Thursday, January 8, 2009

Small Business Marketing Tips – 5 Ways To Market Your Small

As small businesses naturally don’t have the necessary
resources to launch huge marketing campaigns, they will have to
compensate this with resourcefulness and innovation. If you’re
running a small business and you’re searching for cost-efficient
marketing solutions, here’s how you can use the wonderful World
Wide Web to your company’s advantage.

5 Ways to Market Your Small Business Online

Build a Website – You don’t have to pay for web hosting even if
you’re running a commercial website just as long as your company
can be properly categorized as a small business. Having a
company website is the means for prospective customers to learn
everything they have to know about the products or services
you’re offering. Compared to other online media, a website
allows your customers to see and hear about your offer and
perhaps interact with you as well.

Know about SEO – Your work doesn’t start and end with building
a website. To make your website work as a marketing tool for
your business, you need to incorporate SEO - or search engine
optimization – elements in it. SEO can help your website zoom to
the top of search engine rankings and provide it with all the
exposure you need.

In regard to SEO, make sure that you focus on your design and
content. Besides needing your website layout to be visually
attractive, it must also have easily located links to facilitate
navigation. Use HTML as much as possible as this is more SEO
friendly than, say, CSS. As for the content, refresh or update
it as much as you can because new information will always
encourage old and new readers to visit your website. Also, think
about the appropriate keywords for your website and use them as
much as possible – without committing grammatical errors or
ruining the coherence of your content – to delight search engine
spiders all the more.

Have a Blog – A blog is one of the most effective online
marketing tools today, and if you don’t have one yet then you’re
wasting a huge opportunity day after day. A blog allows you to
directly interact with prospective customers and almost
immediately update them with anything new about your company’s
products or services.

To increase the marketing effectiveness of your blog, make sure
that you’re writing about one topic alone. This topic must be
directly related to your company’s products or services.
Furthermore, it must be something that you know and love a lot
to enable you to write in a convincing and interesting fashion.

Build Your Network Contacts – Although websites sometimes seem
to be creatures of their own right, always remember that a
website can’t really operate by itself. It gets updated and
achieves success because of its webmaster or owner, and that
person should be the one you’re concentrating on getting
friendly with. Do your best to build your network by
establishing good working relationships with other website
owners. This is a give and take situation so be ready and
willing to shell out as many favors as you hope to receive. As
you become good buddies with these people, you’ll end up
exchanging links, and this, by the way, is called affiliate
marketing.

Join the Podcast Revolution – Although the popularity of blogs
is certainly not waning, that doesn’t mean you have to
completely rely on blog marketing alone. There are other
marketing fishes in the Internet, and one of them goes by the
name of podcasting. Make new podcasts regularly and insert your
ads in between. You have to make them short and interesting
enough to discourage your listeners from wasting energy just to
press the fast forward button.

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