A successful website is only as good as its marketing. Most would be website business owners seem to slight marketing thinking that just half way efforts in marketing will be ok or falling for the field of dreams myth “if you build it they will come”. They will spend several thousand dollars on a nice website and no money on marketing. If we look at traditional brick and mortar business I think we can compare.

Most successful brick and mortar businesses do everything they can to market their business from ads to television; they usually have nice store fronts and signage. Retail stores look for good location so they will gain a steady flow of customers that frequent their establishment. Have you ever seen a Wal-Mart or a Taco Bell that was built in a pasture field forty miles from nowhere? Me either.

How do we know businesses like this exist? Even if you have never been inside a Wal-Mart or Taco Bell you know what it is because of ads, television and radio plus you have probably driven by them. They have exposure and it’s very hard to not notice them. Even small successful business owners will market their business.

Shifting back to the online world and your website we often see the website as the business built in the pasture field forty miles from nowhere. It has no signage and a lot of times the lights are off and it appears abandoned. There has been no form of advertising and marketing is pathetic.

There are basic forms of marketing that anyone can do for an online business that will get you started but unless you are a marketing guru or you plan on taking time to learn how to market your business it’s probably best to be left in the hands of a professional. Marketing does not have to be ridiculously expensive it needs to be done right and done to the right audience.

Who is your target market? How can you appeal to them? How will you get their attention? You need the right product to satisfy the needs of your customers. Your product needs to be offered at the right price. You need to have the right product at the right price in the right place to be purchased by your customers. You need to inform potential customers of the availability of this product, its price and its place.

In its most basic form you can start marketing your business through social media, article writing and blogging. Don’t become a spam freak but instead write articles to inform and educate. Start groups on social networks that will allow you to educate and network. Try to keep in mind that you want to help your potential customers and in turn they will help you. If you are an authority to them that will build trust which in turn will lead to more customers and sales for you.

One other very important thing is to be yourself, you are your business so don’t be afraid to open up and let people get to know you. You will build closer more personal relationships with your customers.

Local brick and mortar business can benefit from social media marketing by becoming more personal. You can harness the power of Twitter and social media for your offline business. Business marketing is taking a huge shift and moving to social media because of high costs involved with traditional marketing such as television, news paper and magazine ads.

There are many ways that you can market your business via the internet and social media that can cut your adverting cost by more than half plus you will build personal relationships with your customers.

Step out from behind your company and let people relate to you first and then your company brand because you are your company, right? This is personal branding and it makes your customers feel special and it builds loyalty. You like to feel special don’t you? You like to have an owner of a business call you by name when you come to their establishment don’t you?

If you think about it years ago this is how business was done, you went to a local establishment and the owner knew your name, this is the way business is supposed to be.

Your brick and mortar business can build a personal community with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media channels and it can be live and on demand. You can gain loyal customers in real time just be befriending them and making them feel important.

Twitter will let you communicate with your target audience in real time and so will Facebook; you can gain a mass following of targeted people if you set things up the proper way.

I was shocked to do a local search on Twitter for businesses in my local Tri-Cities, Bristol TN/VA, Kingsport and Johnson City area and not see hardly anyone there.

The folks from WJHL news are taking advantage of Twitter and I think this is great but why are there not more business not tapping into this advertising gold mine?

Are you taking advantage of Twitter and social media for your brick and mortar business?

A friend asked me about “work from home” jobs on the internet and inspired me to write this article. I am one of those people that started out online many years ago all excited about this new vehicle called the internet. I remember back in 1997 shortly after purchasing a computer, I was surfing around (trying) and it’s like a light came on. I remember thinking there had to be some way for me to make (earn) money online and work from home. Mind you, I had no idea what I was doing and I knew almost nothing about computers as a matter of fact I broke my computer 3 times in 2 months and had to take it back to the shop to have it repaired.

My passion has been graphic design and art work ever since I was a child, I loved to sketch and paint, etc. I had worked for several advertising companies locally and even opened my own brick and mortar business several years before doing some custom air brush work on cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc. but that business went nowhere.

