One of realities any business has to deal with is advertising. Advertising is one of the important ways people get to know a product exists among the millions and millions of goods out in the market. While advertising costs money in many cases, the internet has made life easier for entrepreneurs by offering free marketing resources that can have a great impact on profit margins.
There are multiple resources available on Internet which an entrepreneur can use so that more people can know about the business.
Advertise for free on Social Networking Sites
According to author and marketing strategist Lorrie Thomas, “marketing is all about building relationships”. Social networking sites does this job effectively by providing potential and existing customers an avenue to share ideas and get into a more personal contact with a business with no added costs to the bottom line.
Of course, the catch with free advertising on social networking sites is that they are still social networking sites. Nobody goes on Facebook or Twitter with the initial intention of shopping for things. People use social networking as a service, which means that they expect to receive something of value from it off the bat, such as reading a funny tweet or getting the latest update on their best friend’s roadtrip to a nice place.
Lorrie Thomas advised that to utilize social media successfully, it is wise to “get out of the business of selling and into the business of serving”. What this means is that advertising on social networking sites should be anything but the traditional formats of advertising. Businesses must use social networking in a way that is informative and helpful in providing potential customers with the tools they need to make good decisions as consumers.
Blogging = Free Marketing = A Sort of Free Advertising Method on the Internet
Content is king
The words “content is king” is a common buzz phrase for a good reason. The internet, at its core, is nothing more than a vast library of educational information. This is one big reason why ‘how-to’ articles are such hot commodities on the web. People want to learn something fast and the internet is the best place to go. By writing articles online as a blog, companies fulfill this huge demand and driving business in the process.
There are a lot of sites that allow people to create a free blog, and post articles on it. Such as wordpress.org (Know more about WordPress here), blogger.com , medium.com etc. They allow anyone to post written material for free and link those articles back to a company’s main webpage (also called a ‘landing page’ in internet marketing language). Of course, the result of doing this is that more people become aware of the existence of a company or individual’s website.
Signing up with sites like Blogger and WordPress is free, but to make better use of them requires a minimal amount of money. When people start a blog, the URLs usually include the name of the blogging platform such as ‘www.carparts.blogspot.com’ or ‘www.carparts.wordpress.com’. While it is not taboo to utilize a free blog, having one’s own domain provides a more professional image.
On Blogger, it costs only a few $$ to secure a domain name without having the .blogspot in the URL. In addition, sites can even sign up for Google Adsense and carry ads on their blogs. When clicked, can churn out a few cents of additional revenue here and there. Securing a wordpress.com domain is cheap as well but it does not allow blog advertising unless the blog owner pays for web hosting and downloads the free wordpress.org software, which is different from the free wordpress.com platform.
The most important thing to remember when writing articles for blogs is to position oneself as an expert. There are many ways to get labeled as an expert. Fortunately, expertise does not have to cost anyone high grad school tuition fees or anything of the sort. By simply knowing detailed information that thousands of other wish to know about is enough to get expert status.
Search Engine Optimization
While it may sound complicated, Search engine optimization in simple terms means producing web content that would get ranked highly on search engine results and thus get more traffic and business. It is important to incorporate SEO into an online marketing strategy because as Lorrie Thomas points out, “natural search receives 250% more traffic [and]…converts 30% higher than pay-per-click (PPC) paid search”.
The main thrust of search engine optimization is to find relevant keywords about a certain topic. Google Adwords: Keyword Tool is a free resource for developing a list of useful keywords.
There is a wealth of information available to help people perform better SEO, but as a starting point, there are a few articles written at popular blog bitgog discussing the detailed mechanics of the topic.
In order to maximize the free marketing SEO has to offer, an article or web page must be talking about a certain topic that helps the user. That certain topic would have certain keywords in it. They can be used as the title or part of the title of an article and the file name of a photograph. They can also be incorporated into the body of web copies. Learning good SEO is an art and a science that when properly incorporated, can be a wonderful source of free advertising for a business.
You can check below resource on SEO, its very helpful.
The definitive guide to Off Page SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Generally, online advertising is a high-cost solution, so it is definitely an incredible idea to use the online sources to get free advertising. It is ideal for small and big businesses alike. But as with offline advertising, marketing a company or product still requires a detailed strategy.