What is required for small businesses to succeed online in 2010?

Every small business owner I speak with knows that they need to have an internet presence and they know that they need to learn to succeed online. They are all aware that traditional forms of advertising are becoming more expensive and less effective. Not to pick on anyone, but when was the last time you picked up a yellow pages to find a business, and yet the cost of advertising in the yellow pages continues to skyrocket.

The statistics show that 80% of people today first search online when looking for a local business. I don't think anyone would argue that the world is changing faster and faster. Yellow pages are issued once a year. Newspaper sales and subscriptions are down so dramatically that many papers are on the verge of bankruptcy. However, online searches for local businesses are growing every month, sometimes exponentially. All business owners can sense this, you can see how people's behaviors have changed. Information is more readily available and the means to consume it are more available.

Still there is a dilemma which faces the small business owner. How can the business owner continue to keep focused on running their business and at the same time learn how to become an internet expert. Even when small business has a website there is another dilemma. How does a business attract visitors to their website and convert them into customers?

That question leads us to a third dilemma. For those of us in the business of helping businesses improve their internet presence, we know that in order to get traffic you must get a site ranked in the search engines. The dilemma is, it's difficult to get ranked without traffic and nearly impossible to get traffic without being ranked.

One of the ways I address this for my customers is by using what I call the "hub and wheel" method. It surprises most of my customers when I point out to them that they are allowed to have more than one website. The "hub and wheel" method entails building a single site for a customer which is rather traditional and has the means for monetizing visitors - a way to turn visitors into customers and ultimately revenue. That's the hub. Around the hub are a series of websites built to focus on a single keyword, with links back to the hub. Let's call these sites the "spokes" of the wheel. We then spend our efforts attracting traffic to the "spoke" sites. These efforts create the "wheel" and include traditional methods like article marketing, social network marketing, blogging, video marketing and a number of other methods, tricks and techniques I've picked up.

Since the "spoke" sites are focused on a single keyword, even down to selection of a domain name, we can overcome many of the obstacles to getting ranked in the search engines.

If for the "spoke" sites, I can get ranked in the search engines and each of the "spoke" sites has many links pointing back to the "hub" site, they will act to draw traffic and help raise the ranking of the "hub" site.

There is a secondary benefit to this strategy. Everyone in the business of internet marketing is aware that search engines are becoming more and more aggressive in suspending accounts, putting sites in the "sandbox" and otherwise penalizing internet marketers. In the "hub and wheel" method, no aggressive marketing techniques are being directed at the "hub" site. So the greatest exposure is for the "spoke" sites. These sites are easily replaceable, so one of them being punished by the search engines will not derail the whole strategy.