Small Business Promotion Coach

Online small business promotion is something that every business owner should have in place.

Do you think the internet is going away anytime soon?

No, of course not! The Internet is here to stay.

However, many small businesses don’t have an online marketing plan at all.

Unless you consider a yellow page ad a marketing plan. (It’s not by the way)

If your business doesn’t have a marketing plan don’t feel bad. Let’s face it, you probably got into business to provide products and/or services to your customer. Not because you were interested in marketing.

You may not have the resources to dedicate a full-time person to managing your online marketing. And that’s okay. It is quite possible for you or a member of your staff to do manage the basics of promoting your business in just a few hours a week.

Here are 3 online promotion tactics that you can put into place quickly.

Tactic 1 – email

Are you collecting your customer’s email addresses? You should be. Email is an extremely powerful way build a relationship with and to maintain contact with your customers.

Thanks to the large amount of SPAM emails, your customers may resist the idea of giving out their email address.  You will need to give them a good reason why they should give you their personal information.

This “something” must be of value to your customer. (This is called an “ethical bribe” in internet marketing circles.) Some examples might be a discount or access to special area of your website.

Tactic 2 – Social media

Did you hear that Facebook recently broke the 500,000,000 active user mark? That’s a half a billion active users not counting those that register and never use their account.

Facebook allows you to create a “fan pages”. A “fan page” is one easy way to create a community around your business. These are so simple and easy to set up that every business should have one.

There are many other social media sites. (Also called Web2.0 sites.) But perhaps the most powerful one is YouTube. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. At one time this site was mostly a site for teenagers to post their home videos. But no more! Millions and millions of people visit YouTube daily. People visit YouTube for information. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you need to produce a slick video. You can make short useful videos for dirt cheap that will get people to your website.

Tactic 3 – Website

Your website is the “central hub” of your business promotion efforts. Yes, you do need to have a website. No, this doesn’t need to be difficult. You do not need to be a computer whiz to put up a simple blog. Search engines like Google love blogs and they are super easy to set up. You can do this yourself in an evening even if you have never anything like this before.

Never let the technical side of things stop you. If you don’t want to set this up, you can have someone do the work for you for less than $100.