So now your business is up and running on the internet, you have gone live, there are no bugs and you are ready for the money to start rolling in so you can pay off those loans, investments and so forth. You are now faced with selling yourself so that people know about your services. I have been asked this question a lot and so I decided to cover it on here. I had given a speech at a small gathering of hopeful entrepreneurs about 2 months ago and atleast 6 people came up to me at different times after the events and asked the same question. “I have developed and designed my website, everything is in place and ready to go, I just have one little problem…how do I get people to know about it?”
First of all I must clarify something before I proceed. For new entrepreneurs, this is very important so listen up, getting people to know about your business is NOT a little problem. It infact is the most difficult and important part of your startup as far as I know. It is difficult in the sense that it requires hours upon hours of research and work to promote your services. It sometimes will require you spending money and it could get very frustrating when you see your efforts not being fruitful (this is typically the case at the beginning for most startups). It is also the most important part of your startup because you must carefully seek and find your customer base and these are the people you want to market to. Marketing to people who don’t care about or need what you are offering will just be a waste of time and effort. As a new entrepreneur you have tones of stuff you need to spend your time, money and effort on anyway, and wasting that on anything that will be futile and can shatter you.
From the experience I have gathered over the few years I have been involved in startups, I have seen a few strategies that have worked, some for me and others for friends/colleagues of mine…here we go.
Close your eyes, then read the name to yourself: Imagine you were a customer or just another web surfer and you came across the name of your company, can you tell the purpose of the company or not? This is an important aspect of starting a company. The first time I tried my hands on building a social network, I experienced the pain of not having a name that related to my business. I had come across cool sites like xoom, joost, twitter e.t.c. and thought those names were notoriously catchy so I indulged. I realized that I hadn’t got the money or track record like these startups to market my company and so all I could do was SEO and use other free marketing mechanisms. I learned that it is very helpful to have keywords you want to optimize for your website placed in the title and name because the search robots like this. Optimization was really slow for me because of this, coupled with my lack of experience with startups at the time. This doesn’t just apply to online businesses either. If I was walking down a road looking for a store I could buy some ‘sick’ sneakers and on my left I see a store called “besnizzled” and on my right I see “house of sneakers”, I will obviously go into the store on my right even though I have never heard of either store before. The fact that their product is in their business name catches my attention …regardless of if “besnizzled” had the best sneakers in the world. In a nut shell, it’s easier if your business name tells people what you do right off the bat.
Is your online presence strong enough?: You must put your business in a position where people feel comfortable patronizing or even window shop with you. The first thing is to make sure your website is not garbage. Your website doesn’t have to be the best designed or most expensive one in the industry but it has to be appealing, it has to be attractive enough to make people want to stay, tell others about it and come back themselves. Make your users able to subscribe to your emails and services, try giving gifts that will be attractive to your customers/fan base e.t.c.
It is also important that you build a community on the web. Exchange links and banners with more patronized websites in your niche. I know most times you will get turned down by a lot of these people but keep trying and ask a lot of sites. I remember I asked collegehumor when I started my college forum site and ofcourse they said no. So don’t take those things personally, just keep asking and you will find atleast one or two. They might not be terribly popular sites, but atleast they have a better google rank and position than you. The more you link, the more attractive your website is to search engine crawlers.
Spread the word: Perhaps the most powerful tool for marketing. I find that a lot of people neglect this tool, advancement in technology has made everyone want to type rather than speak. Most young entrepreneurs will rather spend money of google adwords, affiliate marketing and so forth than actually telling people about what they do in person. I am not saying adwords or affiliate marketing don’t work because they do and they do quite well actually. I am just saying in my position when I started out I didn’t have the money for that so I don’t believe it is the only/best way to go about it. Go around, tell your friends and family about it, and let them tell their friends and so on.
Make flyers, business cards, banners and place them strategic locations where your customer base visit. I once went to a club and I swear I snuck behind the bar and placed a banner with my funny tee-shirt designs right next to the Budweiser banner. It was there all night! All I am saying is, you don’t have to get as crazy as I was but make yourself popular in places where your prospective customer base always patronize.
Be prominent on Social Media sites: If you have a twitter, facebook, stumbleupon, linkedIn, digg account, you are on your way. These are some of the most powerful marketing tools in their own right. Make a lot of friends on these sites, use the power of status of facebook, twit your website name to your followers, share your website and business with all your friends on stumbleupon/digg and have them share with their other friends. Trust me this works tremendously, if done right.
Here is what’s important though, I have learned that it is never helpful if all you do on these social media is submitting your own site. Feel free to always share them with your friends but when you start submitting your site all the time, you start depleting in value, people see you as a parasite, using them for your own benefit. Instead, submit other people’s site in your niche. If your business/site is about photography, submit and stumble or digg other webpages and businesses in this category. Subscribe to them, review them and usually they will return the favor. When they see that you reviewed and submitted their stuff, they are grateful and usually will show their gratitude by doing the same for you. Don’t get too desperate or in a rush to see traffic, it takes time and submitting yourself to achieve this never ever works!
Use Blogs and forums: You do not have to create your own blog or forums even though the former is usually advisable. However bookmark blogs and forums in your niche, visit them regularly and make reviews, comment and make friends there. In time they will get comfortable with you and patronize you. If you are leaving a comment on a forum, you can have your webpage as your signature…it will be seen by everyone anytime you leave a comment. This process is not an immediate source of customers, it takes time. But don’t give up…if you are so quick to give up, then you must re-evaluate whether you are really able to be an entrepreneur.
Track your traffic/customer source: Find out which marketing outlet is bringing you not the most but the ‘real’ customers. Customers that actually hang around and come back regularly. These are the ones you need to focus on anyways, not those who visit for 5secounds and disappear, or those who shoot your bounce rate to the moon. If you are an online business, utilize the google analytics package…it is amazingly useful. If you are an offline business, you can utilize a feedback form. Ask your customers how they like your services and somewhere before your “thank you for patronizing us”, sneak in the “how did you hear about us?” line. Always works.
