Small Business Marketing Tips – 5 Ways to Market Your Small Business Online

As small businesses naturally don’t have the necessary resources to launch huge marketing campaigns, they will have to compensate this with resourcefulness and innovation. If you’re running a small business and you’re searching for cost-efficient marketing solutions, here’s how you can use the wonderful World Wide Web to your company’s advantage.

5 Ways to Market Your Small Business Online:

Build a Website – You don’t have to pay for web hosting even if you’re running a commercial website just as long as your company can be properly categorized as a small business. Having a company website is the means for prospective customers to learn everything they have to know about the products or services you’re offering. Compared to other online media, a website allows your customers to see and hear about your offer and perhaps interact with you as well.

Know about SEO – Your work doesn’t start and end with building a website. To make your website work as a marketing tool for your business, you need to incorporate SEO – or search engine optimization – elements in it. SEO can help your website zoom to the top of search engine rankings and provide it with all the exposure you need.

In regard to SEO, make sure that you focus on your design and content. Besides needing your website layout to be visually attractive, it must also have easily located links to facilitate navigation. Use HTML as much as possible as this is more SEO friendly than, say, CSS. As for the content, refresh or update it as much as you can because new information will always encourage old and new readers to visit your website. Also, think about the appropriate keywords for your website and use them as much as possible – without committing grammatical errors or ruining the coherence of your content – to delight search engine spiders all the more.

Have a Blog - A blog is one of the most effective online marketing tools today, and if you don’t have one yet then you’re wasting a huge opportunity day after day. A blog allows you to directly interact with prospective customers and almost immediately update them with anything new about your company’s products or services.

To increase the marketing effectiveness of your blog, make sure that you’re writing about one topic alone. This topic must be directly related to your company’s products or services. Furthermore, it must be something that you know and love a lot to enable you to write in a convincing and interesting fashion.

Build Your Network Contacts – Although websites sometimes seem to be creatures of their own right, always remember that a website can’t really operate by itself. It gets updated and achieves success because of its webmaster or owner, and that person should be the one you’re concentrating on getting friendly with. Do your best to build your network by establishing good working relationships with other website owners. This is a give and take situation so be ready and willing to shell out as many favors as you hope to receive. As you become good buddies with these people, you’ll end up exchanging links, and this, by the way, is called affiliate marketing.

Join the Podcast Revolution – Although the popularity of blogs is certainly not waning, that doesn’t mean you have to completely rely on blog marketing alone. There are other marketing fishes in the Internet, and one of them goes by the name of podcasting. Make new podcasts regularly and insert your ads in between. You have to make them short and interesting enough to discourage your listeners from wasting energy just to press the fast forward button.

Top 20 Opportunities as an Internet Marketing Consultant

As an internet marketing Consultant it’s hard to tailor in to reach each individual but at least I believe I’ll be able to give some definite direction to every subscriber.

Regardless of your career, you must realize that marketing is not a department but it’s the business and you must therefore from today, start thinking like a marketer if you want to achieve your financial objectives and stay away from debt.

Most Guru’s or Internet marketers will teach you ways of monetizing your business online and teach you on how to make money on the internet but none of them teaches you how to be a marketer.

For you to succeed online you must start thinking like a marketer and do so onwards.  You must try and see how you can make money in every way and every situation.

Let me break the news to you… Money is good.

Most arguments at home and in the workplace are a lack of money.

Money used as a source of power to do the wrong things and defy justice is evil on the other hand the lack of it can be a source of even greater evils, stealing, killing, and conning.

As you see the title above, it promises on 18 ways of making money online, before I reveal to you I’ve laid a foundation first, subsequently I’ve illustrated a cash flow quadrant that shows how all the money in the world is made. Thereafter, I’ve elaborated on the importance of being a marketer so as to make money online.

Lets get this clear, it’s not like I despise other careers and am obsessed with marketing after all who wants to be a “Sales Person”. However, if you change your attitude you will realize that no money can be made in the world unless a sale has been made. Other than just making money by being a marketer, you also improve other areas of your life, e.g.

• You sell your skills to others easily
• You get good social skills
• You pay for products at reasonable price other than hyped prices.
• You get others to agree with you more easily and much more.

Let’s head to the online Opportunities: but first answer the following questions:

Am I willing to run my own Business?

Am I willing to be a Marketer?

If you have answered positively, then I believe you are ready to embrace the context of Building an Online Business.  Below are the various opportunities and remember, my way is not way is not the only way, there are a million other ways. If you have all the time in the world, you might want to test every method out there or invent your own, just hope you don’t get lost in the wilderness and will make it eventually.

