Wright to Holics

With the unemployment rates going up, market ratings going down, and an overall gloomy outlook for the next few months, every business needs to cut costs. We all need to ride out this economic storm and wait for those clearer skies beyond. Hence, the norm usually these days is that you need to fit a small budget for a big objective. Advertising for example is one of the key investments that may suffer some budget cuts but still has some big shoes to fill. So you need to know how to advertise your business even on a small budget. Do not worry; there are ways to do it. One of the ways to do this is by direct marketing, investing in print media like flier or brochure printing. Another way is by establishing good relationships with investors and clients by reasserting your competent image. This can be achieved by printing color business cards and company portfolios. To help you with these simple and cost effective advertising strategies, we have compiled these simple steps on how to advertise your business on a small budget.

1. The first thing you need to do is to once again relearn what your target market is all about. You may already have some of the initial research on your market a few months or years back. However, with the change of the economic climate, these studies may not be as accurate. So check again on the prevailing attitudes and trends of your market. You may discover that most people prioritize affordable products and services instead of luxury things today. Also, you may find out that most people do not travel too much these days, preferring to stay at home or just go to the closest commercial establishment for their needs. Note the new kinds of details such as these. This can prove valuable as you adjust your advertising strategies to these trends.

2. Now, armed with that information we go to the easiest and fastest way to advertise, and that is through your logo. In most cases you should have a logo already designed for your business. Also, in most cases, people already recognize it to the point that they almost ignore it by default. To revitalize your advertising through your logo, the simplest and most cost effective way is to change the logo design and make it fresher. Try to integrate what you have learned on the first step. See if you can project an image of “affordability” and stability as you redesign your logo. If done correctly, people should respond to this new image and approach your business more often.

3. Afterwards, you can improve your stature with the local market by investing in flier or brochure printing. As we have learned again on step one, people may not travel as far today. So you can focus on your local market as the base for your customers. Advertising for local markets usually involves some “hands on” promotions. Giving out fliers and color brochures are the easiest and cheapest ways to do this. They are not as expensive as radio and television advertising, and they have the ability for directly impacting your customers since the promotional materials are given right unto their hands. Of course, since the distribution is purely “hands on” you can target specific neighborhoods and demographics by distributing your print brochures in a few key locations.

4. Once you have your local market interested, it is time to re-establish some old business contacts, and try to open up new investment opportunities. You can do this easily by investing in yourself and your image. Have some new color business cards printed and then give them away again to old and new business contacts. Meet these people and establish a new and mutually beneficial business relationship. You might meet new investors, more affordable suppliers and potential customers just because you look new with your freshly printed color business cards.

5. Lastly, you can tap the Internet as a prime advertising tool. This is the cheapest and easiest to do in a slow economic environment. Since Internet marketing involves using just a computer, an Internet connection and a healthy imagination you do not need much capital to implement it. You can use electronic newsletters, banner advertisements, e-postcards, forum marketing, social networking and other Internet marketing techniques to reach people in this new and dynamic medium. It is easy to do, and the potential reach of advertising in this mode is worldwide.

Those are just a few easy steps, but it should let you adapt quickly to this new economic environment. You can still maximize your advertising potential while keeping within the boundaries of your small budget. With imagination and determination, you should be able to encourage your potential customers to do business once again.

Advertising your web hosting site

Any new web host will realise that there is a lot of competition in the web hosting industry and it can be hard to establish yourself in the market. I think to succeed as a host you must offer a quality, reliable low cost service to your clients.

No matter how good your service is, if people do not know about your hosting business you will find it hard to break even each month. Every successful hosting company has a well thought through advertising plan. There are many types of advertising available for a host to use to generate new sales.

Search Engine Advertising

Many internet users have used a search engine before to find information, a product or service and for a web site search engines can generate a lot of revenue. As a hosting company it is no different, many new clients can come from search engines.

To take advantage of search engines a host must receive top ranking for popular search terms such as hosting, web hosting, shared hosting and reseller hosting. However this can be a very difficult task, as these keywords have a huge amount of competition for the top ranks.

There are two main types of search engine listings, all search engines offer listings where the rankings are decided on a number of factors such as backward links, web site content, inbound links etc,

Some of the search engines offer paid listings, where the rank of a web site listing is based on the amount paid by the advertiser either for a set time limit or every time a user clicks on the advertiser’s ad.

Web Hosting Directory Advertising

Like search engines, advertising in a web hosting directory can bring a lot of revenue for your hosting business and the cost can be fairly low. If your company offers a quality service you should have no problem being added to all the top directories, I would like to say that different directories have their own rules for submissions, and some do have continual operating requirements.

On the whole many hosting directories allow free submissions for your hosting site which can directly bring in traffic to your site, and can also in-directly improve your search engine rankings which will in turn bring more traffic to your site.

Along with free submissions, many hosting directories also offer paid submissions, and/or paid advertising on the web site.

Cost-per-click Advertising

This type of advertising involves placing either a text based or image based advert, and the advertisers’ states an amount they are willing to pay for every click their ad receives.

The best places for a web host to use this type of advertising is on web hosting related web site, such as web design, programming or a hosting form site such as Web Hosting Complete.

CPC advertising can be very cost effective, normally only users will click on an advert they are interested in.

Web Hosting Forum Advertising

A web host can usually advertise directly and in-directly on hosting forum web sites, an example is Web Hosting Complete (http://www. whcomplete. com). WHC offer different advertising programs, such as text link and banner based advertising, which can be very effective for hosts.

Advertising on a hosting related site should lower your advertising costs but still generate revenue. Along with the direct advertising, there are subtle ways to generate free traffic from a web hosting forum.

Many of these forum sites do not allow links to external sites to be placed in posts, however normally you can place a link to your web site in your signature. By posting on a forum site, you can place a huge number of free links to your web site in your posts. This can generate a lot of free traffic, and because it is from a hosting related site, it can be highly targeted as well. However this can take a lot of time, because you cannot just post nonsense, your posts must be relevant to the discussions of other members.

Conclusion

In conclusion there are a number of advertising methods a web host can use to generate targeted traffic, some are free but take time and other methods can take money.

I would recommend creating an advertising plan before you start putting money into any form of advertising, the plan should set out how much per month you can spend, and where the money is best spent.