A good small business marketing entrepreneur always makes good use of the basics in online sales to stay afloat the profit quota. With the widespread trend in social media, it is essential for businesses to tap into this tool to maximize network influence and potential sales and profit.

Let us suppose that your business is already running well, thanks to your effective use of social media. Do not give yourself a good pat on the back yet, as you still have to improve your standings and keep up with competition. In this case, you have to go the extra mile and step up from your basic knowledge.

While you may already have a good to excellent number of client following with a corresponding conversion rate, you would definitely want to increase sales and profit as much as you can. To do this, you may start knowing where your followers visit and participate in. Knowing where they congregate would most likely be another good online community to tap into for your widening network.

If you really followed your small business marketing strategy basics, you would be a member or part of a collaboration of similar businesses. And a good basic application would be to compare metrics and productivity. A more advanced thing to do is to actually know and mimic their operations, set up where they set up, and follow where they flourish.

Basic advertising and promotion is the bloodline that continuously flows to your clients to keep them aware that you exist. However, advertising also involves contests and activities for your visitors to participate, and this is what you should actually do. Getting them involved and excited of gaining something such as a prize item would keep them coming and visiting your website.

Content is a basic must for any website to sustain itself for the least part. The content is, after all how you would convey your promotion. To add spice to things and make your small business marketing strategies even more enticing to visitors and followers, provide areas of additional literature for consumption such as news links and blogs; anything that entertains them as well as keep them informed.

Finally, you may want to go the extra mile in setting up your online stores beyond your homepage. Thanks to social media and popular social networks, you may actually register your business and have a new store opened up in that social networking service, catering to all the subscribers in it. Use this feature when available.

Basics in small business marketing are the first set of tools for you to thrive in the virtual community of e-commerce. Incorporating other tools such as social media requires a more advanced method to properly set it up and utilize, and therefore have the full potential realized.

Wrong. A website is just like any other extension of your nightclub. You MUST promote it, meaning you must market it.

Why? Because a finely tuned nightclub or bar website can put more money in your pocket by keeping your customers knowledgeable about what’s going on in your club – and keeping them coming in to buy drinks.

Barhop Marketing has been working with Nightclub and Bar Websites since 2004 and we have helped to come up with a checklist of the things a Bar or Nightclub must to do to market their website. This is that checklist. Do everything in this order and you will have a finely tuned bar or nightclub website.

New Bar or Nightclub Website Marketing Checklist:

1. Add your website URL to all of your Table Tent, Menus, Door, Business Cards, T-shirts, Printed Ads, Radio, TV, Everything…

This is an easily overlooked item, but is completely essential. As soon as your bar or nightclub website is launched, add your URL (www.yourbarwebsite.com) to all printed materials.

2. Make your bar website “Sticky”

“Sticky” simply means that it will keep your customers coming back to your bar or nightclub website. These include the following:

- Guestbook
- Pictures
- News
- Drink Specials
- Calendar
- Blog

Be sure once you add these sections and more importantly keep them up. There’s nothing worse for a bar or nightclub’s website than to have two year old content on it. One of my favorite Bar Website’s is the Hog’s Breath Saloon (http://www.hogsbreath.com).

3. Use Social Media in conjunction with your website.

Social media can be extremely confusing, but once you start using it, it really starts to make sense. Here are the ones to focus on right now:

- Facebook – This is very easy to set up a business account and then start promoting your events and specials on. (www.facebook.com)

- Twitter – Twitter is basically a blog that is limited to how many characters you can add per “Tweet.” This is extremely easy to use and you can even link your twitter account to your facebook account. (www.twitter.com)

The reason to use these two mediums? Your clients are already there and they can sign up even with their phones, so why not directly market to their phones?

4. Create an Email List and Send Newsletters Out

Newsletter marketing has been around for ages. There’s a reason – it works. In my opinion, this is one of the most essential weapons in the arsenal of a bar or nightclub owner.

