Marketing For Small Business – Start An Online Business With Skills You Already Have

Marketing for small offline businesses is a lucrative way to build a business for yourself. These service businesses must have an online presence if they are going to flourish, and you can use the skills you already have to help them do this successfully. In order to set them up on the Internet so they will be found by their prospects and customers, you will want to set up a blog for them, get them involved with social media sites, and write articles on their topic. I have even created a course to learn how to market for small business.

I now recommend using WordPress as the blogging platform for the businesses, for several reasons. The SEO (search engine optimization) is much better, for one. This will help you to get them on the first page of Google for their search terms, also referred to as keywords. WordPress is easier than ever to set up, but you can also have a webmaster do it fairly inexpensively. Post to this blog two or three times each week during the first two months, and then reduce that to once a week for the next few months. Once you get going with this you will find that it is much easier to maintain your place in the search engines in a shorter period of time. This cuts your work load down considerably, allowing you to focus on new clients.

Social media can raise awareness of these brick and mortar businesses very quickly. Sign them up for Facebook and Twitter and upload pictures right away. You can connect the blog to Twitter using a plug-in so that a tweet is sent out every time you publish a new post. On Facebook, create a Fan Page using the name of the business and the city they are located in. Fan Pages are indexed by Google and the other search engines, helping the small business to be found by even more prospects.

Article marketing is a great long term strategy to use when promoting businesses online. Choose a title that reflects what the business has to offer to its clients, and then write a two hundred fifty to three hundred word article that goes into more detail on this. At the end of the articles, in the resource box, include a link back to the blog or website for the business.

These techniques will help small service businesses to stay in business and grow, while also helping you to build your own profitable online business.