Why Market Your Business Online? | New Wave Web and Marketing

Adults are spending more and more time on the Internet ? many of them searching for information, advice, goods, and services and looking to connect with others in their community. This means that the obvious choice for businesses is to take their marketing efforts online. Online marketing can benefit your company or business in ways traditional marketing would not.

Don?t know where to start? Below are five steps that can get your business in the right direction:

1. Build a Website. This may be the most obvious step. After all, you can?t have an internet presence if you?re not online. You can either set up your own website or hire an established company to set it up for you. The website needs to have easily navigated layouts, be filled with useful and interesting information and be free of junk or unhelpful things. Avoid using anything that will discourage a customer from lingering; this is one time when some upfront paid advice from a web designer can be well worth it and will pay itself back in no time.

2. Make your Website SEO Friendly.?The idea of search engine optimization (SEO) is to write your website?s copy (the content) in such a way that your site will appear high on the results pages of the major search engines (i.e. Google and Bing) when users perform specific keyword searches. The higher up on the results page, the more likely a user will click on your website.

3. Use PPC Advertising. Online pay per click (PPC) advertising has a large reach and is the way many sites thrive or even survive online. You can set a price that you would be willing to pay every time someone clicks on an ad that you write. You only have to pay this when someone clicks on your ad. If no one clicks on your ad, you do not have to pay. These ad formats allow you to set up a daily advertising budget and you have the freedom to cancel and restart your ads any time you want.

4. Use Blogs and Forums to your Advantage. Blogging is another way to drive qualified traffic to your website and boost your site?s ranking in the search engines and it is a great?way to help promote your business or services ? especially if you can show yourself as an expert and as someone who genuinely wants to help resolve user?s problems. Often you can do this for free. However, this option has one huge caveat??be sure to post in forums that are website promotion friendly if you intend on using your URL or emblazoning the post with your business details. In many cases, simply stating that you?re the founder/owner/director/community manager, etc. of a certain site can be sufficient to alert people to the good your company is doing online. Let them do the rest of the adding up and finding of you??consumers are intelligent.

5. Participate in Social Media. If your business does not have a Facebook ?account, get one as asoon as possible. And make sure it is optimized to get the most from it. For Facebook, you can use ads, updates and Fan pages to keep fans posted on your business happenings.?As a business, just be careful to get your business a Facebook Page and not a Profile; profiles are for individual people only and they are limited in what you can do as a business. Once you have created your page, keep updates relevant and interesting ? you want users to be engaged in and share your content.?And it doesn?t just stop there ? you can continue onto Twitter, Google +, and LinkedIn. (Hint: these are great places to share information from your website, blog posts, and forums).?Creating a coordinated social media and website traffic-building strategy for your business is a big task, and you can hire professionals to help.

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Source: http://www.newwavemktg.com/blog/why-market-your-business-online-113-323/

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