Your business is your income generating tool. If you don’t do it right, you might as well not do it at all. There are a lot of ways to advertise your business. It could be through print ads, radio or TV – but these forms of advertisements are very costly. If you don’t have the budget to sustain it, it could leave you penniless. So, what could be an effective form of advertisement that most of us are familiar with? You got it right, the Internet. Almost everybody uses it and there is no limit to what you can do with it. Contrary to popular beliefs, you don’t need to be a computer genius to build an online presence for your business. You just need to have basic computer knowledge and everything will fall into place.

Create a Website

If you decide to do your business online, it is, of course, necessary to create your own website. It is actually not hard to create one. There are a lot of tools (and most of them are free) that are readily available online which can guide you step-by-step on what you want to do and how it should be done. Building a website should be done with care. You have to present it in a well-organized and easy-to-use format. Although it is not hard to create a website, a lot have failed for the simple reason that they did not exert enough time and effort in doing so.

The common dilemma in creating a website is that there are a lot of ways of doing it. The problems begin when you are overwhelmed with so many designs to choose from, and you end up making it look like a garbled mess. This will cause confusion to potential customers, which will result to a negative impression of your business. If you are not sure about the look of your website, it is better to make it simplistic but methodical. Later on you can update and edit it to your preferred appearance. If you want your business to succeed online, you have to show your customers that you are serious about it.

So, now that you have a website, you proceed to finding ways to make your presence felt over the World Wide Web. Here are some of the free ways to achieve your goal:

Free Email Accounts

There are a lot of search engine giants who give free email accounts to online users. Make use of this free service because it is very vital to any online business to have an email account. Email communication is one of the basic procedures in product or service inquiry from potential customers. You can also use this to promote your business online. You can send out email newsletters and promotions or anything that you think that people should know about. This will ensure that your presence is felt even if they are not visiting your website (make sure that there is a link that will direct them to your website).

Free Live Chat

If you think that this feature is only available to big online businesses, well, that was eons ago. This feature is already made available for free to everybody who needs it. Live chat is very essential to any online business because it creates human interaction, people will know that there is a person behind the website. Customers will make your website as one of their preferred ones because they will think that their concerns or inquiries will be dealt with faster.

Free Feedback Form

One of the main mechanisms of every online business is feedback. It gives important information about customer opinions, feelings or preferences about the products or services you provide. This will give you useful information on how you can better improve your business. It will give an impression to your customers that what they think matters to you. The best thing about this is that it is delivered to your email address absolutely free.

Free Offline Tips

You should always include your website address on your business cards, letterheads and, yes, even email signature. It will ensure that people will most probably visit your website.

If you have a company uniform, it is best to print your website address on them. Potential customers will see it and will most likely visit your site

Print your website address on your promotional products. It will be a constant reminder for people to visit your website

Free Online Tips

Be involved in online discussion groups, forum boards and chat rooms. Always make sure that your signature includes a link back to your website. But be warned, you should not do any selling until they have visited, and inquired, on your site, as this will make other members think that you are spamming them.

When a customer purchases a product from your website, do include a catalogue. This way, they will have access to your products even if they are not online.

You can also sign-up to online auctions or classified ads. This will add exposure to your website and of course your products and services.

Thanks And Good Luck,

Duncan

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• View 3 Comments...

If you are an offline business that constantly seeks to please its customers, then you might be well versed with working out a budget that will meet your marketing needs. There are those few thousand dollars for that billboard or radio ad, and a few more for that TV spot. There are prescribed methods for working out a budget for offline marketing, and questions to answer so that you know exactly how much you need to spend. This is not completely true for Internet marketing, however, which is still a relatively young dimension of marketing.

Offline marketing depends largely on the size of the market, as well as the target market’s needs and interests. This is much harder to predict in Internet marketing: almost anyone can visit a website, not all visits can translate into company profits, and not all visits are made by people. In other words, the return on investment, commonly called the ROI, is difficult to calculate, and you can end up overspending on Internet marketing if you are not careful.

Look Around First before Diving In

Before going into Internet marketing and working out a budget, you might want to see how your competitors are spending their money. First, look at how your competitors are carrying out their marketing. Are they sending out mass e-mails? Do they have a website, and what special features are they employing to win people over and keep them coming back? Are they offering special online incentives? If you can, find out how much they are spending on Internet marketing compared with their offline marketing.

Ask yourself, moreover, what you want to do online. Do you want to raise sales and profits due to online purchases? You will have to spend on setting up a secure website that will allow customers to make purchases safely, as well as to provide confidential information without any risk of their information being hacked into. Do you want to let more people know more about your company? You will have to spend on e-mail marketing as well as on an attractive website.

Know what you want first, and know what other people are doing, and you will get a pretty good idea about how much you should spend on Internet marketing. This will definitely depend on your products and services, as well as on the nature of your market, so you will have to do a lot of research work.

The Before and During of Internet Marketing

The process of developing an Internet marketing strategy is in itself difficult to do, and it will cost you money. You need to assemble a marketing team that will do your marketing research and get that website going. You will need to get a website designer who can design a website that is easy to navigate, loaded with features, accessible through a wide range of browsers, and attractive. You will need to get people to monitor your Internet marketing efforts to see if they are paying off, and how.

As soon as you have a marketing strategy, you also need a budget to implement it. You need money to pay the webmaster to fix website glitches and to monitor site visits. You need to change your website content constantly, or at the very least update it. You need to optimize your website so that the search engines will pick it up and index it properly – a feat that can be accomplished by a team of search engine optimization specialists, who are generally a group of skilled writers hired to write site-specific content.

Your Internet marketing budget should also include the costs to keep your Internet marketing strategies going. You need to pay your web host yearly, and renew your domain name annually. You need to pay your webmaster to maintain and even redesign your website. You need to pay your SEO writers to constantly update your site with new articles and better content.

There are still many other factors that you will have to take into consideration as you embark on Internet marketing. This is a whole new adventure for your company and business, so you need a complete roadmap that will guide you through smooth waters. Moreover, you need a lot of common sense, so that you can use your budget wisely.

Thanks And Good Luck,
Duncan Chua

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

• View 4 Comments...