Making cents or dollars: Online and direct marketing for small business

Marketing online can be very confusing. E-mail marketing, newsletters, websites, and blogs all sound fairly straightforward. When added to the already overwhelming schedule of running a business, they can freeze a business owner in her tracks. It's power to reach a large audience at a relatively low cost is unmatched.

Luckily, there are experts all over the internet to help, no? Well, yes and no. I have spent the last two weeks browsing website, blogs looking through the eyes of a business person. How do you sort out who is legitimate and where to invest those tight marketing dollars? How do we get the most bang for the buck?

Yes, there are experts. I encourage those who can affort a good web designer, a good copy writer, a good seo ( Seach Engine optomization) person to do the research and hire the best they can afford. For those who prefer of need to do this themselves, we will explorer the tools and resources to reach our marketing goals. Ill be exploring these tools and resources in detail over the next few weeks.

In the meantime, there are a few things to do to start. You probably already use email for client and supplier contact. The first item on our To Do list would be to clean up your contact list and to add a question to every email you send out to your clients and suppliers, "would you like to be added to our email mailing list." In economic downtuns it is more important than ever to nurture deep relationships with each person we come in contact with. That includes clients, material suppliers, even the sales people who come cold calling on us. Every contact is an opportunity to ask questions and learn about needs and uncover opportunities. We want to not only make those exchanges profitable but to also ask permission to contact them again in the future on a regular basis to strengthen the relationship.

This will be the first building block of our email marketing. A strong, opt-in email list. We will be exploring ways of reaching out and building this list through other activities like our website, our print or electronic newsletter and our blog. A blog is a special website that is a cronological list of posts with a special feature. It allows others to comment on the content we have written there. There is a source for instant feedback and the opportunity to expand our audience and we promote the blog across search engines.

There is one more opportunity we can take advantage of if we are not already, forums. Many of us browse forums all the time looking for information without slowing down to comment on the information we read. If we take a few moments to comment on whether the information was usefull and relevant and we leave our contact information, it helps the other readers searching for information and can help drive readers back to our website or blog.


Richard