When it comes of online marketing most of small business owners tend to raise their shoulders and think on short term advantages. But did you know that 40 percent of the new businesses will fail in the first three years of their existence? That is because most small business owners do not make long term plans and tend to use bad alternatives to promote their businesses.
Get Involved
For small business owners online marketing is not an easy job. It takes time and energy to develop and implement online marketing techniques that really work for a specific website.
First step you should do is to determine your target market. Your customers wait for you to reach them. Because online marketing has so many strategies you can take advantage of, you should first focus on the group of consumers you want to get into contact. It would be a waste of resources to try to implement strategies that reach people overseas if you have a local business.
How to get to local customers
If you want to be noticed in your area you should address to your neighbors. Not literally, but to try to get to them using the internet. After all, this is not such a hard step because you live in the same environment with your target and you know what its main concerns are. This way you can easily estimate how much money a person or family in your area is willing to spend for your services or products.
Communication is a very important aspect for every business. Keeping close contact to your target should be your main concern. But how to do it nowadays? You cannot just go on the street and try to convince people to come and buy from you. You can easily attract new customers through texts and images. In this article I will mainly focus on texts that can help you attract people from outside to your website.
Articles
Maybe you never liked to write stuff when you went to school, but internet is mainly about written information and transmitting the information to those who search for it. One good way to get to your local target is to write articles about topics related to your business and then submit them on several directories.
Articles are very useful for traffic ranking. There are sites where you can submit articles to and they will distribute them to their readers. To really take advantage of your articles they must be rich in keywords that are related to your website. Articles must attract readers so, it is important to set a good title, to give useful information about the domain you are activating. Always relate the title with the article and do not try to fool the audience because you are the one that will lose in the end.
To give you a small idea about article writing, think on the pages on your site. You added useful information to promote your business. An article is not exactly like that, because most article directories will not allow you direct publicity. But you always have a box at the end of the article where you can add a link and a small description of your site and business.
How does writing articles help you? Let us think that you own a beauty salon. A women, let us name her Georgia from Glen Echo, is looking for a beauty salon in her area. Last time she went to a beauty salon and she considered that she paid too much for the services. Now she is searching on the internet for a new beauty salon and one of the search results is an article. You previously wrote an article titled How to be beautiful in Glen Echo and submitted in an article directory. Georgia reads this articles she finds some good beauty tips and she wants to get more information about your business. Because she thinks that last time she was ripped off, now she will go to your website, look for price list and your address. She likes what she reads and decides that tomorrow morning will call you. Do you get now the role of submitting articles to promote your business?
Press releases
Press releases are very good for promoting new products, services or events. They are very good in promoting your business and get in touch with new partners and customers. Do not forget that press releases must be rich in keywords, just like the articles. A press release is a very good opportunity to announce journalists about an event, invite them to the event, and maybe read an article in a local newspaper about it. I worked in the media for a while and I can tell you that are times when journalists just crave for a new topic. Get in touch with some local journalists, create a connection with them and you will see benefits.
Press releases work just like articles when it comes to search engines and displaying results. Do not get into the trap that press releases are only for the big companies. You can promote a new product, services in simple words by making them wish they had what you are promoting for.
Getting in touch with your target market must be a priority when you want to make a name on the internet. There are numerous and efficient ways to do it. Building a name is a step by step process that will attract financial benefits for your business.