9 Online Marketing Tips for Offline Businesses

There are a lot of offline business owners, that still don’t market online.

One major reason reason why they don’t do it, even if they would like to, is simply that they just don’t know how to get started and how to do it properly.

Unfortunately, most of the information on Internet Marketing around seems to deal with people that do business online.

If you’re an offline business owner and look for some clues to go about online marketing,  here are 9 tips to get you started.

1. Your business should be present online with its own website. There is virtually no business, no industry that couldn’t benefit from being online. Now more than ever, people are relying on the Internet to shop, read, communicate, play, etc. Remember the old days when you had to rely on telephone books and 411 to find about a German restaurant in Washington. Now we simply go online. After we find your listing we look for your website. If you don’t have one and your competition does, guess who gets my money.

2. Determine what kind of message you want to present to your visitors. The 3 most common themes are

• Information based (7 reasons why…)
• Transaction based (buy this stuff…) and
• Advertising based (i have the biggest … ahmm…*-)).

Your presence on the web should be designed with this in mind since content and voice will differ between the three.

3. Include some pictures and photos (of you).  One major reason for having your photo out on your site is simply that people prefer to do business with someone they know. So introduce yourself and give them a face they can get familiar with.

4. Why would your visitors want to return to your site? You have to give them a reason (no, not just more photos …lol). In order to do this, your site must be dynamic in content. You should include articles relating to your website and change them monthly. Or include a calendar of local events. Tell success stories. Keep your visitors informed (even if your site is primarily to sell or advertise). Consider running a blog, as it is one of the easiest ways to “dynamically” update your site’s content.

5. Can people find your business website easily? The sad truth is that the major search engines only find about 15% of the websites online. You need to manually submit your site to the search engines, to be foundir site. Most of the search engines have a link where you can submit your information. There are also some submitting services available that promise to send your info to hundreds of search engines. But ask yourself, where do you to search online? Do you go to hundreds of different sites? Nope. I bet you only have in mind one or perhaps two sites, like most people. So submit to these sites first and perhaps subsequently even submit to other search engines, if you have the feeling that “much helps much”. Besides the search engines, you should submit your site to online directories, especially ones that are close to your industry or field of work.

6. Partner up with other websites in your industry or field of work.  Form reciprocal link partnerships with as many worthwhile websites as possible. You can do this simply by asking permission to place their link (even your competition) on your site and asking them to include your link on theirs.  “Intetgration Marketing” is a hot topic these days in Internet Marketing. Try to go even further than just linking your site, link and integrate your marketing with other businesses.

7. The same goes for local information sites and directories available, sites that show the many opportunities in a particular city or area.

8. Use forums, message boards and email to promote your website. But please – no spam. Build a double-opt in list for email marketing purposes. Collect email addresses of your clients and prospects and send them messages that lead them to your site. In the subject box, be sure to include your name so that they will know it is from you, and you are in compliance with legal requirements like the Can Spam act.

9. Don’t forget the rest of the “brick and mortar” community. The offline world will continue to exist. So include your website and email on all your marketing materials including business cards, brochures, flyers, media advertising, yellow pages, etc. This will help leading prospects to your business website, where you can showcase and pre-sell your products or services to them.

Tags: blog, Business Building Basics, business online, Email Marketing, forum, how to, Internet Marketing, online marketing, own website, presence on the web, Search Engine

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