Don't think you have enough time in the day to effectively market your business? Think again! This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh of Tecmark: SEO Liverpool and Manchester, shows that with as little as 30 minutes a day you can be on your way to attracting more customers.
30 Minutes a Day Online Marketing Tips
For the small business operating in a particularly tricky financial period, the bulk of your marketing budget may come in the form of time.
While it’s true to say that online marketing, SEO, social media marketing etc is a worthwhile investment, we’re not just talking in terms of money.
Putting some time into online marketing can pay dividends for a small business and you can even make a difference in just half an hour a day by implementing some of the following:
It takes just a few minutes to make a contribution to Twitter and making this a part of your daily business routine is a steady way to build up a network of followers interested in your area of industry. Share a link to an interesting news story relating to your industry or details of a special offer on your own website. Just make it a post that offers the reader something (information or a great deal) and your followers will gradually build up. Start to search for people in a similar area and follow them. Begin networking within your niche to meet contacts.
Blog
The same sort of concept applies with blogging as with Twitter, except the posts are much longer! This needn’t be an everyday thing but posting to a blog a couple of times a week is a way to keep in touch with your customers and to convey more about your business and the market in which you operate to your potential clients. This is an excellent means of marketing. It takes a while for a blog to take off, so have patience. 20 minutes or so twice a week can really get this going for your business.
Blog commenting
Contribute to the conversations on blogs by bloggers in the same niche in which you operate. This, again, is a form of networking and it also keeps you abreast of everything else happening in your industry. You also get back links when commenting, which potentially has SEO benefits for your website. A few minutes a day to read and comment on blogs in a similar niche will make a big difference in the long term.
Forum Discussions
Find and sign up to forums on a related topic to your business. Actively take part and get to know your fellow posters. Yes, more virtual networking but once again, the importance of this cannot be overlooked. It contributes to building an online presence for your brand and can begin to establish you, the business owner, as something of an authority in the specific area in which you operate. This can eventually lead to people getting in touch with you about the products and services you supply, as well as encouraging more links from the sites of others back to yours (more SEO benefit)!
Checking your content
Make it a goal to read one page of your website through each day to check the content. You’re looking for grammatical and spelling errors, typos etc. But you should also be keeping an eye on how frequently your keyword is mentioned. By keyword, we mean the word relating to what the page is about. It’s surprising when reading back over content how infrequently your keyword might be mentioned. When you think about it, the only way in which Google can recognise the topic of your page is by the words on it. So ensuring you mention the keyword in the content is critical. However, this should not come at the detriment of the meaning of your content and if you struggle to write keyword rich content that reads naturally, you should consider investing in a professional copywriter through an online marketing company. But it’s certainly worth investing a few minutes a day to read through your own existing content.
=
These are quick tips that will, over time, increase your web presence which will, in turn generate more traffic and thus more leads to your small business website.
Want to be our next guest author? Here's how you can...Click here for details.
Photo Credit: mao_lini
Similar Posts:
- Recession-Proof Your Business with Social Media
- Do You Know How Your Customers Secretly Perceive You Online?
- A Simple Three Step Method to Dominate Online
- My Website Traffic is a Trickle!
- Why Your Online Customers Might Hate You
{ 3 trackbacks }
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Social media can be extremely beneficial to businesses who utilize it correctly. Often times, companies are reluctant to implement social media campaigns for lack of time. In this case, it’s wise to outsource your social media.
Stacey,
Good list of things that do not take a lot of time but will add up. One of the things that I need to work on is being more consistent with my own blog post. I think you just have to make this a part of a routine, one of the things that I am going to try is when I have my AM coffee, write a post for my blog. At the same time read my favorite blogs and forums and make comments that add value and maybe help others. This will most likely result in more than 1 cup of coffee and probably a new addiction, but hey I can always blog about that.
Great article! You’ve pointed out some tips that took us a while to discover.
To a great extent, I agree with Mr. Wagner in the comment above. These are wonderful tools to have when developing an online voice for your small business, but they must become habits. One thing that’s worked for our startup is to create a calendar of tasks and goals. We’re a two person company, so we split the responsibilities and created a list for who-does-what and at what point in the day. For example, I’m responsible for updating Twitter and Facebook in the morning, and my coworker fosters many of our online relationships via email and IM. It’s worked well thus far, and after a few days, social media maintenance will join checking your voicemail and pouring that first cup of coffee as part of your routine.
-CH
I attended a conference yesterday, and one of the best things I heard was that social media should be utilized as a listening tool. There is a wealth of knowledge that is free for the taking out on social media – just follow experts / leaders in your own niche to see what it takes to be successful.
@Kikolani
I think the main benefit with SM is to use it to listen. As a business it’s super easy to find what your customers want, what your would be customers want, and what you should be doing more of just by listening.
Matt
PS: Any more problems with the truck? =)
The message I got from Stacey’s article is that doing small things, everday consistently, can add up to really big things for your business. People may think “yeah, taking 30 minutes to write a blog post won’t get me anywhere” and they’d be right – one blog post probably won’t get you anywhere…but doing that everyday will certainly add up to something over the course of a year, or two, or…
Matt
Absolultely, Kikolani. There’s so much information available from such fantastic sources.
And yes, I think the biggest problem with people employing their own online marketing strategies is patience. Results don’t come overnight unfortunately, but as you said, Matt, a year or two of small marketing moves will make a big difference!
All useful tips but more importantly reassuring that doing it is bringing in results. I like the twice a week for blogging idea. I would add that blogging on the same day at the same time may get your followers to login know they are going to get more useful staff from you at that particular time. Social networking is all about giving for me.