Local businesses deserve the same attention and results that large corporations achieve from their internet marketing efforts. While not all companies are equipped to handle smaller clients with limited budgets, Javaleaf’s methods cater to just that type of clientele. We strongly believe that any company with a listing in the local yellow pages is a perfect fit for our service offerings – and we’ve designed packages to fit all budgets, large and small.

Give our office a call at (570) 825-3950 to learn more about what we can do increase your local internet marketing reach.

Together they decided the best course of action would be a full redesign of backmountainbacks.com, as well designing a new information structure and sitemap for the site, for usability purposes.  In addition, the implementation of WordPress as a content management system was necessary, so the good Doctors could make changes to their site’s content easily and efficiently without having to pay maintenance fees.

Occasionally there is a time and a place to use a middleman to help you make the most informed decisions in certain situations; however, when it comes to marketing your local business online, the time and place to use a middleman (aka large business directory site) to lead your online program is never.

Large online directories, such as superpages.com, magicyellow, citysearch, and Local.com, are essentially the “middleman” when it comes to getting your company in front of potential clients online. If you are searching for anything from a plumber to a mortgage broker in your area, these directories will pop up on the search engines toting the End All, Be All solution to local results. They then guide the user through their maze of competitor names, addresses, and maps while trying to filter the user to a business that is relevant to what they are looking for.

The argument in favor of these directories usually revolves around the high volume of traffic that they sometimes provide. It’s no real secret, however, that this is all traffic that can easily be landing directly on your site anyway. Fortunately for everyone, Google is all the local directory we will ever need.

By marketing your site correctly, you connect your potential clients directly to your site through their searches on Google. Without a strong web presence, you essentially force your potential clients to leave Google and send them through a maze of listings on these directories, to hopefully land on your site.  Cut out the amount of exit opportunities on the path to your lead form by cutting out the middleman!

If you are relying solely on a yellowbook.com or an anywho.com type site to feed traffic to your business, then you are putting your entire web presence in their hands. You are relying on these sites to be your online representatives. Can the small template box they stick your name and address in truly convey your talent, value, and commitment to the client, let alone motivate the user enough to click on your link over the next guy’s? No one knows more about your business than you do, and no other tool is as effective at capturing online traffic as your own website.

Time and time again, even the large professional firms in the neighborhood can fall for the sharp sales pitch and vague promises made by the industry specific directories. For instance, lawyers.com and findlaw.com are just two examples of portals that take users who are searching for attorneys off of Google and into a maze of competing attorney listings. The only difference between those sites and yellowbook.com is that the user won’t see anything but ads and listings for lawyers. Both types of directories, however, are equally effective at frustrating and confusing the user.

Once you have established your site on the search engines, having a presence in local directories is an easy way to supplement your attempt to capture more “online real estate”.  If you are in an area where your current online competition is minimal, having a few local directory listings on superpages.com under your web site may help push certain competitor sites off of the results page. In areas such as Wilkes-Barre and Scranton where the current online competition is minimal for certain industries, having a few local directory listings on superpages.com under your web site may help push certain competitor sites off of the results page.

Weekly entertainment guide sites can be used similarly as well since many times they will have a decent page rank or an established organic presence locally. For instance, theweekender.com and the570.com are returned often in Google in our area because of strong Wilkes-Barre SEO content. Take advantage of local guides, but do not rely entirely on them.

Don’t be foolish enough to think that having listings in these “local” directories will be enough to capture local traffic – it’s not. Business directories are simply a redundancy on the path to your website. All that you are doing is opening the doors to your competition to swoop in and steal your internet customers with minimal marketing effort. Get yourself partnered with a professional marketing and design firm that is experienced in local search marketing, specifically local Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and take charge of the traffic that is rightfully yours.

These communities are more popular than ever, and recent studies are showing that they are not only being frequented by the usual suspects (tweens, teens and college age students), but that many adults in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s have also jumped on the bandwagon as a way to reconnect with old friends, stay in touch with loved ones, to receive the latest news, and to build networks with people from across the globe that share similar interests and passions. In fact, recent information provided by InsideFacebook.com shows that the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women 55+, and during the last six months of 2008 Facebook experienced a growth rate of over 276% for users age 35-54! The 55+ demo is not far behind either showing 194% growth rate over the same period, and the 25-34 year old population is doubling once every six months on Facebook! Each of the sites mentioned above have millions if not hundreds of millions of active users, and once you are inside, it’s easy to see why so many people are flocking to take part and share a piece of their lives with others.

