by Dave on August 19, 2008
You may have noticed that Web designers/managers/marketers spend a lot of time encouraging you to buy services to help you promote your website online. We often seem to neglect the need for micro business owners to promote their websites offline as well.
Remembering that many of your potential customers still use traditional media to find you, you might want to allocate a little bit of your marketing budget to some of the following offline marketing activities:
- Place a classified advert in the local newspaper. Classified adverts are cheap, and if you place them regularly enough, people will start to notice.
- Teach a class. Recently I held a training program for a group of small business owners, teaching them how to maintain their own websites. Two of the students referred their friends to my website and I signed them up for regular website maintenance contracts.
- Add your URL to everything. Let everyone know you have a website by addding your URL (your web address) to your purchase orders, your invoices, your brochures, your sales receipts, your letterheads, your fax covers and your email signature.
- Make a bumper sticker. Get your local printer to make a sticker of your URL and stick it on the back of your car. Every day hundreds of people will see it, and you may just get some website traffic as a result.
- Write your URL on the beach. I couldn’t resist this one. I read a forum posting a while ago about a guy who wrote his website URL in the sand every morning. If you’re selling something that beachwalkers want to buy, this may just work.
- Send a letter. Develop a relationship with your clients by sending them a personal letter thanking them for their business and directing them to your website to receive a limited offer or helpful information.
- Create an online tool to help clients. If you can afford to hire a freelance programmer, create a free online tool to help your existing clients use your products more effectively.
- Speak to more people. If your micro business is anything like mine, a lot of your new business comes from referrals and simply from striking up a conversation with people. Having a business card handy helps to direct people to your website for more information.
- Give away promotional gifts. If you’ve got the budget, buy some unusual promotional gifts and send them to clients. You never know where a pen with your URL on it could end up.
- Write a press release. Tell the media about new products, new projects or anything else work talking about by writing press releases. Having your URL in the byline will definitely bring you website traffic if your press release is published.
If these ideas sound a bit too tame for your liking and you’re interested in trying shock tactics (or you just want a laugh), you should read Patrick Altoft’s ‘5 Killer ways to promote your website offline‘.
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by Dave on August 15, 2008
Have you ever backed up your website before? If not, you need to start doing so, right now. I’ve prepared a step-by-step tutorial to show you how to use the free FTP tool Filezilla to download a backup copy of your website. If you missed my introduction to FTP, please read it first.
Before we start
I’m going to assume you’ve already downloaded your free copy of Filezilla and made a note of your website’s FTP account information, namely:
- Your FTP host name
- Your FTP user name
- Your FTP password
If you haven’t done this yet, you’ll need to do so in order to follow the rest of the tutorial.
For your final preparation step, go to your ‘My Documents’ folder on your PC and right-click, then choose ‘New > Folder’ and give your folder the name of your website (e.g. thinkdave.com).
[click to continue...]
by Dave on August 11, 2008
Just when I think I’m starting to get the hang of the latest Internet Marketing fad, another one replaces it. This seems to happen about once a week at the moment.
But there are a number of Internet Marketing tools that just keep on working, no matter how the Web evolves. Here are 5 goodies micro businesses can, and should be trying out:
- Pay-per-click advertising. Not everything on the Internet is free. Then again, not everything has to be expensive either. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a simple way to manage an online advertising campaign, irrespective of the size of your budget. The best service to start you off with online advertising is Google Adwords.
- Content. No matter how much money you spend on fancy graphics for your website, it’s the content that gets visitors to do business with you. So the next time you decide to redesign your site, hire a good copy writer first. If you have any money left over you can spend it on graphics.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Of course you can write all the content in the world, but if it isn’t properly optimised for search engines, you’re wasting money. SEO takes some time and patience, but it pays off in chunks once you’re at or near the top of the search engine rankings.
- Email marketing. If you’ve been in business for a while, you should have a house list of email addresses for your clients. If you don’t have one yet, start compiling and using a house list today. And if you’re new to business, you need to concentrate on building a house list quickly. Email marketing allows you to push your message to people who are willing to hear from you. It’s a proven fact that marketing to people who already know you is far easier than trying to sell to someone who doesn’t have a clue who you are.
- Online directories. There once was a time when adding a link to your website onto thousands of online directories would skyrocket your search engine rankings. Of course, Google is more clever than they used to be so this isn’t quite as lucritive as it once was. That said, you can’t ignore the fact that a few hundred inbound links from high ranking directories will send traffic your way. Note: Every Friday I post lists of free online directories for you to try out, and it should only take you 20-30 minutes a week.
So there you have it. Don’t worry about the latest social media tool or the brilliant, if somewhat questionable tactics many Internet marketers are recommending just yet. Start with these basics and you’ll have a good foundation for your website for years to come.
