You should have your own website. Many small business owners have been slow to embrace this idea because they do not know how to create one themselves and they think it is to expensive to get one of their own. This could not be further from the truth. If you already have a company logo on your business cards you can put that on the internet and create a website. This could be anywhere from 1 to 5 pages for less than $100. eLance.com is full of talented people ready to do that for you. If for no other reason than just building credibility every online and offline based business needs a website.



Forum marketing is a great way to create passive marketing on the internet. Discussion forums are communities of people who have the same interests and share them online in a forum by posting thoughts. Forums are a great place to hang out and read what other people are saying about topics within a niche. You can participate by registering and creating a profile about yourself and you business. Most forums will let you include a link to your website in the form of a signature file. This is really nothing more than a short classified ad about your business. By posting helpful answers to questions in the forum you can send people to your website when they see you sig file and click on your website link. This is an enjoyable form of online marketing and you will make many friends all over the world when you participate.

Search engine optimization is a great long term strategy for helping your business be found out of the billions of websites on the internet. SEO involves many things, but the main thing is to include relevant keywords on your page that a person would be searching for. One of the ways a search engine determines what your website is about is by the words you put on your pages. The more variations of a keyword the more you saying "this is what my website is about." As you build more pages you can expand on this to include hundreds of relative keywords which can create more traffic from the ranking a search engine gives each page.

Social marketing has become a big phrase on the internet. Basically this just means making your website more interactive with your visitors. You can do this several ways. Have a survey form and ask for your visitors to enter their feedback to a question that is relative to the content of your webiste. You could start a blog and ask for comments to the posts you make. To encourage people to comment you could offer a monthly drawing for a free prize for the best comment. Adding audio and video is another way to make your website more interactiive to your visitor.

These are just a few internet marketing tips you could use to improve your business. Try and see your website through the eyes of your target market and create a website that gives them what they want.