So what does this mean to you, and what does this mean to us? I think the answer is one in the same. These social communities are giving both businesses and community members the ability to interact on a completely different level that ever before, and in a manner that is much more personal and intimate. The setting on the sites is casual and comfortable, where businesses and customers can become friends. Businesses and organizations now have the ability to get instantaneous feedback from clients fans. Companies are creating conversation and gathering information in real time that they can take action on to make well informed, and well educated decisions about how we can better improve their services, customer satisfaction and brand reputation. We enjoy the interaction with members or followers of our community pages, and we are encouraging those of you that already have accounts on Facebook and Twitter to do a simple search for us, or click on our links below to join in the discussion. And for those of you who may be new to all of this, getting started is simple, and a lot of fun once you are on board!

“A good way to prepare for the hard times is to scale back, always be ready, and expect the worst. When the rainy season comes you’ll have extra money to survive these slow times in business. Cut back insurance, only spend on bare necessities, and realize how to run an operation with as little operating costs as possible. “Cut Cut Cut Cut”……..”Increase sales”…..”Cut Cut Cut”……..

Wait a minute! I had to interject with some of the most successful business friends I know. “How are you going cut all marketing efforts and keep increasing sales”? Wow did I start a swarm. I felt like I just lit a hornets’ nest on fire! After 5 minutes of arguing, I had the whole room laughing and agreeing that sales and customers is the life blood of any company. Especially in a time of recession!

In an economic downturn, sales and marketing are two areas that should be budgeted for any growing or surviving company. There are very cost effective and track able ways to market to your audience. Obviously Internet Marketing Is the most accurately tracked advertising in the world today. Analytics and data collecting allow you to track and tweak your campaign in real time. With Display and Search Engine Marketing, your targeted audience will be connected with your website. A Website is the number 1 sales instrument in any company. Yeah it’s great to have a very pretty and professional website, but if no one is ever going to see it, no one will ever know you exist.

Websites also have to be functional. Does it really inform and capture your audience’s attention? Or more importantly does it capture your audience’s information to follow up with later. Deigning a web site to fit the needs of your business is crucial in having a functional web presence. If executed correctly, web design and marketing can be the most cost effective form or business acquisition.

On and On I go.  Needless to say, We are now doing business together and acquiring customers on a daily basis for a respectable return on investment. I love my job!

If you were fortunate enough to be born and raised in the Wyoming Valley of Northeastern PA, you will inevitably be exposed to NEPA’s most basic life lessons: hard work is rewarded, never forget where you came from, and family is everything. However, in this beautiful valley of nearly 300,000 children and grandchildren of immigrant coal miners, one lesson reigns supreme… change doesn’t come swiftly or easily.

With only 10 minutes of browsing online a child now has access to more of the world’s information than our great grandparents had in a year of local newspapers. It’s an amazing time to be thirsty for knowledge, and even better time to share your knowledge with others, and there’s no better tool to do so than the Internet.

So why, in this cyber age, are the majority of locals still reaching for their bulky phone book to find a plumber or a lawyer instead of firing up a Search Engine? Well folks…change here doesn’t come swiftly or easily.

We live in a valley where traditions, homes, cars, customs, and the shelves dedicated to holding 400 page phonebooks are passed from parent to child, generation after generation. So what’s wrong with staying true to your roots you ask? Well, nothing, but certainly now there’s an opportunity to clear those hefty books off that dusty shelf and instead pass something even more valuable down to your children…Google!

As a local Internet Marketing Agency, one of Javaleaf’s biggest obstacles is overcoming the stranglehold traditional advertising has over the residents and businesses of this great valley. Of course it’s not to say that these marketing channels (TV, radio, billboards, yellow pages, etc.) are completely ineffective; however, a company that is not using Google, Yahoo, and MSN traffic to its advantage is missing out on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars in annual business. Yes, millions.

