Online Marketing Tips for Business Owners

For us small to medium business owners, promoting our websites online which is also known as online marketing needs to meet two conditions. Low investment is the first condition so TV ads are probably out of the question (for now) and for many of us, it needs to work almost as a do-it-yourself marketing task. Here are a selection of online marketing tips which are both budget minded and require very basic previous experience.

1. Don't put all your eggs in one basket - Some business owners are content with investing time and money driving web traffic to their websites. However, there are many online platforms which will allow the business to list products or services and they already have large amounts of web traffic. Consider using platforms such as eBay, Amazon and even classifieds to create a type of multi-channel online marketing strategy together with your website.

2. Web traffic isn't as important as creating sales - Often we look at website traffic as a marketing goal, however it's much more important to work on improving conversion rates. There are many factors which will influence the users to purchase, from your design to your prices. Take the time to research how you could improve the ratio between visitors / buyers (aka conversion rate). Start with reading Chris's six tips which can help you boost your conversion rate.

3. Use Google's free marketing channels - Google is offering couple of free online marketing channels which are very useful for business owners. Google has been offering local businesses a chance to register their business address and phone number in its local listings for some time. When a user searches for a keyword together with a location, for example 'DC plumber', the search results will sometimes include listings from Google Local displayed on a map. Another free service is Google Merchant. A place for businesses to upload a data feed which includes products or services. Under some types of user searches, Google will include products or services from this channel in its search results.

4. Use social media - If you've reached the stage of been able to manage your own business, clearly you know a thing or two about your industry or occupation. To get your business out there in the public eye, consider contributing your time and knowledge. Offer to write a guest posts on quality blogs, participate in the conversation across Q&A sites such as Yahoo Answers and Linkedin Answers and make connection with other industry related businesses through Twitter.

5. Keep writing content - Many business owners mistakenly think that to be great at online marketing you need to be a techie, but nothing could be further from the truth. One of the most important factors in online marketing is a website's level, quality and freshness of its content. Quality content is the most recommended long term strategy to increase web traffic. For businesses, blogging provides an excellent way to create content and in doing so improving the website's potential. Another suggestion is to offer ebooks, how-to guides and editorial reviews.

What are your tips?