If you're trying to attract clients to your new business, some helpful online marketing ideas may help you begin. Internet marketing, when done correctly, is a powerful tool which can aid traditional and home based businesses alike. These online advertising ideas can help you bring in quailfied visitors to support your business and bring you success.
Idea 1: Network For Free
Joining various social networking sites can ingratiate you within different online communities and help to spread awareness of your business. Try joining some or all of the following websites, for a start:
- Flickr
Each of these websites requires very minimal effort to set up and maintain, but can be powerful tools for spreading the word about your business. By giving visitors a reason to return with clever or informative updates, you can earn repeat customers as well as new ones. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes a day to post an update, so keep your accounts up to date if possible.
You should also join networking sites which relate to your business and make yourself known on online forums. For example, freelance writers could join FreelanceWritingGigs.com, while skin care consultants can join SkinCareTalk.com. Websites such as these are great for targeting customers who are already interested in your service or product.
Idea 2: Start a Blog
Blogs not only help build your online presence, but are also a great way to share fun stories, thoughts or whatever else you like. It's also a way to lend validity to your business by providing backlinks and a sense of personality. You can start a blog for free on WordPress.com or BlogSpot.com. Both sites are intuitive and easy to use. If writing isn't your forte, you can hire freelance writers reasonably inexpensively to update your blog regularly.
Idea 3: Start a Newsletter
Set up a mailing list through your website where people can sign up to receive your business' newsletter. Packing your newsletter with fun stories, photos, notifications of new products or services available, and promotions can give any potential customer reason to sign up. You can use your newsletter to advertise anything you like, giving people even more reason to buy.
Idea 4: Hold Promotions
With your blog, newsletter and networking sites, it can be fun to hold special promotions only for those people who network with you in some way. This will give new customers incentive to join your network, and provide everyone within your network with incentive to buy your services or products.
Idea 5: Get Optimized
Optimizing your website with SEO (search engine optimization) content can help bring traffic to your website through search engines. SEO is the strategic use of keywords within web copy. To find out what keywords you should be integrating in your web copy, use Google's search-based keyword tool (Google.com/sktool). Enter the name of your website and some words which are related to your business. The SKTool will come back with a list of keywords. Next to each will be a small bar (which is partially filled in) and a dollar amount. For the purpose of SEO, you can ignore the dollar amount - just look at the bar. The more it is filled in, the more popular it is. You should pick out a few of the most popular words to work into your web copy.
You can use this same tool to buy PPC (Pay Per Click) ads on Google. This is where the dollar amount comes in: that is the amount you will pay per click if you purchase the keyword. You can sign in with your Google account (or create one for free, if you don't have one yet) to shop for keywords and start setting up ads.
These 5 ideas may help you market your business online to many qualified potential customers. Even better, 4 of these 5 ideas are free! Using the Internet to its full potential can make your business a success for a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.
