Are you looking for small business web marketing? If you have a website for your small business there are various ways to get more people to it and as a result, get more customers through your door. You can do marketing for yourself or you can hire a small business marketer to take some of the burden off your hands, or help you learn how to do it for yourself. See my marketing website for details of what I offer for small businesses.
Small Business Web Marketing – Free or Paid Marketing?
Paid marketing is the fastest way to send potential customers to your website. You can do this in a number of ways but the most popular ones are through Google Adwords and Facebook advertising. With Google you can target people in your area who are deliberately searching for keywords in your business area. Facebook can target people through a number of criteria: age, sex, interests and geographical location. By targeting very specifically you can be quite frugal with your advertising budget and, once it proves itself, slowly increase the budget and open it up to new keywords and or demographics.
Small Business Web Marketing – Free Advertising
Free advertising sounds good but there are a couple of problems with it! It is slower and it can’t be scaled. However it is a good idea to do some free advertising alongside you paid campaigns. Free advertising can be done in a number of ways.
- Blogging about topics related to your business – use the Keyword planner to find long tail keyword chains. See finding long tail keywords for more on this.
- link building – blogging for other businesses like yours in exchange for a link to your site.
- Article marketing – listing articles on sites like Ezinearticles.com and linking back to your website.
- Video marketing – Listing useful videos on YouTube is a great way to increase your online presence. Again you can link your videos back to your website o find more potential customers.
- Using FreeAds sites like Craigslist and GumTree.
- Using Web Sirectories to list your website and link back to it.
Small Business Web Marketing – Paid Advertising
When starting out with a paid marketing campaign you can set your daily limit of expenditure to wherever you like. Ideally start of with a small budget and increase it over time. With Google’s Adwords you can also be very specific in your targeting to avoid the wrong kind of visitors.
Target Market
For example use prices in your adverts and be specific about what you offer. You pay per click so you don’t want someone to click on your advert and then realize that you can’t help them. A good advert will only attract buying customers – not tire kickers!
Facebook Advertising
With Facebook you can be very specific about your target audience. Do some research about them and find out things like:
- Where they live,
- What their likely interests are,
- Their age range,
- Their sex.
The more you can find out about your potential customers, the better you can target them and the less you will spend for each new customer through the door. Have a look at the videos I have done on Facebook and Adwords advertising to learn more about this by subscribing to my YouTube channel.
The Power Of Paid Advertising
Although free advertising can eventually build a constant and reliable stream of traffic back to your website over time, paid advertising is much more immediate. The problem is – it costs money and you don’t know yet what your return on investment is. This is why you should tread carefully at first until you can see some tangible results from your adverts.
Paid Advertising Is Scalable
The magic of paid advertising is that it is scalable. This means that once you have a proven advert which works and is bringing in customers, you can simply scale up your budget and increase the amount of times your advert is shown. With a local business this will still work to a certain level still. However, there will eventually be a limit to the number of people interested in your business. Remember that some people won’t by after only seeing your advert once or twice. It’s the constant reminder which puts your brand into people’s minds.
Lifting the limits – An International Business
With a business which is international, you have less of a limit on the number of people you can reach who would be interested in your product or service. Yes, anyone can have this kind of business.
An Online Business
By successfully combining a scalable advertising campaign with an international business, almost anyone can build a business through online marketing alone, by using other people’s affiliate products. A business like this can be run from anywhere with an internet connection and a laptop. You can start learning how to do this with this digital business system. Access a free video series here which talks you through the process.