Why Marketing For Small Businesses Is More Important Than Building A Pretty Website And Imperative To Survive A Recession!
Marketing for small businesses like yours and mine seems to be this huge complicated thing that only larger companies can do because you have to have a huge budget to run. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Factually, if you don’t have any cash to pay someone to run a marketing campaign for you and you don’t mind putting in some hours then you can do it completely free.
Because this website is for online solutions for the small business we are only to concentrate on how you can run a successful and effective marketing campaign.
Marketing for small businesses does require a time investment, not necessarily a monetary one. I am going to explain briefly in this report and we’ll expound on these subjects and tactics in other issues; so make sure you sign up for my RSS feed (you can sign up at the upper right hand corner of this website.)
No matter what your business is you can market very effectively for no cash, just some time. I will be using how this done using the example of a moving business, as I know a little something about that. You may have to adapt these strategies to your business.
You need to know as well, that during hard economic times you have to INCREASE your marketing efforts if you wish to survive. Many business, whether large or small, tend to cut back on marketing during lean times. There is no faster way to kill your company then to back off on marketing. And the lean times do not have to be just during a recession.
When I first started my moving company and I needed to get the word out the first thing that I did was put a free classified ad on marketing. Literally ten minutes later I had my first paying move job. You need to be putting ads on all the free classified ad websites. Besides Craigslist, there is Backpage.com, Kijiji.com, Google Base and Yelp.
Craigslist is great for immediate exposure, the downside being that you have to post often if you are in a large city. Backpage and Kijiji don’t get the traffic that Craigslist does but they tend to get very high search engine rankings. Backpage and Kijiji also lend favorably towards a long sales page or article type of marketing because of their long shelf life. Craigslist you need to be short and sweet much like a traditional classifieds in a news paper.
Yellowpages advertising is crucial for a small business. I am not talking of their over-priced, under-effective book listings. I am talking about their free internet listings. The Yellowpages allows you to have a free listing with them for the internet. Simply fill out a profile of your business and you are off a running. What I like about this profile is that it acts much like a mini-website. Yelp is very similar to the Yellowpages in this regard. The difference is that Yelp tends to higher organic search engine rankings. Google Maps is vital marketing for small businesses. Like the Yellowpages and Yelp, Google Maps provides a profile page that acts like a mini-website. Remember to add pictures and video to your profiles for greater effectiveness.
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories is very smart. Though article marketing for small businesses is a more long term marketing solution. I suggest that you write an informative or interesting article of about 400-600 words and submit them to the article directories. Below I have listed some great sources for you to submit your articles:
- Google Knol
- Google Base
- Squidoo.com
- Hubpages.com
- Associated Content
- Ezinearticles.com
- Goarticles.com
Additionally, Squidoo, Hubpages and Associated Content will also pay you to write articles for their sites. I will not go into that here with this article, but know that you can actually generate a small a cash flow from those three sources while driving people into your website or business.
Blogging is imperative for a small business. Despite it being a great way to get a tremendous amount of traffic organically through the search engines, but it build a relationship between you and your clients. Use your articles that you have written as blog posts. Blog about your day, the weather, or your community in general. Blog like you would be talking to a friend. Marketing for small businesses is almost dependent on blogging.
I used my blog as my primary website. I have over 200 different articles on the website. I put my testimonials of my business. I can’t tell you how many times that people hired me just because of the articles and tips that I put on blog. I got moving jobs just because of my blog. Blogging is that important if used correctly.
Here are just a few tools you need to be using in marketing for a small business:
- Blogging
- Article Marketing
- Free Classified Ads
- Free Business Listings
- SEO
- Email and Newsletter Marketing.
I know that many of you don’t know how to do marketing for small businesses, or if you do know how don’t have the time. The good news is that I do. If you would like to speak to me on how you can implement these things to market your small business, then either email me at jae@thesuccessfulbiz.com.
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