Promoting your Business Online:
Contrary to common conception promoting your business online is much cheaper than it is in real life. However it requires a great deal of skills and knowledge to use the Internet and various other Web apps, or Web services. For instace Email is the most commonly used web service over the Internet. However most users sign up with a Free email services like Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail and you might be surprised that it costs only $10 per year to register a domain and have an email address which represents you and your company i.eyou@yourcompany.com again it’s not the cost issue, for this to happen you would have to learn basic skills to set up a domain. You can buy a Domain from NameCheap one of the most inexpensive and reliable domain registrars over the Internet and our own domain is hosted with them as well. You love Gmail so do we, and did you know you can use Gmail with your own domain too and without any extra cost. It’s Free for first 50 Email accounts, If you are a small company you won’t ever exceed that limit. Here is the link to Setup Gmail with your own domain. More over you can search over Google for any information that you may need during this process. Once you have created a domain and an email account for you. Your customers are likely to put more trust in you and your company than before. Most of the communication in the business takes place via Email, so you must realize the importance of registering your own Domain and email. It’s the first step forward for promoting your business online. Next Step would be to setup a Website for your company. It’s kindda more techy business and for this purpose you might need to hire someone. However If don’t want to bother enough then you can setup a free website in your Domain name through Google’s Blogger service. It won’t be an awesome website but it’s still better than no Website at all. You can find complete details here to Setup Google Blogger service with your Domain name. Once you have completed above steps then you have the basic presence over the Web, it’s the start of the promotion of your business online. And it would all cost you just a mere $10 per year.
3. Useful Websites, Web applications for Business Promotion:
Alibaba.com is the world largest B2B website. It offers both Free and Paid accounts, for a small sized company you won’t ever need their Paid account, with the Free account you can create a catalog of your Products or services upto 50 and promote your services or products in their Marketplace, you would quickly get the inquiries from this site. It’s mostly useful for Export companies however Importers also can benefit from it by finding the good source of their supplies. Also there are plenty of scam companies which might pretend to sell you Quality for too cheap price. Good rule of thumb is, If someone offers you BMW car at the price of a Motor Bike then you must suspect something fishy! In addition to Alibaba there are plenty of other B2b Websites which you can search on Google try to create your account on all of them and promote your business and services. In addition to B2B sites, more recently social networking websites such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter are proving to be a good source of both promoting your business and keeping in touch with your business contacts. Most of the frequent users of the Internet use these websites everyday, so it’s good idea to create a Fan page for your company on the Facebook as well as setup a company Profile at Linkedin, it does not cost anything, you are free to create Fan pages for your company. The idea is to get your business introduced to as many people as possible, more people know about you and your business better it is for your business. Lastly we at Loyal are huge fan of Dropbox it offers you free 2GB space to store your important documents, images, video etc, and it gets installed on your computer, iPhone and Android Phone too. It’s very handy service. You can sync your computer with Dropbox Web servers to store all of your important data. If you need more space you can always upgrade to their paid accounts!
4. Paid Online Advertising.
In addition to above free promotions, you can also use Paid Advertising to promote your business online, However it roughly requires a min. Budget of $250-$500 per month for an effective promotion. For this purpose you can use the Internet’s Most popular and widely used Advertising Program Google Adwords. You are in total control of your promotion using Adwords, it’s basically based on the Bidding system (Higher you bid more your ads appear on the Internet). In addition to this you can also choose in what country, city or even a specific town your ads appear. For instace if you are a local business Selling Computers you would prefer your Ads to appear to the Internet users of your local city or where your potential buyers are. Moreover you can search Google to learn more on the Google Adwords Program.
Phew! It’s just the basic guide, we tried to keep it as simple as possible, In futue we would try to cover more advanced tips for promoting your business online. If you liked it don’t forget to share or forward this to your co-workers or friends.