I often write on this website and blog that Las Vegas businesses often try to market to the masses, which is a huge marketing error for any business or company in Las Vegas. To run truly successful marketing campaigns that are targeted and well planned, you should identify your target market.

Even with your target market in mind when running a marketing campaign, another successful marketing strategy and tactic that many Las Vegas businesses use is targeting zip codes. Targeting a zip code will enable you to reach a specific demographic in the Las Vegas valley or a group of potential customers close to the area where you do business.

By considering targeting a specific zip code, you can plan a mailing, door-to-door marketing, flyer, print, newspaper or internet marketing campaign and target zip code/s of your choice.

Resources to find Las Vegas zip codes and Las Vegas demographics:

• Zip Code Lookup – Yahoo! Small Business
• Las Vegas Zip Code Map – Henderson Zip Code Map – greatlasvegashomes.com
• Las Vegas Zip Code Map with detailed views – act4u.com
• Las Vegas, Nevada ZIP Code Map – hellovegas.com
• Free Las Vegas Demographics Report Available For Area Business Owners And Operators – lasvegasnevada.gov
• Las Vegas, NV – Neighborhoods & Demographics – neightborhoodlink.com

Internet Advertising for Las Vegas Businesses

When running a business online in Las Vegas there are many aspects of internet marketing which are crucial in building regular traffic to your website to optimize total income through consumers and ad marketing on your own website. The most important aspect in internet marketing is through advertising your own Las Vegas website.

What is internet advertising?

Internet advertising is a means of putting up banners and advertisements which target consumers who are interested in your services to click the ads and go onto your website to see if what you offer is what they need. There are many forms of advertising such as pay per click ads, and actual professionals you can hire to advertise your site in their own professionally proven to work methods.

Why do I need to invest in advertising?

Advertising gives new and existing businesses the kick drive to improve traffic and gain notice in the world wide community. Internet advertising provides websites with the opportunity to make more profits from the advertising itself, than the actual cost of the services. Without advertising your website will not get immediate high page rankings to get into the search engine, and could take a few months to years to actually get noticed enough to make profits which someone can live off of. Sometimes without advertising and the proper development the website could never make enough profit to support it.

What are the different ways to advertise online?

When choosing the best method of advertising there are a few choices available to you currently, some of these choices consist of the following:

Pay per click advertising – This is the most commonly used form of advertising, through pay per click advertising businesses you can choose websites which have signed up with the business to display their ad boxes and purchase space which you only have to pay for per click or per 1,000 page impressions. Typically this is the best method because you are ensuring that what you pay for is giving your website traffic and customers because no one is going to click to come to your website unless they are interested in seeing what your business can offer them. Pay per click advertising accounts can set spending limits so if the website displaying your adds has high levels of traffic you do not end up paying past your budget limit due to high volumes of clicks. An example of pay per click advertising is using google Adwords.

Another form of advertising is to hire a Las Vegas company to assist you with internet marketing and advertising. These companies will either put your ads on their related websites, or use professional techniques of submitting your website advertisements to many big companies which get your advertisements to the top of the search engine. This form of advertising is paid off in one lump sum instead of per visitor so you are receiving unlimited amounts of customers for only one flat rate then constant traffic thereafter.

For more information and professional solutions on internet advertising in Las Vegas, please contact my company, Perkolate at 702.341.0085 or visit our website at www.perkolate.com.

Once you’ve published your blog and written at least two entries a week for about three month (needs to have steady stream of content, it’s time to submit your Las Vegas blog out to blog directories.  There are literally hundreds, but here are some key websites you should submit.

National and International Blog Websites:

• seobook
• google
• dmoz blog
• best of the web
• blog carnival
• bloghub
• bloggernity
• blogarama
• blog search engine
• blog catalog
• globe of blogs
• bloggapedia
• blog flux
• blog listing
• blog explosion
• blogger
• blog digger
• technorati
• bloglines
• bloggeries
• blogged
• bigger blogger
• blog toplist
• search 4 blogs
• bloghop

Email Marketing can help spread the word in Las Vegas and nationally about your business, products and services. More on why email marketing is important. Defined, Email Marketing is direct marketing to a target market you are trying to reach using email. It can contain news, tips, articles, promotions and specials, but it’s main goal it to market.

