Ok. So you’ve decided to start your own business. Congratulations! But how do you go about advertising your new business? You’ve got to generate some leads and some sales, right?
In the past you could choose to cold call or you could go door to door trying to sell your product or service. Of course, in neither of these methods did you pre-qualify a lead and you most certainly had to handle a truckload of rejection. Maybe you could hire advertising experts to create a flashy but expensive advertising campaign. This could prove to be extremely costly yet offer no guarantee of results.
Fortunately, you no longer have to do this. With the evolution of the internet economies of scale have been created with respect to advertising costs which enable the little guy to compete with the corporate giants. No longer do you have to cold call or pound the pavement or borrow big bucks from Aunt Martha to fund your advertising budget. With internet advertising not only do you make money faster but you cut your expenses tremendously. Hey, it’s not how much you make, it’s how much you keep that counts.
It is imperative to create your own website. Nowadays it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to do so. You can create a high quality site with little expense. Even better is the savvy business owner who joins a business which already has its own website. However, this deserves a cautionary not. I would recommend setting up your own personal lead capture page even if you join a business which has its own website. In this way you can capture and store the information about your potential customers versus giving that information away to the company.
There is a vast array of advertising methods available online. Good news: a lot of these are absolutely free. Yeah, you heard me right. I would recommend utilizing some sites which allow you to post free ads with, of course, a link back to your website or lead capture page. Another tried and true method is posting banner ads. These are larger and in general I don’t use them that often. Nevertheless, there are successful marketers who utilize banner ads.
It is always a good idea to give away free content to entice visitors to your site. The content must be interesting and useful to the reader. There are several ways to do this. Giving away free e-books that are short, simple and easy to understand yet provide valuable content is a great way to attract more customers to your site. Who doesn’t like getting something useful and interesting for free? Another method which may work equally well is writing periodic free e-newsletters. Submitting free newsletters, again with a link to your website or lead capture page, should bring more traffic to your site. And more traffic means more sales.
Most business owners are so focused on marketing their own product or service they often miss one of the best and most profitable strategies on the internet today. I’m talking about affiliate marketing. Simply put, you can sign up as an affiliate on other people’s sites and agree to refer their product or service to your customer list. You will receive affiliate commissions when your customers buy from the other vendors. There are some visitors to your site who may never buy from you. Why not make money from them anyway. And you can cross-sell affiliate products to those folks who are your good customers and make even more money from them.
No longer do you have to sell your house or your car just to fund the advertising budget for your new business. No longer do you have to spend hours on sales calls to people who are not even pre-qualified. The internet, with its global reach, can do your marketing for you. Even if you join a business with its own website, I would recommend creating your own lead capture page unless your business provides you with your own contact and autoresponder service. And whether you post banner ads or write free ads online you are not spending money to advertise. Don’t be shy about giving away quality content for free either. We’ve already discussed writing e-books or periodic e-newsletters. Remember these drive people to your site. And don’t forget about the hidden secret: affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing can bring in cash flow during the start-up phase of your business as well as ramp up profits in the mature phase. So what are you waiting for? Kick start your profits with the right internet marketing and you will have a winner!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Post a Comment