1. UzaNunua.com

It’s easy for me to write eBay as a portal for buying and selling but as a Kenyan am trying to remain in context to my subscribers and reveal to them opportunities that are for real and can make money for them. Here you simply list your products, whether it’s old furniture, used books, new or old cars or any form of services that can be paid for.

2. Information Products or Digital products

People want to benefit from your expertise, but the problem is, you have not written it down, maybe you know of an accounting formula on excel that can remove duplicate records, or you have much knowledge on child care and pregnancies. People are willing to pay for this information. That’s why we buy newspapers, magazines and hardcopy books. Sometimes don’t you wish you could have all these on an electronic book in your computer or by just typing a few keywords on Google? You can start your own site and start selling eBooks and software. A personal friend of mine George Ngondo is a good example on the same. He’s the author of “The Effective Job Search Guide” cv-guide.net he started selling the book on book stores but today he’s making sales in the Global marketplace.

3. Work from Home

There are diverse opportunities in this one. You can be someone’s virtual assistant, or writing medical transcripts e.t.c. You can also do personal services e.g. article writing, web design and shared projects. Also you can identify with companies abroad who have interest in your country for certain products, you can therefore develop a site targeting local people, send introduction letters when you identify a buyer they ship for your client and you are paid some commissions without incurring investment costs. You can try AliBaba.com and see how.

4. Adsense

Adsense is a program from Google. Especially if you own a content website you can easily join and allow Google to randomly place ads on your site and every time someone clicks on the ads you are paid for it. You could earn a few cents per click or even a few dollars per click. I participate in this program in my other websites and I receive checks every my cumulated earnings reach USD 100.00

5. MLM – Multi Level Marketing

These programs use the same marketing model as the offline businesses like Tianshi Kenya and GNLD. They are based on a technology that generates a special link to its members. A good model is the success university. Where members pay a monthly subscription fee to access internet marketing materials and the members make more money by referring others to fall under them. In this category one needs to be careful just like in the offline MLM there is genuine programs like Tianshi Kenya and scams like the pyramid schemes same case applies to the online business.

6. Coaching/ Consulting

Hope you have seen ads of online universities and so on. There is much in this field that you can explore. If you are an accounting expert and employed in an auditing firm you can choose to monetize your expertise by put up a website to market yourself. There are entrepreneurs and business people who prefer to get expert advice from individuals as opposed to companies.

7. Web Hosting

Most people think web hosting requires one to invest in huge servers and a satellite of bandwidth, but that it’s not true. You can always become a reseller of an established company and get to repackage the products in your own way. Follow this link to become a reseller; all you need is a general purpose Visa card.

8. Social Network or Web 2.0

Yes social networks like face book, digg or stumble upon. You can start one that is more targeted. The owners of these sites do the task of gathering people of similar interests together and when everyone is busy doing their thing they sell advertising space on a pay per action or rental basis.

9. Free Lancer

Don’t wish there is someone who can develop your company Logo, do some emarketing campaigns, draft a terms and conditions for your services, update something on your site, draw a balance sheet or profit and loss account for your business. You can make money in two ways in this kind of opportunity. One you can develop such a portal for the local market or participate in bidding for those jobs in the global sites. Check rentacoder.com

10. Business Process Outsourcing – BPO

This is a more advanced business model of freelancing where you can set up a call center and bid for contracts from companies willing to outsource some of their processes offshore. You can start here: outsourcing.org, however to get big contracts you might be required to travel abroad to seal deals with targeted business partners. Learn more here, Business Process Outsourcing in Kenya

11. Paid Blogger

An example of a blog is Supreme Internet Marketing I can get paid to review a product A for a company X and post it here, especially if the product is beneficial to my readership. However, there are 3^rd party companies that link advertisers and bloggers and get bloggers paid from USD 5 $ to USD 100 per post. PayPerPost is one of them.

12. Domainer

This is not the same as web hosting or reseller hosting. In actual sense a domain is like a virtual real estate. You can register a domain add value and resell it as a website or you can secure premium domains and sell them at a higher cost than the annual rental. Right now .co.ke domains are up for grabs and you can reserve generic names that cannot be trademarked e.g. “capital”, “finance”, “love”, and “kiss” and so on the list is endless. You might make huge amounts of cash but it requires patience. Also be careful not to be caught up in trade mark issues and so on. You can reserve .co.ke domains at the cheapest rate possible on this link: http://www.superprofitsmedia.com/eac

13. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is what drives the internet. It means that you refer people to the product owners’ site and they and when they get to buy you receive your lion share of the commission. Some service companies give recurrent commission for the period the customer you referred is with the said company, while others pay huge one off finders’ fee or commission.  These companies use an affiliate tracking software that places a cookie on the buyers’ computer and when they register their details the customer is placed on the affiliates account. You can promote you special link on social sites like face book, email signatures or even on your website. You can try several affiliates and see how the system works. Use these links and register at no cost, send the links to your friends and try to monitor your stats inside your account.

http://www.superprofitsmedia.com/eac

*On the landing page try and identify an “affiliate” or “Partner” link to register. Have this in mind and try to identify such links and you might just land on a program that will earn you money. I will post more on this topic in the coming days.

