I realize local business owners have a lot of “irons in the fire”. There can be very little time for working ON their business because so much time is spent working IN the business.  They may understand the importance of local online marketing, but at the same time they feel frustrated and overwhelmed with the amount of time it seems like it will take.

I want to offer you some strategies for dealing with this. First, it is great that you understand how vital it is that your business takes advantage of the online market. Not only is it very true today, but in the coming months and years it will become THE key component of local advertising. If the task of positioning your business in front of this new wave of potential customers seems too high of mountain to climb right now, don’t simply bury your head in the sand and tell yourself you will start “next month”.

Understand that success online does not come overnight. Therefore, you do not have to make it all work and put all the pieces together by next week. That’s the great thing about online marketing; when you have a long term strategy, the overall project can be broken down into small and easy to manage parts.

There is no need to stress out about any of this!

Let’s look at a hypothetical situation. Mary Jane has been operating a dog grooming business in her city for a number of years. Up to now she has done OK with her Yellow Page and newspaper ads, radio, and handing out business cards. But Mary, like most business owners, would like to move from doing “OK” to doing GREAT! She knows from past experience that increasing her Yellow Pages and newspaper ad spending is not cost effective. She has done her research and understands she is leaving piles of money on the table by not having much, if any, presence online.

But where does Mary even begin? She is not that computer literate and the thought of spending time “learning” stresses her out. She just wants to groom more dogs!

Here’s a simple plan Mary can do that won’t stress her out and at the same time will result in MANY more dogs to groom in the coming year:

1. Mary should commit X amount of time each week for online marketing. Even if it’s just 60 minutes sometime each week, Mary must budget that time into schedule.

2. Mary needs to first focus those 60 minutes each week on building her local listings in Google. Build a really great listing with all the pictures and videos allowed along with a well thought out description and categories. This may take several hours of work in total, but no problem! In a month’s time she will have a great Google business listing.

3. Next she will create her local business listings with Yahoo and Bing. These will go much faster as the process is close to the same as Google’s and she has gained some experience.

4. Creating those local listings is the first and most important step. Depending on the size of her market, she then needs a strategy for moving her listing to the first page. This is where a local search consultant comes in handy. The consultant can offer a strategy to fit her exact market depending upon its size and the number of competitors.

5. Mary should not stop with just the local listings. The next easiest thing to do (I like to get the easy things done first) is begin Craigslist and Kijiji marketing. These take no particular computer skills and have no cost. Ongoing campaigns in these local classified listings are simple to maintain. Mary can budget part of her 30 minutes each week to managing this important component of local search marketing.

6. Lastly, in order to max out her 60 minute allotment of time each week, writing articles is a simple next step. These articles will be used for both submissions to article directories (Google loves to show articles from the top article directories) and for her blog or website. Depending on her computer skills, she will have to devote a certain amount of time learning how to use a blog (or a website is she is more gung ho). It’s not that hard to setup and use a WordPress blog. While learning the process, Mary also needs to allot some of the time to learning what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is and how to optimize her site for the search engines.

If Mary will simply commit to and follow the above plan, the one hour a week she devotes to online marketing will put her ahead of the vast majority of her competition! Most business owners are simply not doing this much marketing online yet. This puts Mary in an excellent position to begin reaping the rewards from online search marketing for months and years to come. By following that simple plan, Mary will have a very firm footing online in 3 to 4 months.

After that time, I fully expect Mary to be so thrilled with the results that she will WANT to add another 60 minutes each week! Business will be so good that Mary will be looking to hire a helper so she can spend more time working ON her business instead of IN it!