Tips for Affordable Internet Marketing
Small businesses everywhere need to gain a presence online if they truly want to compete in the ever-changing business world, but how can they compete with large corporations with huge marketing budgets? The answer is simple. They need to incorporate smart, affordable internet marketing techniques in their niche to keep up with their competition. However, with all the information out there, how can they know what works? The following internet advertising solutions will keep your business competitive while not busting your budget.
Citations are Huge for Local Results
Most small businesses want to build their presence locally and do not care about people searching for their business from the opposite coast. That is why you need to optimize your site for local search traffic. One of the best ways to do that currently is to accumulate as many citations as possible for the business.
A citation is basically a mention of your business on a web page without an actual link. While this may go against your other reading, these are the next evolution of link building. The more citations you get with local authority sites like Yellow Page or Super Pages, the better. You can do this yourself by simply submitting your business to all the local registries and making sure your information is current.
Social Media Pages are a Must
Creating a social media page for your business can be a fast and effective strategy that you can implement at no cost to you. While it may cost you if you want to have custom features to on those pages, it is absolutely free to create a Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Goolge+ account.
Once you create these accounts, you need to make sure to link them to your main website to get the proper credit for them from the search engines. Make sure to keep them updated regularly and slowly evolve the pages to give your customers another avenue to interact with your business.
Content is Still King
Prove to your customers that you are truly an expert in this industry. Set up and maintain a blog on your website to keep your current and potential customers abreast on industry trends, new products/services and anything else that they may be interested in reading. When you are constantly writing about these topics, not only will you show you know what you are doing in your field, but you will also be gaining authority in the search engines. All this costs is time, so if you can put an hour aside a week to write, you can utilize one of the oldest forms of affordable internet marketing.
Consult an Expert
If you are just too busy to do or learn these methods, it can be just as affordable to contact a solid SEO company in order to help you out. Most companies have smaller packages that cost less than one newspaper advertisement, and the time that you save by outsourcing your work may more than make up for the cost.
When working with an SEO company, you will want to ask for previous examples of what they have done and how they will get your company ranking high. If you are wary, it is best to just start with a small monthly fee and then slowly scale up from there once you start to see the results they produce. Building up your website this way may be slow, but is the most effective method. A good company will start to show you results in under a year, so make sure to ask them how long a campaign will take to get results.
These are all solid internet advertising solutions for your business. If you do decide to contact someone, ask those questions about the above methods and see if they are able to incorporate them into a plan. In the end, whatever method you decide is a step in the right direction to getting a solid online presence.