Cost-free Marketing Strategies For Small enterprises
Several small enterprises are run from people’s home computers and fall under the radar of business statistics. Whether you are working for a multi-level marketing enterprise or selling painted bird houses the difficulty of advertising your products without a budget is overwhelming. Let us face the fact that $20 a month spent on classified ad isn’t going to bring in a flood of visitors. A home-based enterprise cannot compete with their larger counterparts. That is why in several cases owners are likely to tap into their personal relationships to make sales.
Like a lot of of you I run a small home based business and have realized through trial and error what works and what doesn’t. Despite putting some “notches in my belt” I have never stopped learning. In the beginning, several years back, I wasted money paying for different types of advertisements. None of them worked well. Now my budget is nearly $0 and I receive thousands of visitors a 12 months. How did I do this?
Method #1 Email: Instead of spending money on lists and possibly getting in trouble for spamming I send businesses a very personalized email message. How do I find these businesses? I find them by looking on the web, going to their homepage, reading a little about them, and then sending them a personalized email about my product. The key is personalization. Create a simple sales letter which highlights your product, offers contact information and how it can impact a specific type of venture. Since I run a magazine which survives off of marketing revenue I have developed sample letters for the clothing industry, auto industry, legal industry, etc. I then place their information within the letter so that when they go through it they say, “Wow! This man knows what is important to me!”
Strategy #2 Information: Search engines and customers love informative articles. We have all heard the saying, “knowledge is power”. Customers want to learn about their enterprise as much as possible. Posting informative articles on your web page will help visitors keep returning for additional information and hold them there longer. Information also increases your credibility as a venture to the potential customer. If they agree with what you are saying they are much more likely to purchase from you. Search engines, like customers, are constantly searching with their spiders for content related information. If your articles are concerning the product you’re selling chances are that search engines will rank your website higher.
Tactic #3 Enterprise Cards: Off-line marketing has never gone out of style. It may even be far more crucial now than it was in yesteryear. There are plenty of printers out there that offer free enterprise cards in exchange for a placement of their contact information on the back of the cards. In most cases the printer’s information is small and unnoticeable making the free deal an excellent deal! Therefore I get my cards for only the charge of shipping and handling.
What you do with these cards is almost as important as simply how much you spend on them. People are interested inside the self and love to speak about themselves as much as possible. Normally, I pass out the cards under the auspices that I would like to further a certain conversation or I would like to keep in touch with them. It’s an easy way get their card in your hand and make a good friend. Now they have a personal relationship with me, are much more likely to look at my site and I can catalogue their information for networking purposes.
Method #4 Ezine Articles: Like I said in method #2 individuals love free information. Those same articles I placed on my site for my current customers could also be used to lure new customers. By making sure that you articles are informative, professional and worthy you can certainly submit those to post databases for free content. Then websites pick up the write-up to create on their own site. The trick is to have your personal contact information either embedded to the post or as a tag line on the end. Personally I use my web address and my name. The better your write-up the much more times it’s posted around the web and the a lot more customers you are going to get.
The four strategies work together to enhance the popularity of a website and reduce the amount of time you waste everyday. Writing informative articles about your product and submitting them to ezine directories helps to increase your sites search engine rankings, retain your customers and increase overall exposure. Passing out venture cards and networking with other owners works well together and kills 2 birds with one stone. Sending out personalize emails and reading about your customers site helps to increase your understanding of your customers must have while promoting to them. The overall tactic of enterprise is to make much more money and spend less time and resources doing it.
The author is a local Internet Marketing expert and founder of a internet marketing company new york. Visit his blog for more small business tips.