PROMOTERS




Promoting your business

By Wal Baker

Small businesses, particularly startup businesses, often strive on small budgets to promote themselves. You can promote your business, products and services fairly cost effectively in numerous and various ways with the help of your web site and the internet, and new ways are being invented as information technology develops and the internet evolves. 

These methods of promotion include: syndicated article feeds, audio-video clips, podcasts, emails, email safelists, instant messaging, fax broadcasts, affiliate programs, animations, banner and button exchanges, reciprocal links, mutual links, social bookmarking, billboards, social and video networking, web rings, advertising, contextual ads, classified ads, directories, listings, ezines, newsletters, news releases, news groups, chat, blogs, tweets, video conferencing, webcasting,  referrals, testimonials, bookmarks, telemarketing, search engine submissions, search engine optimisation, local search, start-page and pop-up exchanges, hypertext optimisation and robot software.

Many methods of promoting on the internet are free. Most promotions need to be planned and applied by experts to be effective yet some promotions can be effectively applied by your general office staff. Some methods of promotion may not be effective for you, depending on the nature of your business.

Some promotional methods are viral in that website visitors  spread them across the internet. These include: social and video networks, blogs, email safelists, and banner and link exchanges. 

Suggestions for promoting your business can be found in this article and more information and practical examples can be found by following the hyperlinks of the banners displayed and internet addresses listed on this website at www.wb-pr.com.

Considering your market

It's usually quite cheap and easy to promote your business and your products and services using the internet. Yet to actually sell your products and services on the internet can take a lot of time and money. 

Many businesses set up sites on the world wide web to promote their corporate image and to sell their products and services to other businesses, not to the public. Businesses large and small, from international corporations to home-based businesses, use the internet. Many millions of people around the world use it every day. The internet, being more than just another communications medium, is a collection of world-wide specialty markets. Most communications on the internet world wide are in English. 

Some businesses, like computer software distributors, business-book sellers, solicitors, accountants and investment advisers, sell more products or services on the internet than others do. 

Among the businesses which thrive most on the internet are those selling information or products which need to be explained or specified in some detail. Customers usually pay online using their credit cards, with web-site software automatically handling the whole sales transaction. Some businesses, such as software suppliers and marketing consultants, deliver their products or reports by email or by downloading from the internet. 

Many businesses only use their websites like brochures to present themselves and their products and services to their market. Some small businesses still promote themselves and sell their products and services to other businesses using email without using web sites. 

Publicity

You can publicise your business and its products and services effectively when you fully understand the differences between editorial copy and advertising copy. You need to keep your news releases relevant to the editorial staff who receive them. Information in the news stories should be of interest and of benefit to the recipients, be they internet users, print publication readers, radio listeners or television viewers. 

You do not email news releases to anybody who has not asked for them and may not be willing to receive them.

The best way to ensure that your news stories do not sound like blatant sales presentations, advertising copy, managerial or bureaucratic reports or other inappropriate writing may be to hire a freelance journalist to write them for you.

 If you write your own news story, you start with a catchy and meaningful headline, summarise the most newsworthy and important point in your first sentence, then elaborate with more factual details and perhaps quotes, figures and a photo caption. At the end of your news release you give your name or the name of another person in your business who will be able to answer questions asked by the reporters and editors who receive your story.

Editors who come to know you and your business and receive a well-written news release from you, will often print your story without phoning you for more information. 

You can send your news to many printed publications, many of which are also on the internet, and to electronic publications, thousands of which are on the internet around the world. You can distribute your news releases to publishers and broadcasters by email using your own mailing lists. You build email address lists of the recipients who may include: specialty writers of general newspapers and magazines; editors of trade and professional newspapers, magazines and newsletters; and presenters and producers of radio and television programs. Then you email your news releases and perhaps image attachments to the media recipients on your list.

As well as news releases, you can also write and distribute newsletters and informative or entertaining stories. You can email them or fax or post them when necessary. You can also send photos by email as digital file attachments, directly by broadband or computer modem and phone line, or by postal mail, or your can invite journalists to copy a high-resolution image from your website. As journalists use the internet to find sources of information, your company's site on the world wide web may become one of their sources.

To introduce yourself to an experienced journalist who specialises in publicity, just read our profile page and email Wal Baker

Most businesses, especially medium-to-large businesses with bigger budgets, rather than trying to do it themselves find it much more cost effective to hire a publicity journalist or public relations consultant who specialises in publicity and media relations. So if your marketing department or public relations consultant fails to achieve good publicity for your company, your may consider hiring a firm with a proven record of success like Wallace Baker Public Relations .


Other promotions

You target your specific market for promotions on the internet, promoting your company, products and services using your web site, email, search engines, news groups and other means.

Web-site
When you set up your web site and promote it, you target your specific market to attract only those prospects and customers who are interested in your business or its products or services.
It is much easier for you to update your information on your web site than it is in printed publications. 

