subject: Online Marketing For Offline Businesses [print this page] Online Marketing For Offline Businesses Online Marketing For Offline Businesses
If you run a traditional type of business you will probably have come to realise that many people now use Google Yahoo & Bing when they are looking for the types of products or services you offer and you may be thinking that it is about time you started marketing your business on the internet.The yellow pages and other forms of print advertising are no longer the force they once were. If you do not have an internet presence you are loosing customers to your competitors and so marketing your business on the internet is becoming an essential part of a company's marketing strategy. Now if you have never been involved with internet marketing, words such as, domain names, hosting, autoresponders are words that may well immediately turn you off the idea but every industry has its own jargon and you will soon come to understand what all these phrases mean. The hardest part as with a lot of things new is getting started.So what are the essentials ? How do you market your business on the internet ? Well to start you need your own website and a name for it. If you have an established business name, use that as the name of your domain and if available you will want a .com or the suffix of whatever country you are operating in. eg if you are in the uk your domain name could be, www mybusinessname.co.uk. You then need to build the website itself, plan it out before hand and decide what you are going to put on the site. Is it simply to act as an advertisment for your business or will your site be selling products or will it combine both these functions. Now the type of business you run will obviously govern this to a certain extent, for example not many restaurants I know sell their products directly over the internet ! You can either build the site youself using a site builder package or employ someone to do it for you. When building your site bear in mind you should be using appropriate keywords in page titles and in the page content. So for example if you are selling "discount tyres in Birmingham", you should include that and similar phrases in the page title and also in the page text. Once your site is completed you then need a "home" for it, which is called "hosting" There are many hosting companys out there but try and get a recommendation from someone you know who is already using one and is happy with the service provided.Once completed and hosted you now want to get as much exposure for your site as possible. There are many directory type sites online and a good starting point is to submit your website for listing in these directories. If you search Google for your type of business you will find these directories appearing in the search results, click on them and you will find instructions on how to submit your site. You will find they offer paid and free entries but initially take the free option. If your business serves your local community you also want to get your site listed in "Google Places" These are results which Google now puts at the top of the geographical organic search results and it is important that your business is up there at the top. Google provides instructions on how to get your business listed, just search online.Now your website is up and running there is a lot more you can do to promote it but if you have followed these steps you will be well on the way to attracting more customers from the internet.
