Most business owners will never write a book – period. Most feel too overwhelmed, it’s too big of a task, or it’ll take far too much of their valuable time. Some may think “I’m just not a writer!” and will never make the attempt. Yet others begin and never finish.
What these business owners are missing out on is a huge opportunity to market themselves and their businesses for literally pennies.
It seems that at the end of the year small businesses like to take a look at what worked over the past year, what didn’t, and what they should be doing differently. As we look back on 2014, here’s my guess on the top small business marketing predictions for the New Year.
Email marketing is probably one of the best forms of inbound marketing out there, and it has a proven track record. First, you need to build up your email list by generating leads with your website. You should offer resourceful content or incentives for people to sign up for your newsletter or to receive timely special promotions and discounts. Here are the best practices you can follow for email marketing success.
Every type of business has “rules of thumb” to operate by – often rules that are taken for granted. Sometimes it’s important to question those rules to determine what you should adhere to, and what may in fact end up being myths. Let’s try and conquer the top marketing myths to avoid, and look at some key takeaways.
More and more businesses pop up online every day, adding more competition to an already flooded market. Then there are those highly authoritative websites that seem to be dominating the SERPs (search engine results pages). So how do you outrank your competition using search engine optimization and your website?
One affordable, easy-to-use marketing option is the incredibly powerful tool of content marketing. While content marketing can get quite expensive (that is, when you’re building tools, widgets, infographics, whiteboard videos, and other visual pieces that take a lot of time and effort), it certainly doesn’t need to be.
That’s because there’s a cost-effective kind of content marketing that will help your small business: If you’re a good writer and have some basic graphic design knowledge, or if someone at your company does, then you can do some basic blogging and content marketing on your own!
It all begins by looking at your products and services and compiling a list of relevant and long-tail keywords that you want to surround with your content marketing. Here are a few different tools to use to compile keywords for your blog posts.