What are new & innovative ways to marketing your business

Marketing Your Business For Repeat Sales 2

Part 2 of Q. What are new & innovative ways to market your business if it’s an online store only, for the purpose of driving more traffic and customers that do repeat business with you?

As promised this week we talk more about driving traffic to your site.

If you are talking about ‘driving’ traffic then the first 2 things that spring to mind are SEO (yes that old cat again) and article writing. There exist many opportunities for submitting articles to popular niche sites that can (and do) in turn drive traffic back to your site. One popular site amongst we-business-types is Evan Carmichael. Here you can upload articles pertaining to your skill sector, add your links back to your own site and create a profile. If you add ‘downloadable templates’ the site it is nice enough to alert you every time someone downloads it as well as their email address, which is a good opportunity to send them a nice ‘thank you for accessing our template, would you like to subscribe to our free email newsletter’ email. Be aware though that there are serious consequences for using peoples email addresses to SPAM them with unsolicited contact.

Speaking of email newsletters, and we are now, one effective way of staying in touch with your target market, building credibility and potentially expanding your database, is to send out a regular free email newsletter. This can initially be done as a simple mail merge through Word, allowing you to create a presentable document full of interesting and relevant information. If it becomes big enough and too laborious then there are plenty of opportunities for outsourcing, we use an Australian based company called Great Look, and find them to be very reliable, flexible and cost effective. There are software programs but having never used these I can’t comment. If you’ve had experience perhaps you’d like to share it on our Facebook page.

It’s very important to stay in contact with your target market, to keep in their face with updates, special offers and the like. In a world where we are inundated with new information and choices it is very easy to be forgotten or overlooked. So keeping in regular contact with your customer base is crucial.

A tip on advertising
Don’t waste your money trying to reach your market through large publications. The expense to advertise in national, regional or even large local publications is enormous, and you’ll be paying for circulation beyond your audience. Target niche magazines and newsletters, instead; your return will be much more profitable.

OK OK so I tiptoed around the SEO topic (that’s Search Engine Optimisation in case you’re wondering), and for good reason. This is a topic that really requires an expert’s opinion, and it’s not our core business so you would be better checking out these sites: www.getfoundingoogle.com.au; www.ltseo.com.au. Their teams there are much better equipped to help with issues of SEO, which include how to effectively use a blog to increase your ranking in the search engines.

Next week we will look at ways to maintain customer loyalty for repeat business.

If you have a question in mind feel free to send it to info@profitune.com , you will also go into the running to win 1 of 4 books.

Peter Rowe