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 New Free Online News
Ten Fantastic FREE Ways to Market
Your New Small Business
These ten action points to market your small business web site are guaranteed to draw in new customers. You’ll be surprised how effective they can be. Yes, they’re free and they’re good. You don’t need big bucks to see big results.
1. Use Free Social Media to Market Your New Small Business
- Use the online social media sites to introduce your business and to build brand awareness. Set up your MySpace page, your Twitter account, your LinkedIn, Facebook, Friendster and Hi5 profiles, and link each of them to your web site. Facebook offers business pages, too.
- Post product pictures at Flickr.com, together with your profile, description and link to the web site. When you choose your screen name for these online accounts, you might want to use the domain name of your business site, like JoesHVACDotCom.
- A number of bookmarking sites also offer you a community presence, as in Digg, StumbleUpon, Ask, Google Bookmarks, Reddit, Blogmarks, Simpy, Delicious, Kaboodle, Blinklist, Live, Slashdot, Magnolia, Spurl, Technorati, myAol, Yahoo Bookmarks, Furl or Newsvine.
2. Try Free Guerilla Techniques to Market Your New Small Business
Explore guerrilla marketing techniques that require only time, energy and imagination. Depending on the type of business, you can offfer seminars, free samples, free consultations, and product demonstrations. Perhaps it makes sense to give away a free toolbar, screensaver, game or utility, all of which can be branded for your business. Many small businesses have been successful when they give away free coupons on their web site. Give the customers more service than they expect. If your employees have idle time, offer the customer free product assembly. Introduce yourself to the customers and get some face time with them.
3. Visit Online Groups to Market Your New Small Business
Visit the online groups for more free opportunities to introduce yourself. See if Google Groups or Yahoo Groups has a group that focuses on your area of interest. Group members will appreciate your help and advice.
Participate in online forums where your expertise will be useful.
4. Write Online Articles to Market Your New Small Business
- Write an article about your field of expertise. It could be a helpful "how-to" article for one of the many sites that accept free articles. You’ll automatically get a link back to your business web site and the publicity is free
- Write a press release and post it online. The topic could be your store expansion, your new product line, a new employee, or a charitable project. Include links to your online store and submit it to the free press release sites online. Check out sites like 24-7PressRelease.com, PRLog.org and 1888PressRelease.com. Email your press release to your local newspapers, too.
- Find your business niche on Wikipedia, WikiTravel, and other wiki sites, and become a contributor. You might be able to link to your business site as a reference.
5. Optimize Your Web Site to Market Your New Small Business
Make your web site friendly for search engines. Explore the techniques of search engine optimization. Just by changing the title of your page, its description, or your introductory remarks, you can double the traffic to your site. The traffic sent by search engines is called organic traffic, and it’s free.
6. Take Advantage of Free Business Listings
to Market Your New Small Business
- Use the Google Local Business Center to create your free listing. When potential customers search Google Maps for local information, they'll find your business: your address, hours of operation, even photos of your storefront or products. It's easy, it’s free, and you don't need a website of your own.
- Also look at your business listing in yellowpages.com.
- Check the local online telephone listing for your business, and correct it if necessary.
- Make sure your Yahoo city listing is up to date.
- Submit your site to The Open Directory Project, dmoz.org. This directory is maintained by humans, and getting in is difficult, but the search engines value your dmoz listing.
7. Use Free Online Blogging to Market Your New Small Business
- Locate blogs with interests similar to yours. Leave comments on the blogs, and use your business domain name as your screen name; for example, AngiesCookiesDotCom. You can pick up free traffic this way, too.
- Read more blogs . Set up your feed reader with the names of good blogs. A feed reader saves time by letting you skim the headlines of new articles. Whenever you have a spare moment, read something in your field.
- If you enjoy writing, set up a blog for yourself. It can be a part of your business web site, where you write informally about related activities and allow your personality to shine. The blog is a great tool to build traffic to your web site.
8. Use Free Internet Tools to Market Your New Small Business
- Set up and verify a Webmaster Central Account at Google.
- Submit a product to Google Base. Google Base lets you submit pictures and describe your items with detailed information called attributes, which will help searchers find your content more easily. You don’t even need a web site to take advantage of Google Base.
- Install Web analytics on your site, if you don't already have them. Google Analytics is free and good. You’ll learn more about the visitor’s experience on your site.
- Set up a CrazyEgg heat mapping test for your most important pages, to analyze where the user's eye finds and clicks on information on your Web site. The results will help you rearrange items on your pages to maximize visibility.
- Show your customers how to find your store by adding a link to Google Maps on your web site.
- Set up a MyBlogLog account for your blog or your web site so your visitors can see avatars (small photos) of each other.
9. Venture Into Free Online Video to Market Your New Small Business
Convert a slideshow of your products into a video and upload it to Youtube or MetaCafe. Be sure to optimize your title and descriptions to get the most traffic. Set up your own channel on Youtube. With You Tube hosting your video and supplying the bandwidth, embed the video into your web site.
10. Try Pay Per Click Advertising to Market Your New Small Business
No, Pay Per Click advertising is not free, but it can be very inexpensive. Signup is free. You can set your advertising budget as low as $1 per day, and turn your ad campaign off and on whenever you wish. When people search for your products, your business ad will appear on the search engine report. With PPC, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and comes to your web site. Each visitor to your web site costs you only a few pennies. You can easily track your Pay Per Click visitors to see if PPC brings conversions. The largest PPC services are those with the most popular search engines: Microsoft Ad Center, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Google Adwords.
I hope life brings you much success. I wish you a very happy day.
----- Surfer Sam
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