Marketing A New Business Online
When you sit down and work on building a small business, there are lots of concepts for marketing online that you can use. Some cost lots of money and some are relatively inexpensive, and some can even be free, especially when you’re considering internet marketing. Small business marketing plans, especially those that are forward-looking, will have a wide variety of ideas to put into place at different phases of growth. Here are a few ideas to help start off your small business marketing online.
1. Have a website. It doesn’t matter if the site is nothing more than a map on how to get to your brick and mortar location, a web presence is definitely necessary in today’s world. For as little as $75 for a year’s worth of domain name registration and site location services, you can have a website that people can look towards. Even full blown sales and catalog sites can be very inexpensive in terms of dollars to set up. Putting time and effort into figuring out how to do your own site can be well worth it.
2. Use social networks to attract business. Hooking your business name up with a presence on Facebook, MySpace and other social sites will help get your name out and about. Especially if your small business isn’t contingent on local traffic.
3. Have a presence on “instant” sites like Twitter and other forums. By having your business information in your signature, every time you tweet or post, you’re actually advertising your business
4. Either hire a company or pursue the search engine optimization game yourself. Having your name on the web is great, but having it rank highly enough to be on the first page when people do searches for your type of business on Google, Y! or Bing is a real key to having a successful online presence. Even big businesses use this small business marketing idea.
5. Build an email database. Find ways to collect email addresses from people who you know are interested in your products or services and use them. Don’t spam them to death, but do send emails on occasion with interesting information. You can make it a newsletter email and have it link back to a blog with those articles and more information on it. Every 3 weeks to a month is reasonable for a mail of this type. Not too often, but often enough to make sure you’re being remembered.
There are lots of other tips and tricks you can use to have a big online presence. There are little things like eBay marketing that gets used by Google and other search engines to key off of that will help build your name. RSS feeds, connections to Flickr, Picassa and even Youtube are other ways you can get your name to show up on searches. Being creative isn’t a penalty on the web yet, so think outside the box and have fun with it. That will go a long way to your own personal satisfaction and success with marketing online.