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How to Include the Internet in Small Business Marketing

Small business marketing is something that most people don’t think enough about. They concentrate on the running of the business itself and often end up overlooking the marketing aspect because they feel that they don’t have the time or the money to devote to a proper marketing campaign. The best place to overcome these obstacles is the internet. Engaging in a great online local marketing campaign can be one of the best ways to boost sales to a business, but it doesn’t require nearly as large an investment of time or money for equivalent results as other forms of marketing.

The thing about marketing a business online is that you have almost countless options when it comes to deciding exactly how you want to go about your promotion. You can choose from social methods, search engine optimization options, content creation strategies, or paid advertising. You can choose which of these methods you want to use based on your own experience online or based on how much money or time you want to spend in this type of promotion.

If you want to start including the internet in your small business marketing campaign, you need to get a website first. If you’re computer friendly and have some basic knowledge, you might be able to put up a simple site yourself. However, having a great website is going to be the cornerstone of your online marketing package. Investing in a great designer can be very worthwhile, as a great site is what is going to change your online marketing efforts into actual sales. A bad website can mean that all the other time and money that you invest in online marketing is wasted.

The next step to take when bringing the internet into your small business marketing plans is to start finding ways to get people to your website. This is going to involve doing things like search engine optimization. If you’re not familiar with the methods used to improve a site in order to get internet traffic visiting it, then you may want to take a course, hire a consultant, or start reading articles online in order to learn how to improve your site’s rankings in the search engines.

There are many other ways to drive traffic to a site besides just optimizing a site for the search engines. Many of these methods are actually easier to learn for a beginning internet user, and might be more suitable for someone that isn’t an internet marketing wizard when they’re starting out. Creation of content, for instance, is something that you can do yourself; however, you should pay very close attention to that content.

When you write an article, you can post it to many different sites. People may click your link from that article and end up back at your site. Someone might repost it on their website, Digg it, or recommend it from their blog. Each link to your site is going to help your SEO as well. Also, this type of content will get shared on social networking sites, increasing your social profile. See how content is multi faceted in its usefulness? This doesn’t happen just with articles. In fact, it also applies to videos, podcasts, images, and more.

Social networking is also another thing to consider when you’re first bringing internet marketing into your business. You should start profiles on the major sites, like Twitter and Facebook, and then make sure to let your customers know about them. You will start to build up a following over time and can use these tools to communicate with your customers and to promote your business. These tools are easy to learn and, because so many people use them, they’re an invaluable resource.


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One Comment Published

Small Business Marketing / 26 August 2010 / Reply

If you want lasting free traffic, it will take a while to build up, while paid traffic occurs instantly. If you do buy traffic, make sure you can get enough sales to make it worth it.

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