Home Depot Launched Spring Black Friday Savings on Facebook

Last week Home Depot launched a Facebook Event for Home Depot's Facebook fans called: Spring Black Friday Savings Every Friday on Facebook. This special Spring sales event happens every Friday only on Home Depot's wall on Facebook from Friday, March 18 through  May 20 at 7:00pm.

With Spring around the corner in many areas (except for us in the Upper Midwest) many homeowners are for sure going to be starting home decorating and yard projects. How does a social-savvy merchant try to capture homeowners' attention and improve visitor frequency to the Facebook wall? Well, see below...

For fans of The Home Depot on Facebook! Get exclusive savings of 50-75% off outdoor rugs, lighting, fans, patio furniture, and tools every Friday this Spring. These offers will only be available right here on Facebook, right on our Wall every Friday. Watch this quick video for details.

50-75% OFF should get their attention. As of the post they have over 2,100 fans say they are attending. Nice idea that doesn't cost them at lot to promote online, yet gets them frequent, targeted shoppers. Nice idea H.D.!

Click here to see home Depot's Spring Black Friday Facebook Sale Event

Retailers what can we learn from this?

If you prefer, you can post comments on the Marketing Your Store Forum too.

Keyword infographic - Where We Use Keywords

The world of keywords... Oh, how it has changed the way we write. It has helped define an entire industry - SEO. Ignoring keywords and you might find your website lost in the cyberspace black hole.

If keywords carried no weight with the search engines how would Google and Bing rank websites?

Web Equity - Owning Your Local Web Presence

This is really a great overview for store owners wanting to better understand what is all involved in building an effective online presence for their business. Thank you Mike Blumenthal for creating this.

Online marketing has two goals: engage and convert.

Web Equity by Mike Blumenthal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.blumenthals.com.

Marketing Your Store Forum Launched

Just recently I launched a MYS forum for retailers to ask questions about local SEO, social media, pay-per-click advertising, getting listed in business directories and anything else pertaining to web marketing. Although I have the MYS blog, I think for many people it is easier to follow and find specific topics of interest in a message board format. I hope many of the MYS fans and retailers will find the new forum to be a valuable resource and a place to check out before making any mistakes about their online marketing initiatives. So stop over and chime in. It costs you nothing but your time and you might learn something too.

Click here for the Marketing Your Store's Forum

Mapping Out Your Service Area in Google Places

Many local businesses, local carpet cleaners and plumbers, service customers in cities and towns outside of their main location. Google Places allows local businesses the ability to define their service area so your listing will appear in more than just your home town.

To do this you must first have a Google Account and log into your Google Places listing. If you scroll down your listing you will see a section called: Service Area and Location Settings. The default selection is No. You need to select Yes to be able to map out your service area.

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Now you will be given a choice of drawing a circle around your main business location with the radius being how many miles out you travel. This is a simplier way of mapping your service area but may not be as accurate depending on your situation.

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The alternative method is to manually add the cities/town names or zip codes that you service. This will probably be more accurate for many businesses. Just be sure you have them all handy when you start to map out your service area.

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When done you can scroll down to the bottom on the page and click the Submit button.

Don’t under estimate the power of using Google Adwords

Although it is always great to be in Google’s organic page 1 listings for the most relevant keyword phrases, it is not always easy to achieve. For example, new websites just are not going to get high rankings immediately. Stores may have trouble getting good search engine positioning for every city they service. This is where Google Adwords or Google Boost can really help if done correctly.

For example, I helped create a small e-commerce website in early February. There was no way this new website was going to get the search engine exposure they needed without investing some dollars in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. So we setup a Google Adwords campaign with only a very small list of highly targeted keyword phrases. In the first 22 days they had generated over $30,000 in sales. Not bad for a $75 per day PPC budget with an average retail price of $10-$20 per item.

Without Google Adwords they would have been sitting on next to nothing in sales from their new website.  As in this example, when done correctly Pay-Per-Click advertising can really help drive more sales that might be totally missed without it. So don’t be afraid to use Google Adwords to help boost sales leads.

Update: Here is a great read about Google local advertisng... Google Searches for Success in Local Ads