Ten Marketing Tips for Online Success
If you do these 10 things on a regular basis you will see a great increase in your online traffic and if you do these things right you will see a dramatic increase in your online revenue generation. These tips are geared towards small businesses, but larger businesses should assign someone to these tasks as well.
1. Protect your reputation: Search the internet for people talking about your business in discussion forums and blogs and if the blogs or comments are positive you should thank them for their positive reviews or blogs. If it is negative you should try to fix the problem and if appropriate you should comment in a positive way. i.e. ”thank you for your comment about xyz, we are sorry you had a problem can I call you to try to resolve the issue, we really appreciate your business”.
2. Groups: Join discussion groups, trade groups or other online programs that talk about your products or services. Do not spam these groups but offer regular feedback to question and post by other members. Make sure you have signature line that has a link to your business and use your business name as your user id if he site allows it. Always be courteous and professional.
3. Join Social Networks: Social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook offer you a great way to reach your clients or customers and they also offer a good platform to promote new services or products. If you use these social platforms be sure to keep your business and personal online reputation in mind as you make post.
4. BLOG: if you have something to say about your market, your product line, or your profession that is interesting, timely and useful blog about it. If you do BLOG be sure to be consistent with your posting, doing a blog post once or twice a week should be sufficient for most businesses.
a. If you BLOG about a specific product or service you offer be sure to link your blog to that product or service.
b. Link to your blogs from your home page.
c. Encourage other people to link to your blog
d. Link to your blog from all of your social networks
5. Press Releases: Online press releases that allow you to embed links into the press release may be the most underutilized tool that small businesses have at their disposal. Press Releases can be expensive but if used right they can generate a lot of buzz and fair amount of traffic.
a. Only do press releases that allow you to embed links
b. We recommend our clients do a press release at least once per quarter.
c. If you can tie your release into events in the news you have a better chance that a news organization will pick up the story.
d. You get great benefits from Press Releases even if your story does not get picked up by the media.
6. Google Maps and Yahoo Maps: If you have local presence that is not strictly online you need to add yourself to Google maps and Yahoo maps. This is easy to do and will only take 10-15 minutes. Both maps require a verification process but it is also simple.
7. Testimonials: Ask your customers for testimonials about products, services and your business. (Never use fake testimonials on your website.) Testimonials work best if your clients are able to post them directly to your website. You will get some bad feedback, instead of deleting it you should respond to it in a positive manner. No business is perfect – your customers know that and potential customers know it.
8. Promote your site offline: Put your web address on everything you print, business cards, stationary, invoices, statements, thank you notes, in every newspaper ad, in every radio ad. A good rule of thumb is that if you mention your business name you mention your web address.
9. A little help from your friends: Give your customers and business partner the ability to link to your website and also provide “share” icons on your website so that people can easily share your site on Facebook and other social websites.
10. Email your customers: Don’t spam them but you should send out specials, new product offerings, business updates, news and other items. If you have the ability to personalize the email then you should.
10 Marketing Tips