5 Small Business Marketing Online Tips

November and December are probably two of the most important months for small business owners all over the world. If you're in retail or tourism then you're gearing up for a busy time of year. For most other businesses it's a time to plant the seeds and get ready to harvest them come mid January and February. Those that fail to plant the seeds have very little to harvest in the new year, while those that spend the time now find plenty to harvest.

It's very similar to the 'ant' the ant spends all spring, summer and autumn collecting food and getting ready for the winter. The ant never goes hungry because he was so well prepared during the other times of the year. This is exactly what you need to be right now.

Here are 5 online marketing tips for you to use in your business, to ensure you have qualified leads come the New Year.

1. Use Social Media

I know people keep saying this time after time after time. However still small business owners do not understand the power of this platform and with the development of 'marketplace' which will be similar to an eBay and 'email' that will take over Gmail facebook along will soon provide businesses with a 6 figure income. Did you know that over 20 million people per day join business fan pages. That 41% of fans recommend the products and services that they are associated with or that fans on fan pages spend on average $71 more than non fans.

The unfortunate part is still 98% of the business population do not realise how to use social media correctly. Social media is not just facebook. You have to integrate the big 3 or 4 to work alongside each other. Also you need to have a game plan on what you are doing on social media. Are you there to build relationships, to sell products, to inform people of what is happening or are you there letting people know that you went out for dinner, saw a movie or went for a swim. Social media for the remaining 2% of people that use it correctly earn them on average $24,500 per month. What would happen to your business if you had over 100,000 fans liking what you had to say each day?

2. SEO

Search Engine Optimisation is becoming the key to getting free traffic and allowing you to generate more leads than ever before. The tide is turning from pay per click. Years ago the number 1,2,3 pay per click spot use to get upwards of 90% of the traffic, today the number 1 organic listing get about 80% of the traffic. Business Owners take note 'YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PAY FOR SEO' companies that do SEO work have made a fortune from business owners not understanding what they need to do. So here it is. Search Engines want new content (this is what you use a blog for) they want visitors (this is where you send people to your blog) they want backlinks to your site (this is where other people link back to your site and promote you). A business owner could spend 1 hr per week to achieve all 3 keys elements that search engines want. Yes you need to have your tags, descriptions on your website all right, but your web developer should have done that. SEO is certainly a must however you don't have to pay thousands of dollars per month to achieve it.

3. Pay Per Click

Pay per click advertising has not lost it place, it just is not as powerful as it use to once be. The main three places to use pay per click advertising are facebook, Google and yahoo. Pay per click advertising is where you pay so much every time someone clicks on your ad. The cost varies depending on how popular your keyword is.

4. E-Mail Marketing

You must keep in contact with your community of clients, customers and prospects. Staying front of mind for when they are ready to make that important decision to buy. However doing this the right way is all important. People don't want to hear from you if all you're going to do is sell, sell and sell. You need to add value to their lives and offer something more than what everyone else does. To be able to use email marketing you need a database and the ability to send emails from a content management system.

5. Articles

Articles are a great way to ensure your blog has new content, that you gain more backlinks and that you build your profile and expert status. Using articles as a form of marketing is not perfected by many business owners. They see it as to time consuming as a non important aspect of growing their business. Did you know that 1 article could provide you with over 1,000 backlinks to your website? Do you think its important now? Article writing can be done once and used several times, such as putting the same article on your blog, on your social media, in your email marketing, sent to offline magazines or publishers. Article writing is one of the quickest ways to build your profile and get seen by other people.

So now is the time to start sowing the seed to generate more leads come the New Year.