As we tell our Savvy Marketer workshop delegates, using the internet to market your small business doesn’t mean you can stop marketing the ‘traditional’ or offline way. The best results will be achieved with a mix of both sets of tools.
And there are many valuable lessons to be learned from traditional marketing. Like the need to be constant and consistent.
Consistent in your presence. Social Media marketing is like an overloaded buffet table with so many tempting dishes. Newcomers are understandably overwhelmed by all the choices available and think they need to be involved in everything. Not only is this an impossible mission, it’s also a mistake.
To join a group or network, connect with people like crazy for a few days and then not visit again for weeks (or even months) is a completely wasted effort. This approach wouldn’t work with offline Networking groups either.
If you start a blog or email newsletter, keep posting and publishing regularly; if you join Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other networks, contribute often.
Constant in your message. The business possibilities available to those who embrace social media are exciting and many! It can be very easy to get carried away and sign up to lots of affiliate schemes, buy dozens of domain names (because they’re available) and slap up squeeze pages by the score …. and then find it difficult to market any of them effectively.
Traditional Marketing 101 tells us to select our area of specialism and define its target market. Make sure you become known as a specialist in whatever area you choose and only consider adding products and services that fit with your specialism. Your marketing message will be much easier to craft and to communicate as it will be laser focused.
Get one business up and running – and profitable! – before embarking on the next. Don’t be distracted by all the bright shiny possiblities!
Writing content on your specialist subject or about your products and services is something all businesses need to do, whether for printed brochures or your website. But you can make that content go that much further if you recycle it. Why write articles or papers for a brochure or perhaps for your site and not distribute it as far and wide as possible?
Many businesses are regularly writing great stuff and the further it goes and the more you re-use it, the more word will get out there about your products and services. If you’re not sure what to do with articles and papers you’ve written, here’s a few ideas for you.
1. Newsletters
Include articles in your newsletters and if you’ve some great stuff that may be a bit old, there’s no harm in re-using or updating it. Why write fresh stuff each time if some of the older articles you may have written are still relevant, perhaps just needing a bit of a tweak here and there?
2. Blogs
Blogs are great for re-using papers and articles, and if they’re quite long, you can break them down into bitesize chunks, which are great for blog posts. I revisit old blog posts and update them and it saves a great deal of time when updating your blog.
3. Article Submissions
There are loads of free article submission sites out there, but the best one is Ezine Articles and you can often find articles which have been submitted to this site ranking quite well in the search engines too. If you’re writing new content quite regularly for your blog or newsletter, then don’t forget to submit it as an article to Ezine Articles and perhaps a couple of other article submission sites as it gets your name out to even more people.
4. Offering Content
Not only can you submit articles to sites as above, but some sites will happily accept third party content as they can’t possibly write all the content themselves. Find out which sites within your area of expertise may accept articles regularly and most of them will give you a link back to your site as well as send traffic, so it’s well worth it as often these sites are quite popular.
There are many ways you can recycle your content, and if you’ve got any tips or found other ways of recycling your content, please let us know!
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