Pull Ahead Faster: 7 Simple (And Cheap) Ways To Market Your Small Business Online

Small business owners usually have plenty of drive, ambition, and strong work ethic. What they usually don’t have is plenty of money.  By taking advantage of the Web 2.0 environment and online pull marketing techniques, small businesses can get their name, brand and product out there faster than ever before and still stay within their budget.

Here are 7 simple and cheap pull marketing strategies that you can use: 

1. Blogging.  Blogging can allow you to communicate with your customers.  And when I say communicate, I should say converse.  It allows two-way communication with your customers and potential customers.  It allows you to share your expertise.  If you’re lucky it can create a viral marketing opportunity for an extremely popular (or unpopular) post.  It will allow you to join conversations already occurring about you and your company, and more.
2. Article Marketing.  The benefits of article marketing include the ability to establish yourself as an expert in your field, link backs to your site, possible viral marketing opportunity for a well received article, the ability to market to a number of niches that may benefit from your product or service, and more.  To distribute your articles you can submit them to each directory by hand for free or for a fee you can have services such as ArticleMarketer distribute your articles for you.  (I personally use ArticleMarketer.)
3. Virtual Worlds.  Virtual worlds such as SecondLife offer the opportunity to establish a business and personal presence in a unique way.  The people that you interact with you there may need your services in real life.
4. Website.  This may seem extremely obvious.  Maybe what I should have said was an informative website with quality customer driven content.  When designing your website and writing your content, make sure it is with your web visitor in mind.  Ask yourself the question:  What will my visitors be looking to do here?  And then make sure that everything from the architecture to the graphics to the language you choose allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and easily.
5. Participating In Forums.  For every market, there is a forum.  Forums are a great place to share your knowledge about your industry, product or service.  The key to successfully using forums for marketing is to not hard push sell.  Your goal is to establish yourself as an expert there to help.  Your signature line usually allows you to include the link back to your website so people can follow you there if they like the advice you give.
6. Social Bookmarking/Social Networking.  Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and digg and social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIN allow you to become part of a community.  Just like the forums, the goal here is to truly become part of the community by contributing and interacting with the other members.
7. Podcasting.  Podcasts work on the same concept as blogging but your information is in Mp3 audio format. By creating Podcasts, you’re providing your customers with an alternative format to receive your message. Like blogs, Podcasts can be distributed via RSS, but the difference being that Podcasts give customers the ability to download the audio to various portable devices (like an iPod) and listen at their convenience.

When any or all of these marketing techniques are done right, they will allow you to pull ahead faster than with traditional marketing alone.  The key with all of them is not to push your marketing onto people, but allow them to pull information about you.  Put yourself out there, interact with your online community, share your knowledge and the marketing will get done on its own.  While they don’t cost a lot of money to implement, if you are focused and committed to making them work they will cost time.

Reader Comments

Brandi Cummings says...December 8th, 2007

Some of you may have noticed that this post is similar to the post Pull Your Customers With Your Online Marketing. In response to a challenge from Copyblogger, I created this post based on headlines taken from Cosmopolitan magazine. In return for participating in this challenge, the author of Copyblogger has promised what he calls Link Karma. Participating in other people’s blogs through commenting, guest blogging, and responding to challenges such as this are a great way for you to get links back to your site and introduce yourself to the readers of their blog.

Kelly says...December 16th, 2007

Great article! Copyblogger’s challenge created a lot of great reads for me!

Liz Fuller says...December 18th, 2007

Great article - I found you on Copyblogger - Instant Karma for sure!! Now I’m subscribing!

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