Marketing Tips for Small Business

Marketing your website is all about raising your site's visibility in a crowded marketplace.

Let's face it, the chances are good you have plenty of online competition in your product or service niche. And the chances are also good that some of your competitors already own a good-sized chunk of that niche. So how can you get the word out about your website and have a hope of getting it seen? Try this:

Top 5 Marketing Tips

• Leverage your existing business and social network. Announce your new business to your friends, family, coworkers and clients from any other business you operate. Ask them to help spread the word. Put a "Tell A Friend" link on your website. You can get these types of scripts for free or very low cost and they work!
• Establish yourself as a subject matter expert (SME). Fill your site with timely, relevant and professional content that gives visitors to your website the confidence to do business with you. Traffic is important, but content is King. See this post for tips on where to get the quality content you need.
• Walk in your customers' shoes. It's not enough to think you know what your customer wants, you have to know what your customer wants. Doing that takes research: Visit your competitors' websites, especially the big dogs in your market, and see what content and services they are providing. Have your developer install a script to track and record the search engine terms that brought people to your site. Install a survey script and just outright ask your customers what they want. Communicate with new customers and ask them what else they would like to see when they come to your site.
• Make marketing a priority. Don't wait until you get around to it; do something positive to promote your business every day.
• Work with a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm to optimize your site for search engine indexing and to create backlinks from other sites to yours. That way you show the search engine spiders that yours is a popular website they certainly need to index and rank.

There are plenty of other ways to market your small business. As you build more traffic, and revenues increase, you can branch out into buying advertising, running joint venture (JV) campaigns with business partners and a lot more.

Just remember: Marketing doesn't happen by itself. Be proactive; be innovative; become wealthy!