Sure, some people still use yellow pages regularly, so we always encourage clients to have some sort of presence in their local phone directories. However, devoting the bulk of your marketing budget to yellow page ads is mind boggling to anyone who has ever spent more than a week advertising on a search engine. Simply put, there’s just no comparison.

The local yellow pages and Google results are the same basic form of marketing; however, this is where the similarities end. The inferiority of a year-long, unchangeable, and expensive phone directory program is just comical when compared to an incredibly flexible online program for the same cost. Having the ability to constantly test value props, customer’s geographic location, time of day placement, color scheme, and content of your online ads (all the while sending the traffic to your infinitely detailed website instead of a 3 inch paper ad) is a vastly superior option. Oh, and did I mention that these programs only cost you when someone actually clicks on your ad? Oh yes. Now we’re talking about a pay-as-you-go model which is nonexistent in TV and yellow page contracts.

The point is that there is a real opportunity here that local companies need to take advantage of. Capturing online leads is easy with the right help, and can certainly be the key to taking your business to the next level. As much as Change likes to take its sweet time in this area, NEPA’s next generation of those seeking a local law firm, doctor, dentist, contactor, or mortgage broker has already established its dependence on the Internet over all traditional media. The dependence grows by the day.

The days of simply throwing up some contact information on a clever domain are over. Here’s what you need to do to help your business:

• First, prioritize your marketing budget to get more serious about your website.
• Second, get your site in the hands of the marketing professionals before your competitors do the same.
• Third, have faith in the effectiveness of Internet Marketing.

Yellow pages are dying and you can’t afford to let your business die slowly with them. Local advertising is a battlefield, and by overlooking the proper online marketing you’ve shown up to the battle without any ammunition.

To solve some of these issues, Javaleaf is providing a fresh new look for the Blakeslee Inn and Restaurant’s site, as well as fully integrating WordPress as a CMS (along with some custom plugins) to give the good people at TBI full control over all aspects of their web presence. You can see a sneak preview of their new design above.

Their existing site worked, but having been designed and developed more than 6 years ago it was a bit behind the times in terms of both visual aesthetic and e-commerce functionality.  It operated on a proprietary e-commerce platform that lacked much of the functionality that is commonplace in today’s online marketplace, such as per-option inventory control, coupon and promotion management, and product comparisons. To bring the site up-to-date Javaleaf designed a fresh, clean and appealing new interface and migrated the site to the wonderfully full-featured and open source Magento Commerce platform.

Javaleaf is not just a company born in Northeastern Pennsylvania, but a company that intends to work tirelessly at increasing the size and scale of NEPA’s online footprint.  We’ll never forget our roots!  Besides, what good is a company that is “too big” or thinks themselves too important to work with clients in their own backyard?  Our main focus is to promote and serve local and regional companies with effective marketing and design strategies tailored to meet their online goals and objectives.

Our team is an exceptionally talented group of  internet marketing experts and design wizards who are eager to grow your business and ours.  We are constantly learning and excited to be offering our knowledge base, experience and skill sets to local business owners.  But above all else, we pride ourselves on producing measurable results for our hard-working clients.  With over two decades of combined marketing and design experience, the Javaleaf management team brings Madison Avenue expertise to the Wilkes Barre/Scranton metropolitan area.

So what exactly does Javaleaf do?

We aren’t just an internet marketing company.  And we aren’t just a web design company.  We are a hybrid; a company that designs with marketing in mind.  From your web site to your brochures and business cards, from your search engine optimization campaign to your pay per click marketing strategies, from your corporate logo to your blog and Twitter page – our focus is on growing your customer base by building a marketing plan to capture leads and increase your brand’s exposure online.

We come from the eCommerce industry where every dollar counts and new customer acquisition is paramount.  Javaleaf is dedicated to bringing that extra level of scrutiny and professionalism to law firms, doctors, dentists, and accountants.   And we aren’t going to forget plumbers, electricians, realtors, or any other business who deserve an online presence that represents the quality of the services they provide.

We welcome the opportunity to get to know you and your company, so please introduce your business to us by calling: (570) 825.3950 or emailing: grow@javaleaf.com.