Your web site can sell to hundreds of prospects at once whereas a telemarketing sales person can sell to only one prospect at a time. Your web site can project your company's corporate image and products much more graphically than email messages can. You can display logos and other graphic art, illustrations, diagrams, graphs, photographs, slides, animations and video presentations, and play music and other recordings. You can copy the text and pictures of your company profile, press releases, newsletters, product catalogue, specification tables, brochures, user manuals and other literature on to the pages of your web site. 

You can promote your web site itself by advertising and publicising it in trade magazines and other print publications, by listing its url address in directories and by sending email letters to canvassed business prospects. Your web site will promote itself as you keep updating it with new information useful to your internet visitors. 

Most effective web sites are updated regularly, every couple of weeks or so. This keeps your customers and prospects coming back to your site for more information. You usually need to register your business name as your own internet domain name. Then if you need to change to another internet access provider you can take your domain name with you.

Email
You can customise information for different customers and business prospects using email even more easily and much more cheaply than you can for posted direct mail, and you receive a faster response. Email messages you send should be relevant to the customers and businesses that receive them. If you send unsolicited, commercial emails in bulk to people who resent receiving them, you may damage the reputation of your business among prospects you wish to impress. Used responsibly, email can be a most efficient and effective way of prospecting, marketing and networking.

Why not promote your business in the subject line which appears at the top of each email message you send. This line can briefly tell the recipient the name of your business and what products and services you provide.

Also you can promote your business on signature lines which can be automatically printed at the end of each email message you send. For the convenience of your readers, usually it is best to keep your signature details fewer than six lines deep and fewer than 80 characters wide. As subject lines are sometimes erased from the top of email messages, it is usually best to include your name, business name and email address in the signature lines too. Again, the signature should tell how your company serves and benefits its customers.

Be careful to comply with spam laws. These laws usually allow you to send relevant emails only to businesses which consent to receiving them from you. Some mailing companies supply email safelists of people who agree to receive emails relevant to particular subjects. 

Spam laws also apply to SMS messaging.

Search engines
Your web site needs to be be designed in a special way so that it can be successfully promoted across the world wide web. Not only does it need to look attractive, download quickly and be easily navigable but also it must be readily accessible to search-engine robots. 

Web-page text, including hypertext, must be written not only for people to read and understand but also for robots to search and rank. Your domain name and address, hyperlinks, frames, titles, descriptions, metatags, headings and captions must all be written or designed to achieve higher ranking. Web pages with frames in particular need to be specially optimised so that search robots can easily access and rank them. 

Ranking by search engines  is the most important aspect of promoting many web sites. As your web site is updated, maintained and developed, designing continues as an integral part of promotion. That is why Wallace Baker Promotions offers you such an advantage by providing integrated professional copy writing, graphic design and website development and promotion services.

Search engines find little that interests them in elaborate graphics or large flash animations, which also slow down web sites and waste a viewer's time. Like most business people and frequent visitors to any web site, the search engines are looking for pages of meaningful content - useful information about services and expertise provided, product news, benefits, features, specifications, prices and such. Like most people, modern search engines view the content of a web site as the best indicator of what that web site has to offer to its visitors. The underlying source coding of a web page, including its meta tags and title text, is a vital yet secondary indicator for the search engines. 

That is why we at WB-PR concentrate on writing and publishing good content and illustrating it with jpeg and gif images and small animations. We use simple yet effective graphics in straightforward page layouts, and use only small flash animations when we use them at all.

Web links
Other web sites can promote yours by linking to it. A hyperlink in the text or with a banner on their site clicks over to your site. This brings people from their site to yours and it also brings robots which help lift your site's ranking with search engines. You may encourage other sites to link to your site by offering to link to their sites in return. 

By joining or forming a network of sites with reciprocal links, you can bring more people to your site and keep search-engine robots coming back to it more often. You can also join public link exchanges, banner exchanges and directories which display hyperlinks to your site in return for your site linking to theirs. Examples of link and banner exchanges can be found throughout this web site. You may browse our link exchange to find willing link partners whose web sites are relevant to and complement your own web site.  

News letters
A newsletter containing useful and updated information, which you regularly email or publish on the web, is likely to be well received and appreciated by those who find it relevant to their business or profession. Other businesses on the internet may appreciate concrete information about your company's projects, achievements and plans, about how one of your customers or clients has used and benefited from your products or services, or advice on how to solve problems, fulfil goals, reduce overheads and improve profits. 

Do you know you are more likely to receive a better response from briefer newsletters published more frequently than from longer ones published infrequently. You can help to ensure that your web site is most effective in promoting your business and its products and services by hiring a publicity, marketing or advertising consultant who has experience in web promotions, to write your web pages for you.

Net talk
You can talk with your customers and prospects on the internet although you cannot do so in commercials on radio or television or in advertisements in printed publications. So you talk online with them, not at them, offer them your products or services, invite them to ask for more information, and seek marketing feedback from them. Clients and prospects talk with us using voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) communications via Skype.  

