It’s easy for small business owners to get overwhelmed by the plethora of information around Internet Marketing, so here we have made a brief list of quick and easy tasks small business owners can undertake to market their business online, without investing a substantial amount of time and money.
Create a Google ‘My Business’ Listing
Google My Business is free and allows businesses to get themselves online quickly and easily, which makes it an excellent option for small business owners. Google My Business focuses on local searches, this means better chances of your business being at the top of the search engine page results for your category and location.
Write an Informative Blog Post
Fresh and relevant content is vital for an engaging website, it also helps increase your chances of being found through a google search. Blog posts can be as short or as long as you like, as long as the content is relevant, and useful to the reader. There is plenty of information online on how to write effective blog posts so do a quick search for ‘How to write a good blog post’ and you will find plenty of useful information to make sure your post is effective and engaging.
Create a List
Often small businesses already have a list of customers email addresses, but are not effectively marketing to these customers. There are plenty of free tools for creating email campaigns (like Mailchimp) and creating an email campaign is made as simple as possible with drag-and-drop templates and rich text editors. Creating an email campaign doesn’t always have to be about selling, it can just be a good way to keep your brand fresh in your customers minds, and to provide some useful information to your customers. There is also plenty of resources online around how to create an effective email marketing campaign but if you need any advice or help around creating an email marketing campaign, feel free to get in touch with us.
Get some links to your website
Good quality links to your website are the best way to increase how google perceives how relevant or important your website is, and the more important google thinks you are, the higher your will appear in googles search engine. Links to your website can be gained in a number of ways:
- Ask other companies that you have relationships with to link to your website. Try and get some good quality keywords within the link itself and link it to a page on your website that is relevant to that keyword.
- Comment on blogs. Often blogs provide a link back to the website of the person that comments. Many blogs however do not allow a link back to your website, so make sure not to waste time commenting on blogs that don’t allow links back to your site! Check out the other comments and see if they link to a website.
- Comment on forums which are relevant to what you do. Again as above, some forums may not allow links back to your website so check before you start posting!
- Post articles on others blogs. Guest posting is a popular way of getting good quality links back to your website. It can be a win/win way for blog owners to get some good quality content for their website and for writers to get good quality links back to their website.
There are lots of other ways to get good quality links to your site so have a quick look on google for ‘good quality links to your website’.
Share!
Share what you are doing through whatever social media portals you have. Exactly which social media tools you decide to use will depend a lot on the type of business you have. For example a funeral home may not necessarily benefit from having an Instagram account, but it might be useful for them to build a reputation through something like LinkedIn. If you have any questions or if you need some advice around any of the points discussed here, feel free to get in touch with us. We are always keen to help small business market themselves online.