What are the best ways to promote small business? They say that marketing is the lifeblood of any business and without it you are relying solely on word of mouth for your advertising and promotion. When your competitors are using every means of advertising to their advantage, you need to do the same too, just to survive. Not to say that word of mouth advertising is no good, quite the contrary it is the best form of marketing. To get word of mouth advertising your business needs to excel at what it does and have a few customers, at least, to start with.
Get a website
This is the internet age and much of what customers want is being sought after through the internet. If you don’t have a keyword optimized website bringing in customers to your business through either Google organic search or Adwords advertising on Google, you are quite literally leaving money on the table. This is especially true of local physical businesses which can easily build a website which will bring in some free custom for years to come. With international businesses it gets a little more tricky due to the competition of other businesses in your niche. Either way, you should definitely have a website.
Get a Google Places Listing
Again this is for local physical businesses but it is completely free to create a Places listing in your niche and target your main keywords. Many local business searches now bring up Google Places listings before any others, including high ranking websites. Just Google ‘Places’ and create a listing online. Google will send you a code in the post which you will then use to verify your listing.
Print some flyers
There’s something to be said for some good old fashioned paper. Not everything needs to be online and one of the best ways to reach new customers if you have a regional business is to do some delivering of flyers to the homes and businesses nearby.
Build a Facebook Page
Facebook is a great tool for connecting with people in either your business niche or your local area. Building a page is free and you can connect with others by interacting on the social platform to drum up business. You can also use their powerful advertising platform to target your customers down to their location, interests and many other demographics. This alone is an incredibly powerful way to promote a small business.
Advertise on Google Adwords
Adwords has been mentioned already as a means to promote your website. Again this is such a powerful medium it deserves another mention. With Adwords you can target specific keyword searches which are being typed into the Google search engine. There will be proactive consumers who are actively seeking what you have to offer on the internet. Again by not having this tactic in your ‘toolbox’ you are leaving money on the table. There is also Bing advertising of course too.
Creating content for Google organics
If you have a website you can hire yourself an SEO (search engine optimization) specialist to increase the organic reach of your website. This can be done in several ways and you can of course learn this yourself if you have the time. Many websites are sitting on Google, or rather ‘off’ Google because they have not been constructed with the search engine in mind or because they have too little in the way of authority. Sites which rank on Google the highest are often authority sites which have a huge amount of content, are several years old and have a large back lining profile. One of the easiest ways to immediately improve your ranking is to place your most important keywords in your title, copy and links from other pages. Deep linking shows the spiders which crawl your site what pages are about.
Writing articles on your website
Regularly blogging or writing articles on your website is a powerful way to improve its authority with Google. Find topics related to your business by using the keyword planner on Google. By finding long tail keywords, (an example of a deep link), you can target them in the searches by writing an article of the same title and making useful content. Not only will you increase your authority with Google by doing this, but you will also create more traffic to your website through the organic searches whenever someone targets your article title. As your domain authority grows, your articles will be given more authority and appear further up in the search results on Google. Over time you will reach a ‘tipping point’ where your traffic will  increase exponentially due to the sheer number of your articles and your growing authority. Old articles will still be bringing in traffic as will the new ones. If they are good articles, people will share them too and link to them.
Share On Social Media sites
There are a lot of social media sites to choose from and it can be quite daunting choosing which to use and what to do. Pick one which works for you and continue to use a tactic that works. I use Facebook and promote my articles there on my business post. This will increase the reach of your content and if you are offering something useful which is of value, you will over time build a good reputation for your ‘brand’.
I hope you have enjoyed this article on the best ways to promote small business. If you have any other ideas please feel free to share in the comments below. I will welcome any questions too.