Small Business Strategy – Where to Make Connections with Potential Customers

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Just putting a website up doesn’t work anymore. I don’t think it really ever did. Success on the web has always been about generating traffic for your business. You can pay for traffic using Google Adwords or other advertising channels, or your go out with a grassroots mentality and find your customers.

I’ve been on boths sides of the fence when it comes to generating traffic for your website. Most small businesses will want to GET CUSTOMERS NOW. The idea of going out to social networks and slowly building relationships doesn’t sound like a good idea. For the most part I agree. You should get business as soon as possible and therefore should set up tried and true advertising and marketing plans when you launch your website.

Remember, your website is not marketing. Your website is not the end all, it is the beginning of your new venture onto the internet. Just like opening a brick and morter store, nobody will find you without advertsing. One word of advise, make sure you are ready to dish out cash for ads. Make sure you have a system set in place that can monitor the traffic you get from your advertsing. You have to measure your return on investment.

Enough about paid ads, you should also go out and build authority on the web by joining communities that are built around your products or services. Of course facebook and twitter are find, but you really need to go out and prove that your are reliable, experienced and personable. Very hard to do that on Twitter, IMO.

Here are a few ways to build authority for your business

1. Your Business Blog – nuff said, I know you have heard this a thousand times. No matter what type of product or service you sell you can write about it. Actually the more obscure your product is,  the easier it is to blog and get noticed. Of course the consumer following will be smaller for niche products but the following might be a lot stronger.
2. Question and Answer forums – Linkedin and Yahoo answers are great places to start. I prefer Linkedin because you can match up your answers with your Linkedin Profile. I find Yahoo not as easy to match up your yahoo profile. Set up an RSS feed of new questions that you want to answer. When you check your blog reader you will will see the answers as soon as they are posted. Remember your goal is to help people, not promote your services. If you service helps, then they will see it, but don’t push it on other members.
3. Community forums – Forums have been around a lot longer then most social networks that we talk about today. You have to do a search to find the community that fits your business. There are not as many questions for you to answer on a community forum, but you can just hang out and make relationships. You will be able to answer a question every now and then too.
4. Other blogs in your niche – Be a guest blogger. Go find other blogs that are related to yours and ask the webmaster if you can be a guest blogger. They will probably as you to write the post and send it to them so they can review it. Do not try to sell your product or service. but do provide at least on link back to your blog with related information.