The light came on and I thought maybe if I could create websites that would allow me to work from home and at least provide some type of income that would be in place of my day job. The problem I faced was I knew nothing about designing websites, I could hardly even turn my computer on.

I felt so strong about this that for over a year I read everything I could about website design, I spent many late nights doing this and lots of trial and error but I started coming to me. Back when I started learning website design they didn’t even offer it as a college class and no schools were teaching it so I had no choice but to learn it myself.

During this time I contacted another website design company and was their “broker” I would get the job, pay them a wholesale fee for doing it then I would mark it up and make a little profit when I sold it to my client. This also allowed me to build a portfolio and meet new clients.

We ate a lot of mac-n-cheese and those raman noodles (I hate those things now, both of them) but times were lean and it kept us from starving. Things got better and I was able to apply the things I learned about website design to something that would generate income.

Now it’s over 8 years later and here we are, even with the economy bad I really have to be thankful that I was able to do what I did. I’m glad I found my passion and followed it. I really feel that even more so right now it’s time people need to find their passion and grab hold of it and don’t let go. Not only will this make you focus on something else other than how bad the economy is but you might just surprise yourself and be able to start a new business online. Trust me, you can start an online business on a shoe string budget, you have to take each small step and keep stepping. Plan, think smart and most of all follow your passion.

If you love to do something people can tell and not only that you will be considered an “expert” in that field by a lot of people.

Have you found your passion?

I think one of the biggest things I have run into while working online is people not seeing value. Since the economy started getting crazy it seems more and more people are just looking for the cheapest thing they can get by with. Now I’m not saying that we should all not be frugal with our hard earned money but come on people, have we forgotten about quality?

It’s not only in our line of business but in countless others and maybe we all tend to do it but I have tried to pay more attention to the value of something rather than if it’s the lowest priced. You know the old saying, “you get what you pay for” holds even more true now days.

The funny thing is that cheap usually ends up costing you more because of the lower quality, you have to spend more money to add more features, you have to spend money to fix it because it didn’t last or you find out it’s not even close to what you needed so you have to scrap it and start all over.

Outsourcing website design is one of the best examples of this… you hire an offshore designer to do your website and pay them 1/3 the cost that you would pay a professional here in the USA. They are cheaper by the hour but they take three times longer to do your site, you have a communication nightmare or you simply end up with something that was not what you wanted. Was going cheap really worth it?

We should all compare apples to apples and look at quality and value rather than who is the cheapest.

I was just thinking this morning about the economy and about how it’s affecting online business. I’ve heard mixed comments from clients and other business people; some say their business is good, some say it’s bad.

Here’s my take on it…

I saw a comparison on recessions and job loss yesterday on Time’s Blog (you can see it here) and my thoughts were kind of mixed. There are a lot of people out of work now and it affects all of us. In a sense a lot of online business people are unemployed very frequently.

Being in any type of sales I have always heard that you are unemployed every time you make a sale till you get your next one and this can hold true for online business as well. Would we not all be better off if we concentrate on creating residual income or even passive residual income so that even in crazy times we have a cushion?

I think back to a story I heard as a child, I think it was about an ant and a grasshopper, the ant was busy working and putting food away for the winter while the grasshopper was sitting around being lazy with no regard to the approaching winter. It came winter time and the ant had plenty to eat but the grasshopper was starving because he had put nothing away and now there was no food to be found because it was covered in snow and ice.

I’m looking at these economic times as summer rather than winter, now is the time even though it’s lean to plan and “put back” so that later we will have something and not starve financially.

Even doing smaller things for your online now can really help not only now but later down the road. Think about marketing, social media, blogging and just doing things to “tidy up”.

If business is slow for you then you should at least have time to evaluate what you have and even write some good articles for your blog, it will pay off for you later if not sooner.

Think about ways you can create residual income, what are you good at? What are you passionate about? You may have to think outside the box but that’s ok, it’s time we all get a little more creative, isn’t it?