You’ve probably spent a lot of time, and money, getting your website ‘just so’.  Now you want people to visit it, find out what you do and hopefully, buy from you!  Many people believe Google will instantly bring hordes of potential clients – if only that were true!  Search Engine Optimization takes time to produce results and needs ongoing testing and tweaking.  Using Pay Per Click campaigns will certainly help – but can be expensive.

Whether your business sells products or services, the following list of low-cost and no cost ways to get more visitors aren’t at all techie to do.

1.  Tell people about it – don’t assume everyone knows about your website.  If you’ve recently added something interesting, that’s a good reason to mention it when you’re out networking.

2.  Business card – give people a reason to take a look at your website, offer them something interesting like an article or free report (this will also give you an opportunity to include them in future email marketing campaigns)

3.  Online Directories – there are so many of these directories that they aren’t as useful as a few years ago.  But it’s still worth taking advantage of free listings that include a link back to your website so long as the directory looks reputable.

4.  Social Network Profiles – people you connect with on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are more internet savvy and will probably want to visit your website to find out more about you, even before connecting.  Give them a warm welcome

5.  Email Signature – so often forgotten, this is a great place to encourage people to click through and visit your website (or blog).  Make sure to provide a ‘live’ link and check it works OK.

6.  Postcards and direct mailers – just because traditional mailings are offline, don’t stop promoting your business’s online home.

7.  Letterhead – same as 6. above.  (Does anyone actually use letterheads anymore?)

8.  Invoices – why not include a discreet promotional message and your web address? (I’d advise against anything too brash when you’re also asking for money)

9.  Voicemail – Use the outgoing message to encourage people to visit your website after they’ve left a message for you.  It’s quite unusual, so they may just do it!

10. Articles (online and offline) – If you’ve written something of interest, be sure to provide a link (url offline) so readers can click to find out more.

If you consistently use all the above methods, you will get more visitors to your website.

Do you have anything to add to the list?  Please share in the comments below, we’d love to know

It’s that time of year when we’d all rather be outside in the sunshine, the children have broken up from school and we want a holiday! It’s also the time of year when websites can get neglected as work quietens down and other things take priority.

Despite this, you still need to keep up your marketing as much as possible! It’s very easy to let things slide and get confused about where your precious time should be spent.

Just to help you, here are a few things you can do over the next month or so, to keep things ticking along:

1. Blog. Blogs are usually the first thing to get neglected, however, it’s important to keep it up to date. Once a week or so should be enough, no essays, a few short posts, but don’t be tempted to just leave it until September! For a bit of inspiration, see Mary Portas’s blog, which she is posting to even while on holiday.

2. Email Newsletter. If you send one out each month, don’t be tempted not to bother in August. Even if you’re off on holiday with your family, a lot of people aren’t and you still need to keep your business name in front of people. Your subscribers are the most important people to keep in contact with.

3. Social Media. If you’re usually quite proactive on Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, then don’t neglect your connections there either. You don’t have to be on these sites each day, a couple of times per week should suffice, but do find a few minutes each week to keep the momentum going.

4. Review Your Competitors. This is a good time to take a look around some of your key competitors websites and get ideas. Since August is quiet and you’re probably thinking about how you’re going to kick start things again in September, find out what your competitors are up to and get some new ideas. Going through competitors’ websites is a great way to ensure you keep on your toes with your marketing!

The key to this is preparation – get some blog posts and your email newsletter written in advance and you can determine which date the posts are published and the newsletter sent, all giving the impression that you’re busy working on your marketing, even if you’re lying on a beach!

For those of you off on your holidays, have a great summer – and we hope you at least manage to do a couple of the things listed above.

What plans do you have to keep your marketing going over the summer? Please let us know!

If you’ve ever got lost trying to write down or type a long URL like: http://www.verylongdomainname.com/index/wherenext123/perhaps here/perhapsthere/?01dontknow/youhavetobejoking/phewatlast.html, the chances are the person giving it hasn’t heard of URL shorteners or that it could have been made it into http://bit.ly/atlast (I don’t know if that’s a real web page by the way!).  This also makes the web address much easier to remember, and pass on.

Shortening an unwieldy and long URL is very convenient. If you use Twitter, you’ll know the number of characters is at a premium (only 140 per tweet), so the shorter the url, the longer the rest of your tweet message can be.

When you use a long URL in an email, there can be problems as a long link is more likely to ‘break’, in other words clicking on it doesn’t take readers where you intended them to go.  Instead they end up with an error message.  While you’d think people would get in touch and let you know the link was broken, often they forget because they’re busy, and you’ll always wonder why there were so few click throughs to your latest promotion.

Some URL shorteners enable you to ‘personalise’ the result. For example, you might want to include ‘mynewproduct’ – so the shortened URL would be http://tinyurl/mynewproduct (hopefully not a real web page!)

If you use Hootsuite as your Twitter client, they offer two URL shorteners: Ht.ly includes a ‘social bar’ (see below – the bar is at the top of the screenshot).

