5 Tips to Market Your Business Online in 2010 February 23, 2010
5 Online Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business
There are many things that you can do to grow your business this year. You can engage in both online and offline activities that will increase your bottom line, grow your customer base or promote your brand. Unfortunately, you don’t have time to do every single thing that you could do to grow your business. You also don’t have the money to invest in every single marketing option available to you. Instead, you need to narrow down the field and choose the activities that are going to be most cost-efficient and time-efficient for effectively growing your business.
If you can only do five things online this year to market your business then these are the five things that you should do:
1. Get your business name on Wikipedia. Ideally, you will write a Wikipedia page about your business that is informative, engaging and of high enough non-promotional quality that it will pass Wikipedia’s high standards and actually gain entry on to the site. If that’s asking for too much, you can still use Wikipedia to promote your business online. Find high-quality Wikipedia pages that relate to the work that you do and start adding content and including yourself in the references section. Make sure that you take the time to learn about Wikipedia’s writing rules so that this is an effective use of your time.
2. Make sure that you’re using multimedia. Lets face it; a static web page is not going to be worthwhile for you anymore. You need to have videos. You need to have images. You need to be putting these images and videos on other websites that reference and link back to your own website. It’s important that you’re not being boring online these days. There are just too many other things for people to go look at if you are.
3. Get familiar with Webmaster Tools. You would be surprised how easy it is to take your good website and to turn it into a great website. Check out the Webmaster Tools on Bing or Webmaster Central on Google. You’ll find a lot of helpful tools and information that can give a big boost to your business once you implement them on your website.
4. Find ways to stay in better touch with your existing customers. These are the people who already like you. They’ll come back to you again if you stay in touch. They’ll also spread the word about you. Figure out what new online approach works for you - email marketing, social networking interaction, blog commenting - and incorporate this into your regular online activities to successfully market your business.
5. Make friends with people who can write about your business online. Get to know bloggers and journalists who are relevant to your business. Write them emails saying what great work they’re doing and letting them know about what you do. The more credible sources you have writing about you online, the more your business is going to grow.