This is how it works, basically. You have a form somewhere on your website. If you have purchased a site with Barhop Marketing it will be withing the first fold. People put there contact information in the form and it will automatically be added to your list.

Hang on to this list as it’s pure gold.

Now send out a newsletter – you can add coupons for things in it from time to time – at least weekly. This will keep your clients engaged and knowledgeable about what is going on in your bar or nightclub.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

SEO - or Search Engine Optimization is simply methods of optimizing your bar or nightclub website to rank higher in the search engines. I usually go for the lowest hanging fruit first (easier to rank for keywords) and then work my way to the harder ones. Follow the sequence below in order and you’ll find your website rising to the top.

5. Research Keywords in which you want to Rank on Google

It does no good to rank for keywords that aren’t searched for. So it makes sense that the first step in this sequence of steps is to find the keywords your bar website needs to be ranked for.

As a bar or nightclub owner this is easier than most other websites as you have a physical location you want to be ranked for. So for example, you might want to rank high for “bar key west, florida” or “nightclub key west, florida”. You could try for both.

Keep in mind if you are in a highly competitive area like Dallas, Houston or Austin, then getting ranked for any of those will take a LOT of time and effort. But if you are in Spring which is outside of Houston, then the following keywords might be easier to get ranked for:

“bar spring, tx” or “bar spring, texas”

You’ll have to experiment a little, but Google has a tool that can help you narrow down your keywords. It can be found at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Just add your keywords and see what it says. Look for the keywords with low advertising competition and high local search volume. I like to ensure that the local search volume is higher than 1,000.

6. Add your Keywords to your Content

Now that you know your keywords, just simply add them to your content. If you had a website designed with Barhop Marketing, you will be on a content management system and this task will be relatively easier.

As a rule of thumb, make sure your content has those keywords listed in the page name, the website name, and each paragraph with some links and bold tags thrown in.

7. Create inbound links to your Bar Website

This item usually takes a little thinking and some googling. To create inbound links to your Bar Website, you must find them first — usually in the form of directories. A directory is simply a listing of things that links back to websites. We are doing this because Google really likes inbound links and will make your listing go higher for your keywords.

So how to find directories? Simply type in the following substituting “yourlocation” with your actual location:

“Bars near yourlocation”
“Nightclubs near yourlocation”
“Clubs near yourlocation”

Example:
At the time of this writing, I typed in “bars near key west, florida” and the top lisitng was a directory of bars. Usually you can just use an online form to list your bar or club. If you own an existing bar or nightclub, you might find that you are already there. Make sure the information is correct.

Do this periodically (once per month) and you’ll find yourself rising up in the search engines.

8. Submit your bar or club website to Google

Once you’ve done all of the above to your bar or club website, then it’s time to submit it to Google. Is there a reason I concentrate only on Google? Not really, except Google represents 80% of the total search engine traffic. If you’ve optimized and submitted to Google, then you’ll be picked up by the other search engines.

So in order to submit your site to Google, just go here: http://www.google.com/addurl/ and fill out all the pertinent information.

9. Create and optimize Your Bar or Nightclub listing in Google Maps

Google Maps is such a wonderful tool. It creates listing for you usually if it finds your website and physicall address. This is a wonderful place to optimize an incoming link to your site with the added benefit that it’s owned by Google and will show in the top listings for the keyword search.

To get to Google Maps, go here and search under the keyword you want listed and log in and add your bar description:

http://maps.google.com/

Be sure to make the description as keyword rich as possible (what you did with your bar or nighclub website).

10. Add Google Analytics to your Website

This is something that your web design company should do. I know I sound like a broken record, but if your bar or nighclub website was designed by Barhop Marketing, this will have been taken care of for you.

However if not, just go to http://www.google.com/analytics/ and sign up for an account and get the code and add it to the bottom of your website just above the </body> tag.

We want to ensure that google analytics is added to your club or bar website so you can trank and analyze the traffic that is coming to your site. There will be very detailed information such as keywords that people find your site with, how long they stay on your site and what is your highest traffic pages. This is key information for your SEO efforts for your bar website.