When you compose an email for marketing purposes, keep these points in mind:

• Create a title for the email that will cause readers to want to open your email. People glance at the first few words of the email title to even decide if they are going to open it or delete it.
• Write interesting headlines. So you’ve gotten the reader to open your email, now give them a reason to read on. Glancing at the headlines should make you want to read the news item.
• Keep main articles concise, interesting and to the point. Get to your point quickly, whether it is an offer of some sort, or any other call to action. People’s attention spans are very short, especially in email.
• Create links back to your website when possible.  Readers will click on the links if they want more information.

There are many places you can source an email list for marketing purposes. Most of the time you must buy a list and the prices and quality of the lists you purchase may vary. A good place to start is by exporting the contacts from your email or address book.  They are most likely current clients, business associates and friends. The first time I exported my address book years ago, I was surprised to end up with a list of over 400 email addresses.  If you would like to purchase a list of email addresses, there are many options available to you. Remember to decide upon a target market for your purchased email list. For example, are you trying to source a list in Las Vegas of Small Business owners on the west side of town or specific to zip codes or is your target a national audience of dog owners let’s say.

Websites you can purchase email marketing lists from:

The process is fairly simple. You need to find an online company, set up an account, pay a monthly fee depending on how big your list is and how many times a month you email your list. They will have instructions on how to import email addresses from your address book or the list you’ve purchased.

Many Las Vegas business owners are just finding out about Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and how it can benefit their Las Vegas website and while it is a relatively new way of marketing, the principles have been around for a long time.

What is search engine marketing (SEM)?

Search Engine Optimization is the biggest buzzword right now especially when you talk of promoting yourc company’s website. But did you know that Search Engine Marketing is another important spoke in the business marketing wheel? The first thing you should know is that Search Engine Marketing, SEM is quite different from Search Engine Optimization or SEO. With this being said, you will find a lot of business people treating SEM the same as SEO.

The first thing that differs between SEO and SEM is the perception of Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Optimization works on the key words and key phrases and content of your website’s pages and how the pages need to be designed keeping Search Engines in mind and how they will rank on a search. Search Engine Marketing on the other hand deals exclusively with how you promote your website with search engines. It could be said that a Search Engine Optimization effort could be a subset of a Search Engine Marketing campaign.

Search Engine Marketing Techniques

Basically, any technique by which the visibility of a website improves with search engines is covered under the umbrella of Search Engine Marketing. Thus, from an aggregate perspective, you could look at techniques like Blogging, Search Engine Submissions, Social Networking, Viral Marketing and other techniques. You could also look at methods like Contextual Advertising and Paid Inclusion being subsets of Search Engine Marketing.

Contextual Advertising

Not many are aware of the complete workings of contextual advertising. Here’s an example to illustrate the concept. Assume you have visited a website A, which is in the Sports niche. When you visit the website, you could see some ads popping up from the site that deals with sports accessories or memorabilia dealers. Basically, you see an ad which is relevant to the context and the content of that particular website. This is how contextual advertising works.

Now, how does the business owner benefit from these ads appearing on their website? Simple, the ad appearing on the webpage would have a revenue basis tied onto it depending on certain actions being performed by the users. For example, a webmaster could get paid if 100 users click on the ad, and so on.

Paid Inclusion and Pay-Per-Click Placement

There are some search engines on the internet that are very popular (google, aol, msn, yahoo), so popular that business owners and webmasters are inclined to invest some money to get into the directory of these resources just so that they have the opportunity to get ranked on the first page as a “sponsored listing” so they can get the traffic and recognition of coming up on the first page of a google search, let’s say. This is where Paid Inclusion or Pay-Per-Click placement comes into play.

A web master or web developer can set up a paid inclusion or pay-per-click campaign to help promote your website (or if you are so technically inclined, you could do it yourself as well). You choose the key words you’d like to rank for, set a budget and run your campaign. The main objective of this is to have some traffic through search engines.

With the above knowledge, you should be in a position to understand that Search Engine Marketing is separate from Search Engine Optimization. One of the best examples of SEM at work would be to see the working of Google AdWords, which best symbolizes Contextual Advertising.

At the end of the day, both the techniques increase the visibility and page rankings of your company’s website within the search engines.