Free Online Resources For Marketing Your Small Business

Your small business probably doesn't make a whole lot of money. Hopefully, it's enough to get you a decent salary and to keep the business afloat, but there probably isn't a whole lot over for major marketing. Unfortunately, you kind of have to do marketing if you're going to grow your business and get it to the point where it does more than just barely support you. So, what should you do? In today's world, there are plenty of ways to market your business without having to pay a lot of money. The internet is the way to go for small business marketing that doesn't cost a fortune. In fact, there is plenty of online marketing that you can do for free.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites are one of the quickest ways to spread the word about your small business without spending any money. These sites don't have sign-up fees and allow you to connect - and stay in touch with - a large number of people from across the globe. You can start with the ones that you already know on a social level - MySpace and YouTube are safe bets. Use MySpace bulletins to spread the word about your work to your friends and colleagues; ask them to repost bulletins about your projects so they're friends can see the information, too. And use YouTube for free video marketing that will put a face to your business and encourage others to get to know more about what it is that you do.

But you shouldn't just stop there. Make use of other social networking sites as well. Digg is one of the most popular ones, of course. You can post articles on your site and then spread them to others, asking them to Digg articles that they like. Get enough "diggs" and you'll get higher traffic to your articles (and therefore a larger potential customer base) from Digg. There are numerous Digg spin-offs that you can use for marketing your small business as well, so take a day or two to really browse the social networking options online that are right for your business and then get involved in them.

Blogs

Your business should have a blog. Quality blogs keep customers coming back to your site again and again and are also terrific tools for submitting to social networking sites like Digg and other traffic-driver sites like blog carnivals. Basically, you can use your blog to spread information about your company as well as to increase the number of people checking out your work. You can set up a free blog account ... or even work with something like Google Adsense to generate a small amount of money from your blog while helping to market your business.

You should also make sure that you are paying attention to the blogs of others. By commenting regularly on other people's blog sites, you'll get their attention and drive them to your blog and therefore to your company. As they get used to seeing your name around, they'll inherently begin to trust you and will be more likely than before to contact you for your service or produce should they identify a need for it in their lives.

Educational Resources

Perhaps more important than the specific things that you can do for free online to market your business are the places where you can go online to get free information and assistance with marketing. There is a lot of terrific information out there on the web and it's there for the taking so be sure to stay on top of the trends in your industry and the trends in marketing for small businesses to improve your success in this area. One terrific online resources for this kind of free education is the Small Business Association online. This organization has numerous resources including free online classes that you can take advantage of to assist you with all aspects of operating your small business, including the marketing that you need to get your name spread around and your income on the upswing.