I was asked to introduce myself by one of the people I have been marketing Market Maker to this past week. I have done so in the past, but thought I would offer the quick response I gave her here again. My name is Earl Netwal.

I call myself a micro business specialist and my focus is on helping small businesses understand and more effectively use the internet.

Thousands of businesses have web sites that are doing nothing for them. Most are little more than glorified yellow page ads. I used to think that many could be transformed into significant assets if their owners knew what to to do. Then I realized I was wrong. Most very small businesses are too busy trying to stay alive. Even if they know what to do, they don’t have the time or energy to do it. But frankly most of them haven’t a clue as to what to do. So there is a double hurdle.

To try to overcome that I wrote a short report I call, “Why Most Small Business Web Sites Stink.” It’s available free from my microbusiness web site blog. It may be that my title should be changed, because what the report is actually about is a comparison of the functions of a web site to that of a trade show. By comparing and contrasting different familiar aspects of a typical trade show I try to communicate what a web site could and should be.

Last year I took a special interest in home stagers as a test subject area. I have a decade plus background as a Real Estate Broker and wanted to find some aspect of the business where a lot of “micro” businesses still prevailed. I did a significant survey of almost 200 different home stagers in the US and Canada to learn about the issues facing them as small business people.

This past week I launched a service specifically targeted to home stagers. It seeks to assist them in revamping their meta tags which are almost always awful and eventually hand hold them through a variety of other search engine optimization techniques through a series of monthly teleseminars. This is to get a greater number of visitors from their market to their web sites.

Then I set them up with an auto responder system and what I call an ethical bribe. This is designed to get their visitors to opt in and allow them to build a list of prospects from their community interested enough in home staging to come to their web site.

I then offer them a series of follow-up articles to drip on these prospects. This idea is hardly new. It’s standard practice in internet marketing 101, but so few main street businesses apply it to their web sites, and so far I haven’t found a single home stager who does.

As a result, I am confident I can help my members increase their share of the business in their markets, by out-competing their fellow home stagers and as importantly by converting more people with a passing interest in home staging into actual customers.

I am looking for people to help spread the message to the home staging community.

What I am doing could easily be applied to hundreds of other businesses outside of home staging as well.

To learn more go to Market Maker

Setting up your web page, and getting your web site to the top of the search engines is a challenging but worthwhile task. The first step is to take stock of your current web site. How does it stack up in terms of its meta tags, on page factors and off page factors. What would need to happen to get to the top of the search engine rankings in your local market? For $99, I will review your existing site, identify its strengths and weaknesses. Suggest any easy changes you or your computer person can make quickly, and evaluate the steps you would need to take to rank in the top organic listings in your market place. This will include a half hour personal consultation with me, after I complete the analysis. To learn more send me and email together with your web site address, and I will do a free quick evaluation of your site to see whether or not my services would do you any good. Then and only then, will I ask you for a commitment, and payment. Send email to enetwal@gmail.com

Technorati Tags: Market Maker