14. GPT – Get Paid To…

Maybe you have received these kinds of requests on your mailbox. Get paid to take surveys, get paid to view ads, get paid to read email, get paid to surf, and get paid to send eCards and so on. As for me I don’t consider them to be serious sources of income especially if you are a serious business owner. However, research companies can adopt these methods to take survey online. I believe most people are more than willing to give more information in governance, banking and other sectors. There is potential though, I know people who earn a stable income using such methods.

15. Sports/ Gaming

These involve opportunities like playing online poker, games, online Casinos. It’s just a form of Gambling. I don’t recommend it, but if your lifestyle is such you can participate in the same. A word of caution: Avoid Scams, refrain from giving your credit card details, your residential address, banking details and form of personal information. People are cruel out there and may use your identity to commit cyber crimes. As much so, there is need to worry if you are dealing with a legitimate company.

If you dream of the jackpot today might be your lucky day. Try this link

http://www.superprofitsmedia.com/gamble

16. Trading

In its broadest sense it involves trading of commodities both locally and in the Global marketplace. There are stocks that trade stocks online or even much popular is the Online Forex trading. With online Forex trading when you understand the online technicalities you just apply the offline tactics of buy low and sell high. The beauty of it is the business is legitimate and in any business you are bound to make profits or losses depending on various factors including your decisions and timing. I know several individuals who have invested in these systems

Copy this link to download Forex trading software

http://www.superprofitsmedia.com/forextrade

You can as well trade in commodities by being creative. Sky is the limit. I’ve a friend of mine who started an online car bazaar with only a small investment of Kes. 35,000. Like I told you earlier Building a business online is just about being a marketer. Allow me to call my friend “Joe”. Joe invested in a website after visiting various car bazaars and agreeing on a commission per lead and per sale. He took pictures from the car sales yard and posted them on the internet. He started promoting his site using different methods including email marketing and he was able to make sales of cars he has not invested a coin in. When you continue learning from my tips your creativity is the only constraint that keeps you apart from making millions online.

17. Services

You can offer services online and charge per transaction. A good example is mamamikes.com. I’ve also seen other websites coming up offering directory services, classifieds and so on. As for me I write killer email campaigns that have proven to be a success, I also let Newsletter subscription services, hosted and local mass email programs, sms and autoresponder services among others. There is so much more I do I even forget to market and package all my services. Knowledge is power and it increases on using. I want you to be rich and/or stay rich by increasing your revenue streams. Now keep your ears wide open.

18. Membership sites

In offline thinking, why do people pay for membership clubs? It’s the benefits that come along. Today you can start your membership site where members pay a passive income on a recurrent basis and now it’s up to you to think of the benefits. A site like Success University uses an MLM and/or affiliate marketing program to recruit new members. However, the principal foundation is that members acquire resources and training at discounted rates and at a centralized place as opposed to otherwise gets the resources for themselves in scattered places.  There are unlimited ways in which you can create a membership site.

19. Money Transfer Services

No matter how you automate services there still people who do not want to change and adapt to new methods. You can start a small business where, you can use your PayPal and/or Money Bookers account in and allow people in the Diaspora to send you cash through any of the above accounts and then submit the funds to their loved ones upcountry through m-pesa then earn some commissions per transaction or in percentage. You might need to find on the required licensing so as to run a fully fledged Business and win peoples trust.

20. Donations

NGO’s run on donations, so don’t be surprised. There are lots of Softwares and services out there offered out there where they are given for free and the users donate to support the programs so that they can continue benefiting on the same. There are products out there which are sold by donations i.e. there is no price tag, you just put the amount you want to pay and proceed to check out. In a society where people are obsessed with free things and no heart for charity, then you might not want to try this. Otherwise your efforts will be for nothing and offering your products henceforth might bleed you dry. Also if you believe in a course or some form of activism then this might be a good choice. Remember the Obama Campaign was purely run on donations from his supporters. If you have successfully run a not-for profit organization you might want to try this option.