I visit alot of forums and one thing that remains constant is the amount of business owners that talk about marketing and what is working and what is not working.

The one thing you always read is “what can I do that is guaranteed to work”….I always read that and for some crazy reason I will read the next few replies actually thinking to myself  “I’m going to find out the REAL answer” . Well as you can guess, I never do find out. The reason for this is there is NO real answer when it comes to marketing. Every business owner must decide for themselves how much they can afford, what their area supports for advertising and basically what does and what does not work in their area.

I’ve known some businesses that can put out a few road signs and they get business daily. I know other busiensses that can spend 5K a month on advertising and just barely break even.

I think what is important is that you have to continually advertise. You can’t just advertise “when you want” and have it work. Advertising has to be done each and every day of your existence to some extent in order to have it be productive. There are literally thousands of ways a business can advertertise and nobody is going to try each and everyone of them, but you have to have a starting point.

Check around in your area and see what others are doing for advertising. Look and see if others are doing pretty much the same sort of advertising each and every month. If you can track what others are doing you at least have a starting point of what actually “might work”. But, until you actually start doing it yourself you will never know.

To compile a list of possible advertising I don’t think is needed there are entirely too many locations on the net that you can find those types of list. To me keep it simple and do the things that you can easily do with little or no upfront cost.

1. Work on your website not only for content but for meta tags, descriptions, image tags, cross linking, blogs, etc.
2. Utilize social media such as facebook, linkedin, myspace, etc.
3. Utilize SMS marketing (yes new advertising means, but who do you know that does not carry a phone with them)
3. Look for community forums in your area to joing and give feedback to others (who knows you might become the expert)
4. Volunteer to give classes at community centers or other locations that they will advertisie for you

Marketing your business should be a daily ritual and one if done properly will pay off in the long run

Dan
CmoNova.com
Acrbo.com