Sometimes small businesses choose to pay for advertising results rather than making the effort to promote their business through social media and other internet arenas. Advertising with Google or another online ad facilitator can bring immediate results. The problem is, when you stop paying for this service, your ad campaign stops and the number of people headed to your web site lessens (most likely). It is possible to create a similar ad campaign for free with a little effort. When you successfully implement a social media strategy to market your business, the buzz that you create for your business will build on itself and, ideally, create more buzz without you having to do any additional work.
If you have a web site for your business, then you have a company blog. You can write regular posts that you think are interesting enough to create some buzz around your business. Of course, you should be sure that your blog is getting readers. The first basic step is to register your blog with Yahoo and Google (and newer engines like Bing) so that it will appear when people search for keywords related to your business. Wisely select keywords for your post (WordPress has widgets that can help you streamline your keyword listing). There are plenty of tools out there to help you find out how popular certain keywords are.
You can ask friends or business associates to use social media to promote your blog posts. Bookmarking sites like Digg can earn you a fare amount of traffic if your post is good and if you have enough friends or colleagues to “digg” your work. Similarly, you can ask them to mention your blog on Twitter or Facebook. Perhaps you can create some sort of reciprocal promotion where you help their blog or site get noticed on social media while they help you do the same in return.
You can try to go viral by creating a video for Youtube and including a URL to your site. If your video gets popular, it may be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people. That’s worth thousands of dollars of advertising. The problem is that it can be difficult to predict what people will watch on Youtube. Generally humorous or amazing videos (or videos amazingly cute animals) have a better chance than normal, informational videos. Yes, Youtube is not a place for dry, informational videos, If you have something fun to upload, go for it. If you simply want to inform people about your businesses services, it is probably better to use other sites for your social media campaign.
In addition to making sure Google knows about your site, you can submit to a directory. Directories are similar to search engines, only they are not updated automatically using computer programs, they are updated manually by an actual person. Dmoz.org is a great option for this type of service. You site will be cataloged and will stay cataloged and not be overshadowed by sites built by people who know how to play the Google game and achieve a high search engine ranking.
If you have a brick and mortar business or provide a local service, you can focus your advertising to your area. This way, your sushi restaurant (for example) or cell phone shop won’t be competing for web traffic with a sushi bar or cell phone dealer on the other side of the country. Both Yahoo and Google have local business pages (Google’s is part of its Google maps). You can also visit the online incarnations of phone books “Dex” and “yellow pages” to find out more about how to get your business listed.
About Guest Author:
Mark has been helping companies maximize their potential online for 3 years. He currently blogs about qr codes and how to set up a brokerage account online.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Social Media and Blogs are very easy and convenient ways to promote and creating permanent link backs to your website or blog. But you must remember that just including a link to your website in comments is not enough, your comment also should be related and have some useful data in it.
Yes you are right, also they think that including keyword rather than the name in comment area will help them to increase the rank, but unfortunately they all visit my blog’s spam area :)
great read. you know i never paid one penny for advertising. mainly because i couldn’t afford it really, but also i dont think it will ever beat the natural way traffic flows to your site. my way may take more time, but once you get there youll stay!
Yup same here, advertising strategy is only helpful for the people who are trying to sell or promote affiliate products, we are happy with our loyal readers :)