Feb 3, 2011

Four Internet Trends Your Small Business Should Utilize

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[/caption] Allocating the right budget and effectively managing your spending on web marketing efforts can go a long way toward helping you maximize your return on investment, particularly if your business invests in emerging technologies and trends. That requires a bit of smart timing on your part, because you’ll want to take advantage of trends on which consumers are focusing their attention. You may want to consider researching and putting your marketing dollars in the following four areas: Email Marketing Who said email was dead? The fact is, email marketing is still a justifiable investment, especially given how relatively low the investment is. Email marketing remains highly predictable and can possibly become even more powerful as more email services integrate new features, such as social media tools. Content Nesting With millions of websites out there, all of them competing for your attention, it can be challenging to get the web visibility your business needs. That is where content nesting can help. Instead of trying to drive all of your traffic to your primary website, take your content to where your potential customers are, whether it’s YouTube or a number of popular content-aggregation sites. Nesting your content in other popular sites allows you to hitch on to their notoriety and take advantage of the added visibility. If your marketing budget is small, nesting might be an effective, low-cost way to get the word out about your business. Online Video In the grand scheme of things, online video is inexpensive to produce and easy to share. And compared with a written article, it can also be more engaging, depending on the topic. It used to be that advertising and investing in video was limited only to television. Now we have sites like YouTube and Vimeo that make video broadcasting as easy as uploading a file from your computer. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) SEO and paid search are wise investments that can allow small businesses to gain notoriety over the internet. Web traffic is the lifeblood of any website; therefore, it’s important to get as much traffic as you can. Search engines can help you do that. The key, however, is to rank high on searches. If you show up on page 20 when people google the type of service you offer, you will receive minimal traffic on your site. Learning SEO will take some time on your part, but it will be worth the investment. You may also need to seek out the service of an SEO expert.