How to promote your business on the Internet

The Web is one of those alternatives to generate potential customers, and if you have not considered it yet, or have not given it enough importance, this is your opportunity to learn in an easy and practical way how to promote your business on the internet.

There are different tactics to promote your business, but the Internet is still one of the cheapest and that today should not be missing from your list of advertising tools.

I must start by clarifying that you do not need to be a webmaster or a computer engineer to take advantage of the advantages of the Internet to attract customers to your company. And for that reason we have prepared this list of tips as practical as possible so that you can start your own as soon as possible. online promotion strategy.

• Create a website for your company. Many entrepreneurs they create web pages for their businesses which at present is relatively simple, free and you can do it in a very short time. The your business website is a summary of the most important information that your clients should know such as: your services, product lines, vision of your company and especially, your contact information such as telephone numbers, fax, email and your physical address. However, creating a page is only the first step and you must be very clear that visitors will not come by themselves. It is precisely there where the web promotion. To create your own business website in 30 minutes, follow this link.
• Include your website address in all your advertising and correspondence. Make sure that the address of your page (also called URL) appears in your correspondence, in your emails (as a signature), in your promotional items such as shirts, uniforms, pens, brochures, etc., in the business cards of all your collaborators , billboard advertising, newspaper advertisements, vehicles, etc. This will help anyone to write it down and visit it later to learn about your products and services, thus becoming a potential customer.
• Register and promote your page in web directories. Directories are portals designed to bring together different company pages classified by their business reason. Including your website in a directory will allow you to be located by topic when a potential customer searches for specific products or services. Registering in a directory is usually very simple and free.
• Post classifieds online. There are several pages to publish free classified ads on the internet. These allow you to easily and easily make publications that will be seen by hundreds of users from different parts of the world and you can even choose if you want them to be published for specific countries. A very good recommendation in that regard is Alec Oxenford’s OLX Ad World website, which has tons of visitors who might know about your company. Posting a classified here will only take a couple of minutes and could represent new customers, so it’s worth it.
• Send promotional emails to your acquaintances. Occasionally prepare an advertising email that makes your products or services known or that focuses on promoting a special offer. It is important that you include your contact information and you should bear in mind that this promotion should be sent to your friends and acquaintances, not to strangers. Why? Because if you send it to your acquaintances, they will not take it as spam and they will have fewer reservations in reading it and deciding whether to forward it to their contacts. This is a slow but safer way to start a promotion strategy via email.
• Create a fan page on Facebook. Whether you are a common Facebook user or not, it is convenient that you can learn and take advantage of this important resource as a tool to publicize your business offer. Facebook is a social network that brings together hundreds of thousands of users who come to share their daily experiences and along the way their “favorite likes” or recommendations. This modality can be well used to publicize your business and allow your current clients to recommend you to their friends, among whom you will surely find other new clients. If you can imagine, Facebook works under a system of recommendations from one network of friends to another, which becomes the so-called “strategy”.marketing viral“that expands at great speeds when you have something good, interesting and useful to offer to the virtual community.
• Post a video on YouTube of your services. Another easy and effective strategy that exists to publicize your business is to make a small video (it can be homemade) about your products or something important and striking that people can enjoy and recommend through this means. You can make a filming with a digital camera or with some equipment not necessarily professional to make your video. Make sure this is not too long and then post it on Youtube so they can see it and suggest it to your friends. If your proposal is good, you will see with pleasure how they recommend you and requests for information from potential virtual clients begin to arrive.
• Use advertising services with sponsored links. If in addition to the free resources, you want invest in online advertising with greater relevance, then you can hire different advertising spaces on blogs, important web pages in your country or in your market and thus access a more powerful and targeted type of advertising. To do this you can directly contact the webmasters who administer certain pages or use the services of contextual Google advertising that allow you to publish ads configured according to the specific parameters you need and for which they charge you just a few cents when someone interested clicks on your ad. This type of sponsored link advertising is highly effective and recommended and can provide excellent results as long as the ad is well designed. If you want to know more about Google Adwords and start using their services, this is the link.
• Use analysis tools to know the quality of traffic that reaches your page. One of the great advantages on the Internet is that it allows you to make very exact measurements. With some basic tools you can find out easily and daily: how many customers have visited your page, which countries they come from, how long they were on your page, which sub-pages they visited (products), what language they speak, gender, age ranges and You can even find out if they have contacted you. If you can imagine it, all this information is highly relevant when making decisions to improve different aspects of your offer. So it is convenient that when implementing your strategy, with a little advice you implement analysis tools such as Google Analytics.
• Use complementary offline means to strengthen your online promotion strategy. Once you have implemented some of the above suggestions, it will help that you can also promote them by offline means (off-line), that is, other than on the Internet like the ones we mentioned in point 1 and also: billboards, magazines, radio ads, classifieds in local newspapers, etc. This will attract new customers to your business.

What not to do:

• Start sending frequent advertising emails to all your contacts or strangers. This is called SPAM or unwanted advertising. People hate spam and the only thing you will achieve with this practice is that they identify you as a spammer and that they automatically configure your emails as “junk” mail. Which, far from helping to generate more customers, will create the opposite effect.
• Don’t be discouraged by slow results. One of the keys to the success of the internet promotion it is knowing and understanding that take-off can be slow. When you promote your page or when you suggest your facebook fan page to your friends, they will start to know and recommend it. But these processes can start very slowly and a good effort of constant updating is often required so that your content and proposal is attractive to many people and of course, this is part of the permanent work of every entrepreneur: Keeping your business proposal attractive. Getting discouraged after 2 or 3 months because hundreds of new customers aren’t arriving is the biggest mistake you can make. If you are patient and know how to wait, the results will come and you will soon discover a new segment of clients interested in hiring you.
• Leave your page out of date. The information you publish should always be fresh, this does not take long and can make the difference between the success and failure of a business. web promotion strategy. Make sure to constantly publish: new products, new offers, new promotions, advantages for customers who arrive via the Internet, attractive photos, news, etc. Creating a page and hoping that it will attract your customers for the next 2 years is an illusion in which many entrepreneurs fall. Why? Because the Internet is like that. It is dynamic, it is changeable, it is novel and it is always captivating.

So here you have a lot of material to start with and remember: patience in the process, but the sooner the better!

In the meantime, I invite you to learn about other resources for entrepreneurs: