How to Promote Your Small Business Online

Whether you’ve just started your small business or you want to boost the revenue of your existing business, you have to find a way to promote your business to attract more customers. One important market every business owner should penetrate nowadays is the online audience. Internet marketing can be one of the most cost-efficient yet effective campaigns a small business owner can engage to grow and make its business more competitive.

If you want to attract more customers and boost your sales, here are some ways on how to promote your small business online.

Get a website for your business

One of the best tactics to make your small business look big and be actually competitive even against your bigger competitors is to have a company website. A professional or corporate website will create your main presence on the Internet. It will serve as your company’s online office where your prospective and existing customers can reach your business 24/7 through the Internet. Your website’s content about your brand, product, services, and other important information about your business are indexed and ranked by search engines like Google which make it more visible on the Internet.

Through a website, you can optimize your content to be more visible on Google and other Internet search engines. You can also create interesting and shareable content that will increase your social media influence. You may read our post about the 25 benefits of having a website for your small business to learn more. You can also check our website design and development services page if you are already considering to launch your company website sooner.

Blog your business

Blogging for your business can be an effective strategy to promote your brand online. If you can create high-quality content or write engaging blog posts, you can reach a larger audience. If you already have a company website, you can also create a blog within it, especially if you are using WordPress to power your website. Search engines love blogs that are rich in high-quality content. That is why when people use the search engines like Google to find some information, it will show them links that are mostly coming from blogs.

Take for example this blog that you are reading. This blog is already receiving more than 100,000 unique visitors every month who are looking for information related to business and the like. Imagine if you have products and your consumers are people who are small business owners and entrepreneurs, this blog is already a powerful tool that you can optimize for your marketing needs, isn’t it?

As a blogger, you can also build your online reputation or your business reputation. Through the blog posts you will publish, you can manage your online reputation and control what will appear on search engines and social media.

Promote it on Facebook

Facebook is the most crowded and busiest social networking site in the world. That is why if you want to find a big crowd to promote your business online, you should not miss the opportunity to tap the social media giant. There are many ways to promote your small business on Facebook. You can start by creating your own Facebook account, which probably you already have. With your Facebook account, you can freely create a Facebook Page for your business or brand. You can also create a Facebook group that will attract members who are interested in things that are related to your business. Of course your Facebook marketing campaign should not only end from creating a Facebook page and group, but you should invest time and effort in creating friendship and other social relationships with your friends and followers.

Promote it on Twitter

Aside from Facebook, you can also promote your small business on Twitter by creating an account and getting followers who will always read your tweets or updates about your business or products. With more than half a billion users from around the world, Twitter is considered the second biggest social networking site behind Facebook. Gaining more followers on Twitter to increase social influence should be done by providing value. In other words, to increase your followers, you should make sure that you tweet or share useful information in a regular basis.

Make it viral on YouTube

YouTube, the largest video sharing site in the world and also one of the top 3 most visited websites according to Alexa.com as I write this post, is one of the top places on the Internet where businesses and individuals go to earn instant fame. If you have the talent or creativity to make interesting videos that can become viral and can attract thousands or even millions of viewers, then you must try campaigning on YouTube. You can create a free account on YouTube and create a channel where you can upload all your videos that will attract subscribers.

Promote it on other top social media sites

The online social world is not only composed of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. There are still other popular social networking sites like Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Foursquare, and StumbleUpon that you can utilize to maximize your online business exposure. If you want to reach more potential customers, you have to always be updated in the social media world.

Make it visible on Google

Search engine optimization or SEO is one of the best online marketing strategies small business owners can do to promote their business on the Internet. This can be done more effectively if you have a website or blog that are rich in content. With the quality content on your company website and blog, you can optimize their meta tags, optimize your site’s architectural structure, and target your specific audience to increase your rankings in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and grow your reach. If you don’t want to spend money on SEO but you have ample time to learn and do it yourself, you can start learning from top SEO blogs. But if you don’t have the time to do it, you can consider hiring a SEO specialist to help you.

Be a guest author

Build your online reputation and authority by writing articles for other top and high-authority blogs that are related to your industry and have audience similar to yours. Guest posting can also improve your SEO as it provides you quality backlinks from the sites you are contributing. However, if you want to succeed in guest posting, you have to continue learning so that you will become an expert on the topics you are writing.

Join online communities

Communities are everywhere on the Internet. These groups can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Internet forums, and industry focused communities like BizSugar.com for small business owners and entrepreneurs. The key to succeed and create influence in these communities is not a secret – it is consistently the value and relevance you provide to the community members. To win quality connections, you should avoid spamming and other annoying online marketing campaigns that will only ruin your business integrity online.

Don’t forget to promote your business offline

Finally, make sure that what you say on the Internet is also true in the real world. In other words, don’t forget to ensure the quality of your products or services before you advertise or offer them on the Internet. Remember that what you do in the offline world will also reflect on the online world.