This means you can easily Retweet the blog post and have access to submit the link to Digg, Reddit, Delicious, FaceBook, etc.

The second of Hootsuite’s URL shorteners is Ow.ly – which creates a simple short link.  Both Ht.ly and Ow.ly provide click through statistics.

Click through stats are possibly one of the most compelling reasons to use a URL shortener (not all of them provide this service, so check the one you use does).  Being able to see how many people are clicking through to your webpage or blog using your link is very valuable marketing data to have.

It’s a good idea to check the shortened link before you give it out – just click to make sure it takes you to the page you want to go to!

There are many (over 100) different URL shortening tools, some more reliable than others.  For an in depth analysis of performance and uptime, see Mashable’s helpful blog post from earlier this year.

Have you tried URL shorteners?  If so which do you like?  Please share in the comments below – and if you found this post helpful, we’d love a retweet

(Warning – this post is a rant)

As someone who has been online (seriously) since 2005 and who loves the whole idea of learning and sharing the good stuff with other small business owners, it makes my blood boil when I come across so-called experts who are nothing of the kind!

They jump on the latest bandwagon that shows promise – most recently social media marketing – and set themselves up to advise other small business owners.

Now, I have no trouble at all with healthy competition – in fact I believe there’s room for all of us to specialise in what we do best and of course our clients have the right to choose who they want to work with.

What I strongly object to are the people who haven’t earned their stripes yet & whose inexperience and consequent poor advice (and poor results for their unfortunate clients) give everyone in the business a bad name.

These ‘experts’ are often people who don’t even do what they tell others to do – how on earth can they know if it works or not?  They haven’t built a community on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.  Their profile pages are incomplete or out of date.   Some of them don’t even have a website (?) or blog , or they quickly populate a blog using other people’s articles.  The only thing they’re expert in is talking up a convincing storm!

In my opinion social media marketing offers some of the best marketing opportunities for small businesses around today!  Amongst the many reasons I could cite is that it has broken the stranglehold of expensive advertisers, traditional directories and thankfully, a lot of the more unscrupulous web designers.

But only a couple of weeks ago I spoke to someone fighting to recover internet property that is rightly hers, more proof that we still need to be careful who we hire.  (Sam and I intend to do a case study once all the legalities have been resolved.)

After the rant, today’s message is …

Please do some due diligence and find out if the ‘expert’ you’re thinking of employing is really walking their talk before you part with any of your hard-earned money.  Fortunately, it has never been easier to check their online presence – the easiest way is to Google their name (personal & business) and see how many entries come up – there should be at least 100,000 if they’ve been in business for any length of time.  And if they have a ‘common’ name, how many of the listings on the first page are for them?  Click on a few links on the first few pages of Google – if they’ve been building their own social media presence they should at least occupy the first few mentions.

(Although Sam & I have spoken many times about this topic, she’s on holiday & hasn’t seen this post prior to publishing.  As the opinions are my own, any brickbats should be aimed at me!)

Have you been taken in by so-called experts?  Please be brave and comment below – your experiences will help others.  If you found this post helpful, a retweet would be appreciated.

I have to confess I don’t write and submit as many articles to online directories as I should.  But when I saw how quickly a recent article was picked up by Google and spread around Twitter, I knew it was high time to revisit this very powerful marketing technique.

While a previous post focused on some of the benefits of article marketing, today I’ll explain more about the ‘nuts & bolts’.

Title – Just as with emails and newsletters, article titles are very, very important.  People will often decide whether they want to read the article based on the title.  Make it clear who the article is for and what it’s about to help them decide.  Using a cute or clever title could work against you.  (there’s a new & nifty-looking tool from ezinearticles.com called ‘Title Suggestions’ – it’s free for Platinum and Premium authors)

Layout – Keep sentences short and paragraphs brief.  Use sub-headings and bullet points (bolded text too if possible) to act as visual markers and help the reader.  You’ll know yourself how much harder it is to read  long chunks of unbroken text on a computer screen.

Length – To write anything meaningful is more difficult in less than 500 words, while articles exceeding 2000 words may be better split into two separate submissions.

Quality – Providing high quality information is key to succeeding with online article marketing.  Poor quality content and badly spelt articles won’t be shared and can damage the author’s reputation.

Frequency – I know quite a few people who submit articles every single day!  If you seriously want to get good results from this marketing technique, aim for weekly (in my previous post I said monthly – but that was back in 2008 and article marketing has become more important since then, with the growth and spread of social media).

Ideas - If you’re having trouble coming with ideas for articles, perhaps this short video from Ezine Articles will help to inspire you!

Right, I’m off to write and submit more articles, how about you?

What’s your biggest Article Marketing challenge?  Let us know in the comments below … and if you found this post helpful, please share it by retweeting!

I’ve been sending out a newsletter (at varying intervals) since 2003, which is amazing because it means I’ve been using Email Marketing for 7 years!  There have been many changes during that time, and also regular false announcements of Email Marketing’s demise.

