If you’re a small business owner, one of the first questions that will likely come to mind: “How do I compete with the big players out there?” The Internet marketing industry is a very competitive arena; hence, playing the marketing game can be very challenging. What’s great about the Internet is that, unlike in traditional markets where you need to have big budget for TV or magazine ads, you do not need to have huge advertising resources in order to reach your target market. Lack of funds and tough economic times shouldn’t limit your marketing efforts. The Internet offers affordable, even free marketing opportunities, and small businesses can leverage these tools in order to boost their online presence. Whether you’re marketing on a budget or without a budget, here are high-impact marketing ideas to consider.
Social Networks
Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Plus all have millions of members. This makes social networks great sources of traffic with great ROI. They also create plenty of opportunities for finding new customers. Cost for joining these social networks? — $0. The only investment to make here is time and commitment. Patience is also needed, as it may take months before you can build your social profiles.
Some tips for creating a solid presence:
- Share interesting/ informative content you find on the web.
- Provide tips/ advice/ answers on how to issues or questions your followers are facing.
Forums and message boards
Do you know how Timothy Sykes, a stock market guru, sends an additional 5,000 visitors to his website every month? – message boards.
Message boards have been around for years, but they are still relevant and effective. Yahoo! Message Boards andGoogle Groups are some of the popular ones out there.
Some tips:
- Find sites that are related to your industry or business niche. Choose sites with high search rankings.
- Write informative posts that answer your potential clients’ problems and issues. This will give more value to your posts. Giving people helpful advice can also increase trust factor in your business and drive more potential customers to your site.
- Integrate heavily-searched keywords relevant to your business, product, or service. This way, when your target customers search for something related to your product or service, they may stumble upon your forum post.
- Make sure to include your website URL in your comments, but do this subtly.
Google Local
If you search for a service or business on Google now, you will notice that more and more results are being tailored to your location. Examples: web design Georgia, dental services Orange County, cheap hotels Seattle.
Register your business address and contact number with Google Local. When your customer base searches for a service or business in your area, they may stumble upon your website. Registering with Google Local is free of charge.
Guest authorship.
Guest blogging is a great way to increase your targeted traffic, establish your branding, expand your community reach, increase your RSS subscribers, and get more backlinks to your website.
Some tips:
- Write a blog post relevant to you (and your host blog’s) niche. For example, if you’re submitting to a travel blog, then write something related to travel and not ways on how to care for plants.
- Establish relationship with the blog owner before applying for a guest post. You can do this by commenting on their blog posts or by engaging with the owner via Facebook or other social sites.
Search engines
Search engines are door to your customers. How do you open it wide so your customers can enter your business site? The key is search engine optimization. You need to optimize your website for search engines so you’ll rank high on their search engines. This, in turn, will make your business more visible to potential customers. If you don’t have the SEO budget to hire a marketing firm or an SEO specialist, you have to learn SEO yourself. There are plenty of free guides to optimizing website that you can find online but be sure avoid any deadly SEO mistakes.
Google Merchant
Register your business with Google Merchant Centre. This free service from the search engine giant allows businesses to list their products or services. As such, likelihood of your products being found online is increased. This, in turn, increases your chances of getting free sales leads.
Some tips for improving online sales:
- Upload product feed to Google Product Search; this increases the probability of your products showing up in Google searches.
- If you’re using Google Checkout, connect it with your Google Merchant account for safer and simpler online transactions.
