Thursday 20 December 2012

Online Marketing Strategies to Help Your Traditional Business Make More Money

By James Steele


As someone who is running his or her own "traditional" (some may say "brick and mortar") business, you probably see the Internet as an "extra." It's likely that you only use it when you need to do emailing and not any other time. It is possible that you've built at least a basic website that talks about your business. Maybe that's working for you already. But what if you have bigger and loftier goals for your business? There is a whole market of people out there who do most of their shopping through the Internet and you could be reaching them. So what do you do? If you want to use IM to expand your traditional business, here are a few things that you can do.

If your business doesn't yet have a website, it's time to start building one. Here's some good news: it is relatively easy to build a website for your business. With easy to use tools like WordPress and all sorts of affordable domain name servers and website hosting options out there, you can have a basic business website up and running within a half an hour or so. The website you build doesn't need to be super complex or extensive--at least not when you are getting your start. It's okay to start out with a very basic "here is our business and this is what our business does" website that can help you establish a basic web presence and then expand from there as you need to do so.

Feature your company in an ad on Craigslist and other classifieds sites. The services section is where you can post information on your business. You can advertise some of things you are selling in the for sale area. Whichever you choose, keep the ads short and to the point. Online classifieds sites are quickly becoming more popular than their offline counterparts in magazines and newspapers. The best thing about all this is that there is not duplicate content penalty to worry about when it comes to classifieds so you can post the exact same ad across the board.

Do not limit yourself to your local chamber of commerce's directory. There are plenty of options online and they generally don't charge anything for you to become a member. Some even function like social media sites because they can assist you to locate and connect with other business owners to create mutually beneficial relationships. It only requires a few minutes of your time to submit your business and site to these directories and the more incoming links you have the better.

There's no other way for people to find you. If you want people to find your site easily then make sure it's properly set up for these terms. Just don't go overboard, that's called keyword stuffing and is very frowned upon. You have plenty of ways to use IM to help build your traditional (or "brick and mortar") business. The most important thing is that there is a global market out there just waiting to find your business online. If you haven't put put your business online yet you're passing up all kinds of profits!




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