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Viewing Four Free Resources for Small Business AdvertisingFour Free Resources for Small Business Advertising
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Most small businesses do not keep track of acquisition statistics, so they are unsure of how much it costs to acquire each new customer. One of the ways to help reduce these costs is to use free advertising resources to increase your customer base. By Brian May One of the most difficult aspects of operating a small business is attempting to decrease your customer acquisition costs to improve profits. In many cases, high acquisition costs are what prevent the business from being profitable at all. Most small businesses do not keep track of acquisition statistics, so they are unsure of how much it costs for them to acquire each new customer. Without knowing this statistic, it is impossible to measure the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing. One of the ways to help reduce acquisition costs is to use free advertising resources to increase your customer base. With these resources, the primary cost is time, which for advertising is a relatively low price. Here are a few resources that small businesses should be taking advantage of to grow their customer base. This will definitely give you a competitive edge over your competition: Craigslist - Craigslist.com is an online classified website where it is free to post listings. Craigslist is one of the top 10 visited websites in the United States, and can drive a tremendous amount of traffic to your business. Their website has a services section where local businesses can list the products and services that they offer for potential customers. Craigslist is organized by local geographies, therefore you have the potential to drive local customers to your business. Total time to post an ad is probably about five minutes, and will be less once you get the hang of it. Google Base - Base.google.com is a free online classified site that benefits from the large amounts of traffic generated by Google.com. A simple listing on Google Base can help to drive traffic to your website, and although Google claims that it does not make a difference, it is a good bet that the more activity you have on the web properties, the better you will rank in their primary search engine. Press Releases - The days of needing to be a professional writer to submit a press release are long gone. Now, anyone with knowledge of a product or service should submit press releases to media outlets. You can do this easily with free resources. A couple of the sites that I recommend are prleap.com and prfree.com, but there are many others. These services submit your articles to the Associated Press, which in many cases will be a distribution of 40,000 subscribers. If only a fraction of the subscribers pick up your article, you benefit. It establishes you as an authority on the subject matter, and it generates links back to your website, which will increase your search engine rankings. Merchant Circle - Merchantcircle.com is an online business directory that is focused on offering small business websites to promote their businesses. The main benefit of their service is that their pages rank highly in the search engines, and therefore increase the ranking of your website in your local geographic area. To set up your page only takes about ten minutes. These are just a few examples of free resources that your business should be using. Think out of the box and do a little research to find other free resources that will benefit your business. Even with only one new customer, this form of advertising pays for itself. About the Author: Brian May is owner and operator of http://www.SmallBusinessLocal.com, which focuses on helping small businesses attract more local customers using the Internet. Article source: 111 Travel Directory: Triple1.com (triple one dot com) More free articles: 1st Rate Articles - 1stRateArticles.com |
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