Have you been trying to market your small business online and just feel like you’ve been spinning your wheels? You’re not alone. Even with all the hype over the Internet and social media, many small business owners still don’t get the whole Internet marketing thing.
Luckily, the end of the year is around the corner. It’s a perfect time to take a step back and put a critical eye towards your marketing efforts and to look for ways to ramp things up for the coming year. The following are several online marketing strategies that savvy business owners can employ to build up their brand and increase sales conversions.
Tap Into Non-Traditional Traffic Sources
These days it seems like nearly every business on the planet, from Fortune 500 behemoths to mom and pop shops, has an account on the big social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Getting your message heard among all the noise currently in social media is becoming harder (and more expensive) with every passing year.
Savvy small business owners are going against the grain and spending their marketing resources in places that many others overlook, such as:
Industry-Specific Forums. Forums where your customers hang out can be a gold mine of quality traffic. Forum marketing may not be exciting or trendy, but if you can provide value to the community, you’ll be rewarded with boatloads of targeted traffic and brand awareness.
Q&A Sites. Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers, Amazon’s AskVille, and Ask.com, are some of the most untapped traffic sources online. Where else can you find an active community of people asking industry-specific questions about your business’s products or services?
SlideShare, DocStoc and other content directories. Why play the YouTube lottery, hoping that your videos go viral, when you can get your message in front of a large audience with much less competition using content directories, such as the presentation sharing site SlideShare.net? To give you an idea of the power of these types of “second tier” social media sites, I recommend reading this case study of how one creative webmaster got 2000+ visitors from a SlideShare presentation. These two traffic heavyweights can bring you a fair amount of traffic if you provide something of value to the community.
Tutorial and DIY Sites. Here is another, largely untapped source of promotion and traffic. Tutorial sites, such asTutorialized.com, and DIY project sites, such as Instructables, are heavily visited and give you a chance to showcase your expertise to potential customers.
Infographic Marketing. Got some interesting statistics that would fit nicely into an infographic? There are many sites, such as visual.ly, that specialize in showcasing the latest and greatest infographics and that can send you some quality, targeted traffic.
Ebook Marketing. Taking your best content and turning it into an ebook can be a great way to get a completely new source of free traffic. Free ebook sites, such as Free-ebooks.net and Bookboon.com, get thousands of visitors every hour. Make sure you have a link back to your site throughout the ebook so that interested readers can check out what you do.
http://frugalentrepreneur.com/
Luckily, the end of the year is around the corner. It’s a perfect time to take a step back and put a critical eye towards your marketing efforts and to look for ways to ramp things up for the coming year. The following are several online marketing strategies that savvy business owners can employ to build up their brand and increase sales conversions.
Tap Into Non-Traditional Traffic Sources
These days it seems like nearly every business on the planet, from Fortune 500 behemoths to mom and pop shops, has an account on the big social media sites, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Getting your message heard among all the noise currently in social media is becoming harder (and more expensive) with every passing year.
Savvy small business owners are going against the grain and spending their marketing resources in places that many others overlook, such as:
Industry-Specific Forums. Forums where your customers hang out can be a gold mine of quality traffic. Forum marketing may not be exciting or trendy, but if you can provide value to the community, you’ll be rewarded with boatloads of targeted traffic and brand awareness.
Q&A Sites. Q&A sites like Yahoo! Answers, Amazon’s AskVille, and Ask.com, are some of the most untapped traffic sources online. Where else can you find an active community of people asking industry-specific questions about your business’s products or services?
SlideShare, DocStoc and other content directories. Why play the YouTube lottery, hoping that your videos go viral, when you can get your message in front of a large audience with much less competition using content directories, such as the presentation sharing site SlideShare.net? To give you an idea of the power of these types of “second tier” social media sites, I recommend reading this case study of how one creative webmaster got 2000+ visitors from a SlideShare presentation. These two traffic heavyweights can bring you a fair amount of traffic if you provide something of value to the community.
Tutorial and DIY Sites. Here is another, largely untapped source of promotion and traffic. Tutorial sites, such asTutorialized.com, and DIY project sites, such as Instructables, are heavily visited and give you a chance to showcase your expertise to potential customers.
Infographic Marketing. Got some interesting statistics that would fit nicely into an infographic? There are many sites, such as visual.ly, that specialize in showcasing the latest and greatest infographics and that can send you some quality, targeted traffic.
Ebook Marketing. Taking your best content and turning it into an ebook can be a great way to get a completely new source of free traffic. Free ebook sites, such as Free-ebooks.net and Bookboon.com, get thousands of visitors every hour. Make sure you have a link back to your site throughout the ebook so that interested readers can check out what you do.
http://frugalentrepreneur.com/
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