Why The World Isn’t Listening – Small Business Branding

Why The World Isn’t Listening – Small Business Branding Written by Ed Roach

How many of your clients believe they are an apple ripe for the picking? They believe in the old adage, “build it and they will come” – literally.

Based on a comment to the post written by Krishne De entitled, Getting Your Website Found Online, I was inspired to write this post. The point of the comments were that there are a great many businesses who believe that having that website or blog is all you should have to do to get an audience.

I'm Not Listening To You!

The actual post told of businesses who want that magic bullet to success. You know – the – what is the tricks and techniques to instant results? What is it, that would lead any of us to believe that this solution exists? In the many years I’ve been in business, nothing comes easily. It takes work and perseverance.

How in the world is anyone supposed to find you if you do nothing to tell anyone that you are there? Googling is not enough, don’t bet the farm on SEO (but don’t ignore it either). You have to get out there. Do your research. You can’t generate an income without some sales effort. There are some great books on promoting yourself on and offline. Read them and FOLLOW THEM. Having your base marketing in place is a great start, but you have to realize that you must consistently and repeatedly push your brand out into the world. Take every opportunity to develop your brand so that it returns a respectable income for you and your company.

I recognize that pop culture has it’s cheer leaders who profess that a six figure income is around the next corner or in your next thought or whim. While some have hit that benchmark, few are admitting how long it took to get there. Their real success is not in the doing but in the teaching. Enough about that.

The point is that you must get your message out there, and it takes sweat to do it. Try different things to get the word out, here are a few:

LOCALLY:
• Join professional clubs
• B2B advertising (print media)
• Speaking engagements
• Networking organizations
• Personal service
• Effective signage (if you have bricks and mortar)
• Marketing materials to distribute through direct mail
• Cold calling
• Trade shows and events
• Multi-media promotion
• Billboards and bus shelters

ONLINE:
• Website with lots of searchable content
• SEO
• Blogging
• Social media
• Banner advertising
• Article selling
• PCP ads
• html marketing
• eMail harvesting
• Digital products for free or sale
• Newsletters

These are just a few initiatives to get your name out there. I do a number of them, and I am always looking to increase my brand awareness. My favorite is writing articles like this one for a few business related blogs. None of my efforts are easy or taken lightly. Everything you can do involves varying degrees of money, effort, and time. Another aid in succeeding is education – yours. Participate in webinars. Online courses are a wealth of information. What I enjoy about them is that the entire program is usually available as podcasts that I burn to CD and listen to in the car. Itunes has plenty of great podcasts that you can download for free.

Success isn’t really eluding you, you’re just not putting yourself in the position of benefiting because you’re watching from the sidelines. Put yourself in the game, there’s no money on the bench.

Read the entire article at Why The World Isn’t Listening – Small Business Branding.

Tags: blog, business, email, free, name, site, small, small business, upload, web, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 11:02 am and is filed under web site build. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.