11. Write Content and Continue to Add to Your Sticky Sections

Once you write the content, that doesn’t mean you should just kick back and forget about your bar or nightclub website. Google loves content. The more content you feed their spiders, the higher they will rank you for your keywords. This is what I like to call “spider food.” As long as you keep feeding the spiders, the higher ranked your site will become.

The other reason for this is an almost obvious one. You’ll want to keep content “Fresh” so that will keep your clients coming back to your site. Keep writing, keep promoting and keep adding those pictures.

Conclusion

This all sounds like a lot of work, but as a Bar or Nightclub owner, you must realize that a website is the absolute cheapest way to market your bar or nightclub. You can always delegate it to a more technical minded person in your organization if you don’t feel like doing it.

But regardless, if you follow the above list, you will find that your bar or nightclub website will be successful and will bring more people to your Bar or Nightclub.

There are certain things that Bar or Nightclub Websites need in order to be more “sticky”. Sticky basically means that it keeps bringing people back to your bar or club website. You want your website to be sticky because it will mean you will have to spend less on your marketing efforts.

Here is a list of six things that we at Barhop Marketing have found bar and club websites need:

1. Guestbook

Guestbooks are great for people who have visited your Bar or Nightclub to leave a few comments. The only problem with guestbooks are that in the past six years or so, guestbooks have become spam attactors so you have to really monitor them.

The one we use emails the bar or club website owner when there has been a post and is not posted until it’s been approved.

2. Picture Gallery

Everybody loves to see their mug on websites — especially cool websites like Bar or NightClub Websites. This feature alone, if it’s kept up, will be plenty sticky and will keep people coming back.

Post pictures after each major event in your bar or nightclub and especially after Haloween and New Years. There are lots of picture gallery software packages out there that are relatively easy to integrate one into your bar or club website.

3. News

NightClubs and Bars have lots of things going on. It’s important to let your patrons know what’s going on. If you’re going to be closed for a night for a private party, post it in the News section.

The news section needs to be on the front page, preferrably in the first fold, and summarized in bullets. Bar and NightClub patrons are mostly an impatient bunch and dont’ want to read a lot, so bullets will help.

4. Drink Specials

One of the chief things that visitors go to a bar or nightclub website for are drink specials. Make sure you post them on your front page prominently and easy to read.

As a sidenote, we’ve had bar and club owners who didn’t want to post their drink specials as they thought it made it too easy for their competition to one-up them. I just don’t understand that as they then turn around and pay for ads on the radio, tv and newspaper. Just doesn’t make sense at all when the website is almost free.

Do yourself a favor and post drink specials on your bar’s website. It’s where your customers expect to find them.

Also make sure you update the drink specials on your nightclub website when you change the specials. There’s nothing that will cause more of a stir than to change the drink specials and a customer come in because he read about them online and it’s completely different.

5. Calendar

The next chief thing that visitors go to a bar or nightclub website for is your calendar. It’s important to post your upcoming events and keep your calendar updated. We’ve found that once you start using an online calendar, it will help streamline a lot of things in your organization.

Be sure to post your upcoming events on your frontpage as well. A small bulleted list summarizing three to five upcoming events of your bar or nightclub will help keep your customers up-to-date.

6. Blog

Blogs are extremely “sticky.” especially if you post insider-type information on it. Things like insider conversations with bands or bar gossip. You might find that a Blog will open a new style of conversation with your customers.

We use all sorts of Blog software, but find that WordPress is among the best. It’s easy to use and configure and is easy to moderate comments. It’s good to have a conversation with your clients posted, but you will want to make sure that your bar or club is not being defamed on your own website.

Conclusion

In conclusion, in our experience at Barhop Marketing, the above six things are extremely needed on bar and nightclub websites. If you include them, you’ll find that your website will soon pay for itself as you customers will be happier and more informed and will most likely be spending a lot more time in your bar or nightclub.