Here we look at some of the popular ways in which small businesses go about their online marketing pursuits. But before that, one word about what small business online marketing is about. Online marketing here refers to making websites popular on the webpages so that more people might be able to visit the website. In the online world, business prospects are directly proportional to visibility. Hence, this is what small businesses try to achieve – they try to enhance their visibility in the search engine result pages so that they get a higher amount of traffic. Now, the methods:-

Article marketing has been popular for small business online marketing since ever. The basic concept here is to write informative articles and submit them on popular article directories. The articles are made rich in keywords. This keyword optimization improves the chances of the article being crawled by the search engines. That can bring a lot of people to visit the pages on which the articles are submitted. Below the article, a bio box is mentioned where there is a link of the business website. People who have visited the article will likely read it, be impressed with it and thus visit the website. This is the intention of the article marketing effort.

Blogging is another method that is very commonly used in small business online marketing. Blogging helps because there are regular posts made here, which keeps the blogs ranked by the search engines. Also, blog posts usually contain the links of the business website. Blogs are considered to be a very contemporary and effective method of online marketing because of their interactive nature. People can submit their comments; other bloggers can visit and there could be a whole community built with a single blog.

Today, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, hi5, MySpace and others are being used in a large way in small business online marketing. These places allow people to build their communities, which are searchable within the website. Most of these social networking websites allow people to promote their businesses. They can mention links in their profiles. They can also directly search and invite other members to their communities and even send them personal information such as emails. In addition, they can submit to feeds so that their community knows about the updates they make. All these things make social networking a very effective method for online promotion of small businesses.

Both of these are old methods and are well on their way out, but they are still being significantly used by small business operators. The idea is to get as many leads (email ids) of people as possible. They usually do this by giving away something for free, such as an eBook, and ask people to give their email ids so that they can be updated about any more free offerings. Once they get a list of leads, they know that these people are interested in the products. They then pursue them with emails, newsletters and such and try to convince them into buying the product.

Most small business owners use a mixture of different marketing methods and some of them use all the methods. Since these methods are mutually exclusive, they can all be used in combination to create an effective strategy to popularize online businesses.