But in reality it’s still very much alive and kicking & definitely deserving of a place in every small business’s marketing arsenal.  Here’s why:

• It’s a very easy way to keep in touch with clients past and present (as well as with new contacts).
• You know that people who subscribe to receive your messages want to hear from you, so they’re warm leads already (less cold calling required).
• It’s a quick and inexpensive route to broadcast your message to a vast number of prospective clients.
• Using a reputable, dedicated service will give you reports and numbers so you can accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaigns
• If done well, Email Marketing will increase visitors to your website who are already interested in your projects and services.

Over the years Sam and I have seen examples of good, bad (and some downright ugly) Email Marketing and we decided it’s high time to share our experiences of this great marketing tool with other small business owners!  Join us on 20th May for a free Teleseminar packed with best practice tips – and get your Email Marketing campaign off the ground.  Full details and registration here.

Following the recent announcement by Ning’s new CEO of his intention to phase out their free service, we thought it high time to write a few words of caution on the potential risks associated with over-reliance on free online services.

Here at Savvy Marketers, we teach how you can establish and increase your business web presence using the free (and low cost) tools available.  We still believe this to be a great way to get started, especially if you’re on a shoestring budget.  However, once your business starts to grow, you experience some success and make money, it’s a good idea to move away from the free tools and invest in paid versions.  Here are a couple of additional reasons to consider:

Support – most free services and tools are offered free while they’re still in BETA and the developers are testing them out, so they’re are more likely to crash without warning which can cause you all kinds of problems.  When you run into difficulties, there’s very rarely a help desk to contact.

Ownership of Data – If you’ve spent ages building up lists of valuable contacts in the social networks including Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn, it doesn’t bear thinking about the effects on your business of losing them all suddenly if a network went down or ceased to exist overnight!

Similarly, if you use a free blogging platform like Blogger, Posterous or WordPress.com – all your words of wisdom are vulnerable to disappearing without warning.  The same applies to any podcasts on free sites, slides on Slideshare – the list is long.

It’s your responsibility to take the precaution of downloading your lists of contacts and keeping copies of your material on your server or other back-up device, and we would recommend you do this even when you use paid online services.  (Sam recommends Sugarsync back-up service)

We don’t want you to stop using the free internet tools and services to start or build your business (we intend to!), just be aware of the possible pitfalls and take action to safeguard your valuable data.

Once you’re in a position to make the move to paid services, remember that you’re investing in the growth of your business, you’re helping the economy to recover – and thus enabling more people to buy from you!

If this post raises any concerns or questions about a free service you’re using, please let us know in the comments below, and we’ll do our best to help.

For small business owners who embrace the internet, social networking presents so many opportunities to connect, communicate, share and get their marketing message ‘out there’.

Many individuals, from college students to pensioners, are also enjoying the novelty of being part of a growing online community, connecting with like-minded people, sharing their thoughts and experiences, as well as following TV and film celebrities who have discovered the PR value of belonging to Twitter and Facebook.

I spend a lot of time online (probably far too much!) and am often taken aback by some of the rather frank and personal tweets and status updates. I’m talking about strong language, personal attacks and bigoted views. Of course I realise much of it is done for the ‘shock’ value but really, it isn’t clever and it certainly isn’t a good move for your future reputation.

You are not only communicating with people you know. Once you hit ‘update’ your message is available for the whole online world to see, forever after. Even that little @ message replying to a close friend is visible to all other followers (and your Facebook and LinkedIn contacts if you’ve set your updates to synchronise). Do you really want a potential employer/partner/business associate to read every detail of what you got up to on that weekend or see the party photos you just posted on YouTube?

As a raving fan of social media marketing, the last thing I want to do is put you off joining in. Indeed you must join in for the good of your business! What I’m saying is please think before you post, message, tweet or have a rant. Are you happy for the world to read your update, or would it be better kept as a private phone call, email or DM?

Sharing personal stuff is a bit of a minefield. Yes it’s important to let people get to know who is behind the business, but if you’re having a bad day, perhaps it would be wiser to stay away from the keyboard….

Each time you send out an Email Marketing message, as opposed to a regular informative Email Newsletter, you run the risk of increasing the number of unsubscribes from your list.  Here are some thoughts and tips to avoid annoying too many people!

• If your subscribers have been used to receiving a chatty newsletter once a month and you suddenly start bombarding them with ‘salesy’ messages every couple of days, be prepared to lose those who don’t like the sudden change.
• Don’t try to make a sale from your Email. The objective should be to get interested readers to click through to a specially prepared web page that will take over the job of selling.
• Some people will take exception to you selling anything at all – they believe you should give them everything for free.  You’re better off without them on your list.
• Rather than keep sending the same marketing Emails to everyone on your list, find out who could be genuinely interested by inviting them to join a separate list.  Then mail this smaller, targetted list.
• When your promotion has a genuine deadline, like a date for an event, you’ll need to send out reminder emails right up to the day itself.  It’s surprising how many people ignore anything that isn’t urgent or immediate and therefore don’t book until the last moment.  Interestingly reminders like this don’t seem to annoy too much.

What tips would you add?

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!