Pro-Actively Market Your Small Business Online and On a Budget

Internet marketing can be mysterious if you don’t know what you are doing. Should you buy advertising? Should you utilize social networking sites? What role can your website play in your marketing program? In the end, we should try to think about internet marketing in the same way as we do any other form of marketing.

Marketing is really the art of generating interest in your product or service. Internet marketing is all about generating interest in your product or service. Note the similarity? So why is there all this mystery? The mystery for many people comes from the sheer scale of the internet combined with the vast array tools available to the marketer. These factors can make it difficult to determine where you should start and which tools are best for your business, assuming you don’t have tens of thousands of dollars to pay an expert to help you figure it out.

First of all, as with any good marketing program, the internet marketer should identify a specific objective that they are trying to realize with their campaign. For most business, that always seems to be “generating traffic” for their website. That reason is terrible by itself because it assumes that all traffic will naturally and magically turn into real sales. This is incorrect. Although generating website traffic may create interest in your product and can be the first step in generating a lead, the real challenge is converting simple traffic into actual sales.

One simple way to generate traffic and convert some percentage of that traffic to sales is to create a “White Paper Campaign,” or better yet, a series of campaigns. So what is a white paper campaign? A white paper campaign is a simple yet highly targeted marketing campaign built around a single piece of unique and original content. The components of this campaign include:

Creating a White Paper or Special Report

The biggest challenge in creating this piece of original content is doing it in a neutral way. In other words, generate this material without selling your business. White papers need to teach or inform the reader in order to be considered valuable. Creating this content is all about ensuring that your business is perceived as a thought leader. So resist the urge to sell. Make sure you actually provide something valuable in this document. Stating the obvious will not earn you any points.

Building a Place for People to Access Your Content

Once your white paper has been created, you could just post it on your website and hope people read it; but that will not generally amount to much. An easy and inexpensive thing to do is build a special landing page for the white paper. Here you can post the white paper and any other interesting materials including past articles and even fact sheets about your business. Just be sure to allow readers to download the white paper without having to provide you with their personal information. Part of this exercise is convincing people that you know what you are talking about, so you have to give away a little knowledge. Trust me, if they are interested they will contact you. If not, then you don’t have to waste your time following up with them.

Publicize Your Original Content

Once your white paper has been posted on your landing page, you need to let people know that it is there. The best way to do that is with a quick press release. Without getting into how to write a press release, you can get your information out to a broader audience by submitting it through BusinessWire, Enhanced Online News or PR Web. For a modest fee (usually $80 to about $360), these companies will distribute your press release through various channels, including mainstream media outlets. Put a link to your landing page directly in this document. That will help you sell your white paper and get more downloads. This in turn will generate traffic for your site. These services all offer ways to track how much traffic comes to your website and how many people downloaded your white paper so you can gauge the success of your campaign. With this information you can make adjustments for the next campaign to increase success rates.

Make an Offer

This is really where the rubber meets the road. As mentioned earlier, traffic is nice but does not make any money. What you need are people who become interested in your services because of the expertise outlined in your white paper. It can be very helpful to make an offer on your landing page. This can be a free subscription to a newsletter, a free assessment (if you are a consultant) or a discounted subscription to your product. It doesn’t matter. The point is that the offer will incent an interested party to take the next step and give you or your product a try. Once they sign up, they become warm leads for your business.

Obviously, a complete internet marketing campaign should also include Google ads, blogging, a well managed presence on certain key social networking sites, relevant community participation, etc. But this is an easy and inexpensive way to start your internet campaign. It is also very satisfying as you can control the entire process yourself.