The web offers a wealth of tools that can help you market your business on a shoestring. In this post and the next one, I’ll take a look at ten ways the internet can help promote your business. Spend 10% of your marketing time on each one and you can build your business on a budget. Here goes …
1. Join LinkedIn
What’s it good for? Expanding your reach and raising awareness
Top tips
- Add a recent profile picture so people know it’s you
- Ask for recommendations so people know how good you are
- Add your company website: this counts as an ‘inbound’ link for Google and helps people to find out more
- Update your status regularly: it’ll show up in your profile and may feature the weekly update email LinkedIn users receive
- Answer questions: you can raise awareness of our company by demonstrating your expertise
- Advertise: you can target geographical area, sex, job title, company or group, so it can be as targeted as you want
2. Get a Twitter account / Write a blog
What’s it good for? Expanding your reach and search engine optimisation
Top tips
- Add a recent profile picture to make a more personal connection
- Be interesting or useful if you can so people want to follow you
- Don’t over sell: this is ‘social media’ not ‘sales media’
- Comment on other blogs: so people can see you’re keeping up with trends plus it´s a quicker option if you don’t have time to write a full post
3. Invest in a website
What’s it good for? Converting leads into sales
Top tips
- Make sure it’s got a clearly defined objective: whether it’s give people more information or get people to buy, it will give it more focus
- Do your keyword research (see my Choosing keywords for SEO blog post) so the right people will find you
- Make sure it’s clear what you want people to do before they leave your site: whether it’s to call, email or checkout their purchases, you need them to make contact with you before they leave
4. Create free directory entries
What’s it good for? Search engine optimisation (the more links from reputable sites you have into your site the better)
Example directories
5. Get reviewed
What’s it good for? Getting more leads and improving conversion rates
Top sites
- Google Places: because it can improve search placement
- TripAdvisor
- LinkedIn recommendations
That’s numbers one to five covered. Next time: numbers six to ten.
