Marketing Your Small Business
My experience, so far, with marketing a website.
I have worked from home doing various jobs for about 4 years. I have been – and still am – a financial writer, teacher, tutor, accountant, bookkeeper, exam scorer, tax preparer, data entry mule and many many many other jobs.
Well, towards the end of 2009, after many months of unemployment, I decided to form my own business and create a website. My Facebook friends will attest to the fact that designing a website drove me up a wall and down again. After pouring a lot of money into website designers and redesigners, I decided to buy a ‘HTML for Dummies’ book. With the help of the book and a friend (Tunde Olubando, owner of 1 More Spoon and all around creative genius), I designed my sites by myself (Feel free to applause :d).
Neither one looks like I spent a million dollars designing them (www.dollarsinline.com, www.coursesathome.org), but they look good. As difficult as it was for me to design my own sites, the next step has proven more daunting – getting the word out there.
Now, I have not yet succeeded in my quest to get the level of audience awareness I desire, but I have learnt a few things.
1. Paid marketing is not all that its cracked up to be: I say this to fellow entrepreneurs: If you are just starting, please keep your money or funnel it somewhere else. There are lots of ads out there for ‘guaranteed traffic’ or ‘guaranteed leads’ or ‘top spot on search engines’. These services cost thousands of dollars and do not do anything. I have not been foolish enough to spend thousands of dollars, but I have spent some money on these and I can describe them in one word: USELESS!
2. Paid email lists are fraudulent: Some web marketing sites and blogs recommend using paid email lists. Supposedly, these email lists contain the email addresses of people who, at some point in time, have expressed interest in one service or the other. My issue with this is two fold:
- Most of the companies marketing these lists might have gotten these emails fraudulently, so the owners see your mail as spam.
- There is no guarantee that these users are still interested. For example, I filled out forms last summer for knitting yarns. I bought a lot and I still have about 100 or so of them left. However, I still get emails for knitting yarns. Since I no longer require them, any subject that says knitting yarn is immediately sent to the SPAM folder without the courtesy of being opened.
This is another service that runs in the thousands of dollars and I hereby give it a brand of USELESS!
Now, there are established businesses out there that swear by these services, but for someone on very limited funds who is just starting up, these services are useless. There are free resources out there that will enable you get started. One such resource is: http://www.addme.com/. It allows you to submit your site to search engines at no cost to you.
I am still on the quest for how to market my sites. So, if you have any ideas, please do not be stingy – share your idea(s with me and other readers.