Questions and answers
How about giving stock answers to frequently asked questions in the form letters you send by email to customers and prospects. Questions and answers can form a page or two on your web site. Answers to important questions most often asked are best placed before other answers on these pages. Welcome different questions and comments from your web site visitors. You ought to respond to inquiries and complaints promptly, usually this means within 24 hours.

Letters to the editor
What about having a web page of letters to the editor and inviting visitors to write letters for this page. Some of these letters may require you to write comments in response.

Disk pages
You may want to copy your web pages on to computer disks to give to your sales representatives, prospects and customers. Then your sales reps can use a portable computer to present your pages to prospects and clients, or prospects and clients can view your pages on their computer screens using internet browser software without being connected to the internet. 

News groups
You can also promote your business by electronically posting messages to news groups on the internet, which are like computerised bulletin boards. Your email signature goes at the end of your newsgroup message. You can search the news groups for unanswered questions and provide the answers. Messages you post on a newsgroup can be read by thousands of people around the world. Find a newsgroup which communicates with your customers and prospects. If you cannot find one which is suitable, well then start your own newsgroup instead. 

Some businesses receive a better response from their newsgroup messages than they do from other promotions, although this may be because they lack the expertise to stage effective and therefore profitable promotions using email, web pages, publicity, advertising and other means. 

You ought not post press releases or advertisements on newsgroup bulletin boards because most newsgroup readers think them inappropriate. Nor should you make the mistake of posting to a newsgroup any information on a subject which is not relevant to its readers.

Downloads
How about promoting your business by giving away information files on the internet. You do this by setting up a file transfer site and putting on it computer files giving product descriptions and specifications, software programs, technical advice and other information. Your customers and prospects can then download these files into their own computers and view and print them or execute them.


Stock photos, like this one downloaded from www.freeimages.co.uk
can enhance the promotional value of your web page.

Advertisements
Try advertising your business, products and services on the internet. First you need to find the most relevant and appropriate sites where you can place your advertisements. You can post free advertisements on some marketplace news groups as long as they are relevant to the readers of those news groups. You can also post free classified advertisements on for-sale and swap news groups. You pay for space to advertise on some news groups. Many newspapers and magazines publish their classified advertisements online as well as in print. Most businesses which advertise on the internet do so to promote their web sites, not to directly promote their products or services. 

Trying to use your web site merely as a display advertisement is likely to fail to promote your business because internet users usually resent this type of promotion. Generally you do not just display blatant advertising or stage sales promotions throughout your website, or merely use your web site like a brochure. Instead you provide practical information and expert advice or perhaps software downloads useful to your customers and prospects.

Stationery
Remember you print your email and web-site addresses on your business letterheads, cards and other stationery and on your brochures and advertisements.

Word-of-mouth
If you promote your business on the internet by providing helpful product and service information and useful expert advice for users, then you will soon have users promoting your business by word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth spreads quickly on the internet and is one of the best forms of promotion for many businesses. Instant text messaging (SMS or IM), social networking web sites and forums, chat and email are all used for word-of-mouth promotions, as well as internet, mobile and landline phone calls. Still, word-of-mouth works best in person, face-to-face.

Chat and blogs
Chatting on the internet to prospects and clients can be another form of publicity. You can even open your own chat room, conference or webcast. Real-time tweets and blogs are like chat. They too allow clients, customers and prospects to communicate with your business on the internet.  When a client, customer or prospect praises, criticises or makes a suggestion  about your business in your chat, tweet or blog, you receive feedback from them. Your can reply to their comments and build a business or sales relationship with them. You can answer their criticism, publicly defend your reputation and even use this real-time media for crisis management. You can also improve your business in response to their comments. 

Networks
Business people join or form networks to make more and better contacts in person and on the internet. If you would like us to invite you to join a business network on the internet through which you may contact thousands of new suppliers, affiliates and prospects, just email us now and write "networking" in the subject line. Business or professional members need to enter into conversations with other network members. Social networking websites enable members to chat or blog with each other. Members interact this way to build business relationships and profit from social networking. You give members free advice with a soft, indirect sales pitch. Blatant direct selling in a social network is likely to fail. Some companies pay sales, customer-service and support employees to participate in social networking to promote sales and customer loyalty. 

Traditional
Your promotions on the internet supplement traditional forms of corporate image and sales promotions. You still stage your conventional promotions and keep employing your sales and marketing staff. Email and other internet tools will help you to stage your traditional promotions more efficiently. So for example you can use email for your direct marketing campaigns and use your web pages as a video presentation at trade shows.

If you would like to receive newsletters about new ways to promote your business and market your products and services on the internet and about the latest strategies for optimising your web site, just submit this form to us.

This article covers a few of the methods by which Wallace Baker Promotions promotes your business on the internet. It may not cover all the strategies we use to promote your particular business, strategies which we work out after consulting with your management. So contact us when you seek advice on promoting your business, products and services or when you wish to build or launch a new web site.

We can demonstrate to you how promoting and optimising a web site raises its rankings in search engines. 

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