What’s the best use of $100 for online marketing?
OK, you have a hundred bucks and want to get the biggest online marketing bang. What should you do? Unfortunately, here goes the answer that you did not want to hear - it depends. And here’s why.
Depending on what site you have and who your target audience is, this answer is going to be different. So let’s say you are Joe The Plumber in Raleigh, North Carolina. And say you have a website that does not get any sales for you at present. Then, fortunately, you don’t even need $100, you just need your own time to get started.
Go to maps.google.com, maps.live.com and claim your business. Fill out as much information as possible on your profile and then send your business’s link in Google Maps to each customer that you interact with, requesting a review. You might even want to include it in your email signature. Soon, you’ll find people that search the internet for plumbers calling you. $100 can buy you this as well. Just call any good small-medium online marketing company and they can do this for you. Or just hire a college student and most of them will know how to get that done. Once you are done with that, seriously, consider revamping your website and getting a nice-looking, fast-loading, effective, simple website. That’s easier said than done, but is guaranteed to take your business to the next level. Once you have that website, call the marketing company and ask them to optimize your website for Google. You are on your way to online fame.
Now, if you are a small business that already has a useful good useful website, then the best use of $100/month is to buy a listing with YellowPages.com or even better, a few niche directory in your domain that get a lot of hits. Some other generic sites are superpages.com, infousa.com, Etc. A good way to find how many visitors these sites get is by going ot compete.com and comparing such sites. Listings in good directories are useful in 3 ways. First, people visit these sites directly to search for businesses. Secondly, these sites often have print publications and you can buy space on that as part of the overall contract. Finally, the category pages on these sites often rank well on Google and other search engines. That’s possibly the maximum that you can get from $100 in this situation.
Finally, if you are a small business that’s already popular and on Yellow pages and directories, then the best use of $100 is possibly to get a good online marketing company to optimize your website for keywords that your potential visitors are searching for. This is more like a $100-$500 per month kind of expense, but if they build a sufficient number of quality links pointing to your website, your site will rank well on Google driving targeted traffic to the site. This is an ongoing cost, but also guarantees a good healthy supply of NEW ongoing leads. If you’ve been in business you know that there is always a cost for acquiring a new customer. Doing is this way is possibly the most cost efficient if done correctly.
Hope these tips will help you take your small business to the next level.
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