Market Your Business Online Free. With the growth of the internet and with the foray of business into an online store front and information hub can you afford not to advertise your business online? Did you know latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that only 44.6% of all business in Australia had an online presence in the 2011-2012 financial year. Furthermore small business just like yours the figure was even lower at 34.1% for the same period. In saying that internet generated revenue for all business in that period was 237.1 billion dollars and by implementing some of the free strategies in this article you too can start making some of that revenue. In this article we are going to examine some of the great ways you can get your business name out there for little or no cost and with no need to know anything complicated. Social Network Marketing. An interesting thing is that websites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus are not just for discussing who’s having what for breakfast and where the nearest out of control party is. In fact these platforms offer extremely good marketing support for small business and a great way to target specific segments of your market. Facebook. Facebook has been around for a few years now and whilst it may have started out as somewhere to chat with friends and cyber-stalk your ex it has grown to be quite a valuable marketing tool if used correctly. Facebook allows anyone with a personal page to make a business page or product page or even a page for you’re not for profit and best of all it costs nothing but a little time and thought. Within fifteen minutes you can easily set up your own page and start enlisting the help of your social contacts to market it by sharing it amongst their friends and so on and so forth. So what information can I put on a Facebook business page? Well as long as you keep to the terms of service for Facebook and you are the legitimate representative of the business almost anything. You can post product information, links to your website, operating hours, articles just like this one and a whole lot more. Once you have reached a certain number of likes the good people at Facebook will also allow you to advertise special offers direct from your page. So how does having a page on Facebook help me make money in my business? Indirectly Facebook helps to get the name and image of your business and its branding out to the general public. This in turn helps drive more potential customers and leads to your business where you can focus on selling them your product. Twitter. Twitter is the short messaging service (SMS) of the social network world with messages limited to a small number of characters. Your thinking how can I get my message across with only a few characters and the answer is simple use it to advertise and link to places where you can say much more. Twitter is simply another way for you to get your brand name and image out there and to interact with current and potential customers. Google Plus. An often understated and overlooked option in the social networking arena is Google’s entry into the field with its Google Plus network. Have you often searched on Google and seen listings appear with a little plus symbol (+) and a number next to it. Well that little symbol and the number is Google Plus at work besides allowing you to set up a business page similar to Facebook it allows people with a Google Plus account to publicly and positively recommend your business to other potential leads and customers. Of late the holy grail for any business is online search engine rankings and getting onto page one of the results Google Plus and its recommend system can help here more than any other social network tool as most of Google’s tools interact with each other on a daily basis to provide information to your potential clients. Social Networking Conclusion. For the sake of maybe an hour or twos work now to set up the accounts and then we recommend about 15 minutes a day to monitor each account you could tap into this great free online marketing resource and drive additional customers to your business all using the power of your own personal and client network. Business Directory Marketing. If you jump onto Google and search for online business directory or free business directory you will be presented with literally hundreds to choose from. Whilst some of these sites have more followers and traffic than others and also some have much larger budgets than others most will offer your business a free listing and to be honest what harm can it do to your business to have an additional place for people to find you. By spending just a few hours to set up accounts and listings on some of these directories you could have a huge network of listings working for your business providing information on contact details and services around the clock. Many of these sites will offer you a free listing however many will also offer you additional information fields and better results for a small fee. As a business owner it is ultimately up to you to way up the benefits of these additions to your listing vs. the cost to have them and see if it’s the right fit for what you are aiming to achieve. Professional and Business to Business Marketing. LinkedIn is a social network aimed at professionals and business owners. You start by creating your own profile and from there you can create a business page. LinkedIn offers some great features that are not found in any of the other social network type sites. For example you can offer special deals straight out of the box as well as provide much more in depth information than what is allowed via standard social networking sites. LinkedIn is a great tool for marketing directly to other business owners and professionals who may have need for your services and it also provides many great networking options for business owners via specialised groups. Conclusion. Whilst this is not a complete article on online marketing it is a great place for small business owners to get a little direction on what they can do to market their business on a budget. Let’s face it small business across the board is hurting financially at the moment with uncertain economic times set to continue for a little while yet. Of course if you can’t find the time to implement a strategy for these marketing options we can always discuss an option whereby we can assist your business with setup and monitoring of all of the above for either a small pay by the month or annual fee.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 05:17:20 +0000
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