Small Business Online Marketing

While there are many offline methods of bringing customers to your business, I would argue that these days online methods are even more important. And within that there are numerous online methods. In this article I want to details those ways including the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Pay Per Click

Pay-Per-Click involves buying small ads that show up on the search engines. There is also pay per click available on sites like Facebook and Youtube. Plus with Google's Adsense these ads can appear on tons of sites across the web.

The great thing about PPC is that you can be up and running almost immediately. When you set up a campaign and ad you'll be able to target your potential customers through demographics, location and keywords. For a local business this will involve geo-targeting along with much else.

This is the only method here in which you have to pay an upfront cost in order to show up online. Without a well-managed campaign and really knowing what you are doing you can end up paying a lot more than its worth. You need to make sure your ROI is positive when doing pay per click.

Also Google and others can make it tough to do simply by not liking your site or how you are doing it.Social Media

There are many different kinds of social media. What I'm specifically referring to here is the big networking and sharing sites like Facebook and Twitter.These are the biggest right now, but may not always be. (Just like MySpace has mostly fallen away after being the dominate player.)

By building a profile on these sites you can gain followers and communicate with your potential customers. This is a good place to get raving fans and also to leverage the popularity of others. Of course, you have to manage your profile correctly. You want to balance it with enough social interactivity, information giving, and commercial intent.



SEO

Search engine optimization is the act of getting your site (or any other web property you own) up into the top results when people search for your keywords. The biggest advantage of this method is that it can mean tons of free traffic. For this reason this is one of my personal favorite ways to go.

The disadvantage is that it can take a while to do. In some cases ranking can happen quickly, but you can't rely on that always happening. Also the search engines are always moving so it takes constant work to maintain the results you've gained.

SEO is fairly complicated. If you don't do it yourself be wary of many SEO firms that make big promises but under-deliver. Find someone with a proven track record and will tell you what they are going to do.

For more information check out Santa Cruz CA SEO services. Plus you'll learn the difference between SEO and SED

Video

Youtube is all the rage these days. There are people that even do searches just within Youtube to find information (even locally!). Plus when you realize that videos are easier to get ranked in the search engines than text you have a double whammy reason for adding video to your marketing.

Even with cheap hardware you can shoot quality videos. Even many phones can do decent enough video these days! There are also ways around live video creation, by using photo montages, powerpoint, or screen capture software.

To get the best results with video you need to know some basic SEO as well.

With video it can be a marketing tool, as well as a conversion tool on your site, to help that traffic turn into paying customers or clients.

List Marketing

This method works offline and online. On your website you need to be collecting leads. With an email opt-in form offering something of value you can find people in your area that basically 'raise their hand' to be marketed too. Once you have the leads you need to then market.

Even if you've never collected email addresses before you should start now. But if you have a customer list you can do much the same marketing offline with direct mail. This is the way to be able to raise money on demand for you business. Create an offer (and there are so many ways to do this), then send it out to your list. The result is people come in and buy.

Every other method brings traffic into your website and store. Meanwhile you should always be building your list which means more money down the road.

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