The Ins and Outs of Finding New Customers Online for Beginners

For small businesses, finding new customers online is one of the best ways to let your business grow. Instantly you can reach people all over the world looking for exactly what you're selling. However, it is easy to do it the wrong way, which causes lots of headache and hard work for little success. There are many ways to reach your target audience, including:

• A blog or website
• Newsletters
• Social Media

Writing a blog can seem intimidating at first, especially if writing is not your forte. But when it's something you are very passionate about, it is easy to come up with ideas for blog posts. For instance, if you have an online store for vintage dresses, you could write an article about what jackets and shoes work best with different style dresses, and different occasions your customers can wear your dresses at. Invite people to respond and interact with your blog. Give surveys about what styles they like, or where they wear their favorite dresses to. Ask them to leave their vintage dress stories in the comments (whatever it may be). Interacting with people makes you more memorable and makes them more likely to buy from you later on.

Social media is a great way to reach out to new people. Provide an incentive for your customers to share or like your posts, like a drawing for a five dollar gift card for your business, or a small product from your shop. Not only will fans of your business get messages from you in their feed, but their friends will see it when they look at their profiles, and they'll know to look out for your business when coming up with gift ideas.

Newsletters are one of the most effective ways to get new customers if done right. What better way to market than get emails right in their inbox every week? Sites like SurveyMonkey will let you create your newsletter for free and you can ask people to sign up for your newsletter on your blog or website. Incentives for signing up are a great way to get people to sign up. But when making a newsletter, make sure:

• you don't constantly spam them with the message "buy my stuff"
• you send them out on a reasonable basis. Daily emails are not best for all businesses, but you don't want to have them so infrequent that they forgot they signed up in the first place.
• content is consistent with your brand and well done. No typos or obvious grammatical errors allowed, and slap-stick humor in your newsletters for your handmade caskets is probably not the best idea.