Online Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Why Online Marketing Matters by L V Kline which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is a guide to promoting your small business online. Apparently small businesses account for 55% of all jobs in America yet 50% fail with in 5 years. Marketing on the internet has levelled the playing field in terms of small companies and large companies competing with each other. In the past you needed a large budget for things like television and radio advertising and direct mail. Nowadays your company only has to be good at what it does. When people are buying something they frequently look to see what their friends on social media sites like Facebook recommend or they look at review sites. Nowadays a Facebook page is as essential as a website. Many people use a CMS program like Wordpress or Drupal to develop their site and with all the plug ins available for these and the fact they are open source it's a sound idea. Many small companies market on craft social media sites like Etsy where the most important factor is your product is unique in some way. A blog is getting to be essential for a small business and it can help feed traffic to the companies main website. Sites like YouTube too are very important and if you get lots of hits for your video it can turn a very small company into a phenomenon in a very short space of time. It most important factor is it should be witty and have that wow factor. There was a company that manufactured food processors and they did a video where they crunched up an iphone in one and sold all their stock in a very short space of time. I did quite enjoy this book which I would recommend.