A post-it note is a great way to advertise your website. You can get printed post-its, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
How about this… Every time you send someone a letter, you put a sticky note on it with your web address. Hand write the note and assuming it’s readible, your site will be promoted even more.
When the economy goes up, your marketing eforts should go up. Why? Two simple words, market share. If your competitors are cutting marketing dollars, that leaves the door open for you to capture market share.
“Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.” ~Warren Buffett
I can hear you now, “but I don’t have any money.” If you have no cash flow, you must not have much business, so that means you have an abundance of your greatest resource… Time. Invest some time using the free resources on this site.
One last note about marketing in a slow economy, make sure you are testing. Just because you need to market, doesn’t mean that you need to keep spending or start spending, a lot of money on marketing that doesn’t work. The simplest way to test is to ask a simple question, “how did you hear about us?”
You can use a simple free online poll to track how well people like your site. I’ve found a company called 4Q. I’ve looked over what they offer and will test it with my new Justin’s Web Design site when I have it completed. You can get more information here.
A couple of weeks ago I came to a rude awakening about password security. I’m ashamed to say that I was using the check boxes in internet explorer to save my usernames and passwords. I assumed Microsoft would encrypt this information and keep it safe.
Well you know what they say about assuming. It turns out that while IE does encrypt the information it only requires a little freeware program to crack the encryption and give all of your information to anyone who gains access to your computer.
I need to manage more than 150 different passwords. Remembering them was not an option (not for this brain). Additionally, I want to use very secure passwords like… u%w6vvuXz&
The solution I found is RoboForm I’m actually using the 2go product which allows you to have all of your passwords on a flash drive. This gives you the additional security of being able to take the passwords away from the computer when you’re not using them. Additionally, now I can keep all of my passwords in my firebox.
Buying a program like this seems expensive, until something happens and you lose two days of work because you’re trying to reset everything. It took me a little bit to get used to the way RoboForm saves everything, but now I love it. It makes it so I can easily go from site to site without remember usernames and passwords.
I would suggest that you choose a good password management system before you have problems, and I believe RoboForm is the best.
Put a poll on your site with three relevant questions that your potential clients are interested in. Invite all of your customers to participate in the poll and then report the results back to them. This will create interest and increase the chances of your clients telling others.
By the way your results could be the subject of a great press release.
You can write articles about your industry and post them to article websites. You include a resource box with your website URL in it. The article websites distribute your article through the web with the agreement that anyone who uses your article has to keep it intact including your resource box.
Here’s a link for a site that has listed a lot of the article directories. If one of the niche directories is a good fit for your business, I would start in that section.
http://www.arcanaweb.com/resources/article-directories.html