Erin M. Wiles

I often times hear friends and peers talk about how they wish they could afford a really nice website for their business or be able to cheaply and effectively market to their target audience.  I tell them, “why wish, when you can put forth a little extra elbow grease and have it?”

The internet is a miraculous thing that not only provides us all with limitless information, but also helps us automate mundane and tedious tasks.  Think about 10 years ago?  Did you have your calendar at your finger tips, accessible to you or anyone else who you wanted to view it at any time?  If you were like me, you carried around this big ugly wire bound calendar you got free from some promotion the Christmas before and often times left or lost it.   Now, servers like Google Calendar or Outlook have made mine and everyone else’s life a little bit easier, on track, and accessible from any computer.

My point is that the internet provides everyone easy and useful tools that can be utilized by individuals or small businesses at little to no cost.  Finding these tools can be just as simple as a Google search or a post on a forum.  But to save each of you time, I have come up with a step-by-step Marketing Plan including links to some of the free web services out there to help you or your small business.

Step 1 - Brand your Business
If you want to start marketing your product or service, you must first create a brand.  This could be as simple as creating a logo and tag line or as in depth as the finding exact shade of red or imagery you want to use in your marketing.  However deep you decide to go, I suggest having at least an established business logo with colors to match and a short tag line that describes what you do and what differentiates you from your competition.

Maybe you aren’t the most creative when it comes to branding?  To help, there is a free marketing forum at marketingprofs.com where you can post questions such as “Name For A In-home Tutoring Service Company.”  Real live, expert marketing professionals frequent this site and give insightful answers or feedback to help you along the way.  Their incentive is to cash in on the points you offer for each of your questions.  The only cost of this service is the time to sign up for an account.  You are, however, limited to 250 points with your free account so don’t cash in all your points with one question if you expect to ask more.

Step 2 - Work on the Website
It is imperative for all small businesses to have a web site in order to stay competitive in today’s market.  However, creating a website can be quite costly when you have to pay someone to create the template and widgets and a few hundred dollars a year to host the site.  Well, unless you want to build it yourself.

There are now a number of free website building programs such as Google site, Webs (will have advertising), and Weebly that can make this endeavor an easy one.  These services both create your web pages and host them at no cost.  You are limited to how many files you can upload to the sites, but if you are a simple business this should not be a problem.  The main issue with these sites are the URLs.  With all of them you will have some kind of long URL such as http://sites.google.com/site/mysite/ or www.mysite.webs.com.  This is where your massive budget of $10 comes into play.  You can visit URL purchasing websites such as godaddy.com, find a URL that is available, purchase it, and redirect it to go to your long-URL web page.  Many URLs are still available and at only $9.99.  Your web visitors will be none the wiser.

Step 3 - Set-up the Blog
Marketing today is quickly moving from direct advertising and selling of your product/service to consumers.  It is now focused on interacting with consumers, web word-of-mouth referrals, and demonstrations of additional values you can offer to your consumers.  What better way to achieve this focus than  to start your own business blog?

There are a number of free blogging services out there such as blogger.com, wordpress.com, posterous.com and you have the ability to continue your business branding on each of these services.  If you need help in writing your blog, check out these two articles: Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Write a Blog…Blog.

Step 4 - Streamline the Communication
Always make sure you can get feedback from your consumers.  This will not only allow you to make improvements within your business but will offer tangible feedback that your marketing strategy is working.  You should already be allowing comments from consumer on all of your blogs, but in addition you can incorporate some other means of communication.  For example, say you want to launch a new product or new service.  How can you find out what your existing customers would prefer?  Survey them.  There are free tools such as SurveyMonkey or eSurveyPro.  You can send direct emails to your customers to survey them or create a survey button on your website to capture feedback from any new prospects.

Another tool businesses could take advantage of are the free trial, direct e-mail services such as MailChimp or Constant Contact.  These services allow you to create newsletter or PR campaigns to keep all your customers in the know of any updates.  Additionally, they provide immediate feedback on how many people opened your email or forwarded it along (and much more).  The down side is that they are limited in their free accounts, and you can do similar PR campaigns through social networks instead.  But, each free trial allows you to get a taste of what you could do with them.

Step 5 - Don’t Forget the Social Media
While I don’t recommend going social network crazy, I do recommend utilizing a few of the more popular social networking sites to network with other businesses or find new customers.  I am big fan of Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and You Tube (all of which are free and easy to use.  Use twitter’s search feature to find people talking about your product or service.  One online radio station who’s theme is standards music did a search on Twitter for Frank Sinatra.  They found a comment my husband, a HUGE fan of standards, made about Frank Sinatra in his twitter feed and started following him.  Before this twitter contact, my husband had no clue about this radio station, but he checked it out and now listens to this station religiously.

Use Facebook as another outlet to post your business updates and links to events you may be hosting.  Linkedin can be used to make connections with other businesses and get feedback from other professionals on their group forums.  Finally, You Tube is an easy way to post, promote, and host any media you may have in relation to your business.

Step 6 - Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy
You can be rest assured that many people who may be considering buying your product or service will first scope you out on the web or Google you.  Because of this, it is imperative that you have an SEO strategy.  And why wouldn’t you?  SEO is easy and can be utilized through only a few simple steps:

1. Determine website keywords (such as your product’s name, your name, your industry, or any other word you would want your business to be associated with).
2. Include these keywords in your web site text (especially in the headers or bolded in the paragraphs)
3. Link to any affiliates, recommended websites, or articles and have others do the same back to your website.
4. Index your website with Google or other search engines.

Do each of these things and check your website through search engines regularly.  Type in the name of your business or your name in a search and see what pops up.  Set up your web content to get your business site number one in each search engine results.  You can even set up a Google Alert to get emailed updates of anytime a new mention of your business or name is made on the world wide web.

Step 7 - Measure your Results
You wouldn’t take all these steps and cross your fingers it worked, right?  You want to see tangible results for all your hard work.  While many social networking sites make it hard for you to see a return on investment (84% of Social Media Programs Don’t Measure ROI), there are some things you can do to see results.  You could advertise a special discount to your followers only on certain sites like Twitter or go the old fashion route and ask at time of purchase, “how did you hear about us?”

Additionally, utilize Google Analytics.  This free service allows you to see how many hits your site gets, where people are coming from to get to your site, what pages they visit most, and much more.  Also, Feedburner is a tool you can use to monitor your blog and how much traffic it is getting.

All in all, there is no excuse as to why an individual or small business can’t have a successful marketing plan on the web.  Even if they can’t afford the staggering $10 URL fee, they can still set up their own website with a non-specific URL.  After all, if your business is having trouble fronting $10, then you may have bigger issues on your plate, like finding a new promotional calendar to replace the one you lost.

Tags: analytics, google, marketing, seo, social media, web media, website