or lack of enthusiasm. Hunt around for those that know how to do this work. Avoid those who offer award-winning designs, charge a fortune and don't know squat about the four keys to monetizing a website (described above). Don't fear competition on the Web - outperform them with the right kind of websites!