Online Business Promotion | You may not have
wads of cash to spend on marketing in the early stages of your startup, but
that doesn’t mean that there aren’t effective ways to get your brand out there.
Before the Internet, small businesses only had
a few ways to market their products cheaply, through methods like printing out
fliers or sponsoring little local events. Now there are all kinds of
opportunities out there on the Web—you just need to know where to look.
Here are six ways to promote your business
online that won’t cost you a dime.
Use the three big local listing services |
Online Business Promotion
Registering your business with Google Places
allows it to be found more easily on Google searches and it shows up on Google
Maps. All you have to do is fill out the form and register, then get your
business verified through their confirmation process, which can be done either
with a phone call or snail mail. Yahoo! also has a big database of businesses
called Yahoo! Local. It’s free, and is certainly worth the few minutes it takes
to set up. Microsoft’s Bing has a similar service that’s easy to sign up for.
Get on Facebook if you’re not already there |
Online Business Promotion
Even if your business does have a Facebook
account, make sure it is optimized to get the most from it. Use Facebook ads,
updates and Fan pages to keep fans posted on your business happenings.
As a business, just be careful to get your
business a Facebook Page and not a Profile; profiles are for individual people
only and they are limited in what you can do as a business. Moreover, if
Facebook discovers you using a profile as a business, you stand to lose the
whole profile and all the friends your business has accrued.
Become a part of Pinterest | Online Business
Promotion
Pinterest has created an platform for visual
social media input and your company can make the most of this by feeding in
well taken photos of your business products and other relevant images. Make
them interesting, compelling and shareable though; some creative effort will
need to be put into the photos to make Pinterest users want to share the photos
around. As with any advertising, focus on what makes your products interesting
and desirable and try to capture that in photographs.
Participate in forums and blogs | Online
Business Promotion
This is one way to help promote your product
or services, showing yourself as an expert and as someone who genuinely wants
to help resolve people’s problems. Often you can do this for free. However,
this option has one huge caveat––be sure to post in forums that are website
promotion friendly if you intend on using your URL or emblazoning the post with
your business details. Not all blog sites or forums allow promotion blog or
forum posts and breaching this could see your business blocked and even
badmouthed. In some cases you may have to pay a fee to advertise on their sites
but usually you do not. In many cases, simply stating that you’re the
founder/owner/director/community manager, etc. of a certain site can be
sufficient to alert people to the good your company is doing online. Let them
do the rest of the adding up and finding of you––consumers are intelligent.
Use YouTube to promote your business | Online
Business Promotion
Perhaps one of the most popular and creative
way to show more information about your business is to use videos. Some
examples of how to do this include:
1. Upload a video of your company, and put on
as many links as you can from all sorts of topics so as many people as possible
see it.
2. Videotape launches and other public events
promoted by your business so that clients who couldn’t make these events are
still able to catch up on what happened.
3. Video how-to information related to your
business, so that when someone is looking how to solve a problem your business
has knowledge of, they find your video answer and learn more about you.
Self-help videos on common, basic problems can be a great way to show your
business’s sharing side and to garner interest from potential new customers.
Use email marketing | Online Business
Promotion
You can create lists of customers, or
potential customers that you can keep in touch with on a regular basis.
However, be aware that many recipients regard this as spamming and may
complain. Always seek to get the agreement of customers to be emailed first,
and always take into account spamming laws, which detail that you’re not allowed
to send people information they do not want. It makes good business sense to
only send information to people who want to hear about your products or
services and not to those who do not. These e-mailings can all be sent out in
bulk, as if you were sending them through postal mail.
courtesy: http://www.medianovak.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment