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10 Ways to Promote your Business Online

These days, there are several ways to promote your business online. Here, we look into some of the most popular ways of advertising your business, in order to drive traffic and increase revenue.

Before you start sending traffic your way, we can’t stress enough about how important it is to have a fresh, sophisticated and modern responsive design. If you have quite an outdated website which isn’t responsive on mobile devices, this can often deter people away from your website.

#1 – Social Media; Facebook:

First of all, Facebook is one of the best places to start. Start by setting up a business page for your business on Facebook. When doing this, make sure you setup a business page and not a personal Facebook account for your business, as no one will find it, and you won’t be able to advertise it properly.

Once you’ve created your business page and had it up for a few months at least, it’s probably a good time to start creating/ buying Facebook Adverts. When you decide to promote your business at a cost on Facebook, you have the option of choosing your type off audience, daily budgets, the duration of your ads, location and many more. As you could imagine, this can be a highly effective way of advertising. You can read more about this here.

There are various other forms of social media out there as well which are worth setting up for your business like Twitter and LinkedIn. Although Twitter isn’t as popular here in Australia as Facebook, Google will index your Tweets for quite sometime.

#2 – Email Marketing:

Once you have a database together of customers or clients, you should definitely be doing regular e-newsletters, as this will encourage traffic to your website. It’s a good idea to put a promotion in your newsletter to not only encourage purchases or business, but to make your audience feel as though they will be saving money when they next purchase a product or use your service.

Along with email marketing, be sure that you have a subscribe option on your website to build your database.

#3 – Google My Business:

If you aren’t operating from home and have an office space, or a venue, there’s no reason you shouldn’t have your business advertised on Google My Business. This allows you to create a business profile containing your business address, opening times and phone number for free. This will also put your business onto Google Maps as well.

Your customers and clients will have the ability to rate your business on Google as well, at no cost to you.

#4 – Google AdWords:

Google AdWords is a form of paid advertising through Google. When you search something on Google, paid advertisements will normally appear on the top of the page and along the right side of the page. Once you sign up for Google AdWords, you will need to setup adverts to showcase your business. With each advert (or campaign), you will need to assign different keywords to it, which people may search to get to your business. With these adverts, you decide on your location and set your own budget. You only pay if someone clicks on your ad or calls you. You can read more about this here.

#5 – Commenting on Blogs, YouTube Videos and Forums:

Do you come across decent blogs or YouTube videos within the industry your business is in?

If you answered yes, it definitely won’t hurt you leaving a comment with your website link in the bottom of it, after you sign your name. Sometimes with blogs you do need to be a little careful that you do include a decently sized response to the blog you’ve just read, so that your comment doesn’t look like spam and the website administrator approves your comment, but for sites that see a lot of traffic, this type of promotion can help your exposure.

#6 – Email Signature:

Surprisingly a lot of people forget about this. You should definitely have a default signature, no matter who you email. This should be striking and eye catching. You never know who may come across your business from an email you sent and require the services of your company or want to purchase one of your products.

#7 – YouTube Videos:

No matter what type of business you are running, creating YouTube videos is something that should be on your list of to-dos. Sometimes you’d be surprised where your video ends up if you do upload a video to YouTube. These can be shared directly on websites, in blogs, or on Facebook and can increase exposure to your business at no cost.

The following three work well for those selling products.

#8 – Gumtree:

If you are a start-up business and are selling products on your website, you can create a Gumtree advertisement showcasing a couple of products or services to increase exposure of your products. Gumtree also has options available for cheap paid advertising, which will bring your ad to the top of the list.

#9 – eBay:

If you are selling products on your website, you should definitely advertise these products on eBay to give your business more exposure. When you mail your product out to a buyer, it’s a good idea to send a special offer out to promote your website, such as “Receive a 10% discount on your next purchase when purchasing from xyz.com”.

#10 – Social Media; Instagram:

If you are selling products, then you definitely should be using Instagram to advertise photos of your products through popular hash tags. This way, people will come across your photo through the hash tag you’ve used.

What a lot of businesses do is search for hashtags that are similar or the same as those that they are using and leave comments on photos belonging to accounts within their audience and demographic. This will encourage the users who have received your comments to visit your Instagram page. When you do this, be sure to leave a decent comment and not to let your comment look too much like spam.

If you are going to be using this form of marketing, it’s encouraged to have professional looking photos on your Instagram page, along with a lot of photos of your products.