Many small business owners are experiencing severe difficulty in accessing working capital in Ireland today. This is no excuse though for failing to market your business effectively on the internet.
Because there are some fantastic free resources available to help you with your digital marketing activity to promote your business.
Here are 5 resources which should be exploited to the full and won’t cost you a penny:
1. YouTube
A YouTube account is completely free. You can have your own branded YouTube channel within minutes. The only requirement is that you have a Google account, for example a gmail address.
And yes, Google accounts are free also.
YouTube gives you a great opportunity to
1) Entertain/inform your potential target market
2) Rank well in the search engines
3) Obtain good back links to your website
4) Generate traffic to your website.
(Learn more about YouTube marketing)
2. A Website/Blog
Don’t have a website/blog? You can get a free one at any number of sites including WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Posterous.com, Tumblr.com (You can learn more about these resources here)
3. A LinkedIn account
LinkedIn is a fantastic (and free) resource to network and generate new business (depending on your business). There is a premium version as well but you don’t need it. (Learn more about LinkedIn marketing )
4. Trello
This is a resource that you may not be familiar with. It is an online project management platform which is
a) Brilliant
b) Free.
You can check it out here.
5. Google Keyword tool
Millward Brown Lansdowne, Red C Research, Amarach are all professional market research companies in Ireland with great reputations. Presumably their professional fees reflect their expertise in providing their clients with accurate, relevant market research data.
The Google keyword tool provides you with relevant, professional data which is spectacularly helpful to your small business-the exact keywords and phrases that your target market is using to search for stuff.
Filed under Digital Marketing 
If you have not already read and implemented LinkedIn Marketing-LinkedIn Profile creation part 1 I strongly suggest that you do so.
To maximize LinkedIn to it’s fullest it is essential that you create a great profile and let people know about your expertise, how you help people and who you help.
Assuming you have fully completed your profile you then need to
1) Get connected
To do this use LinkedIn’s built in feature of importing your contacts.
You can easily import all your email contacts from your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and other accounts (by importing a spreadsheet of your contacts).
Then you need to systematically go through your list of contacts and see who you would want to connect with on LinkedIn by sending them a personalized message.
You really need to go through your list because you will have many contacts in your email accounts who you may not wish or need to contact with on LinkedIn-strictly social contacts or family for example.
2) Seek recommendations
Social proof in the form of recommendations from clients, work colleagues, employers, companies or individuals who you have done business with in the past is a powerful method of demonstrating your expertise.
The best way to get recommendations is to actually give them first but don’t abuse this-don’t give a recommendation for someone to simply receive one if you cannot truly recommend the other person.
3) Join groups
Join groups in your industry or area of interest of both. Contribute to discussions and offer genuinely good, thoughtful responses and you will be amazed at how many requests you receive to connect with people.
This will increase your area of influence exponentially.
Another real benefit of being in groups is the ability to contact people in your group without needing their email address as you can contact fellow group members through LinkedIn internal messaging.
This is a very valuable aspect of LinkedIn but a word of warning-don’t abuse it or spam group members simply because you can.
Starting your own group and being the leader of a group gives you additional benefits such as being able to send messages to group members once a week and raising your profile as an expert and leader in your area of expertise.
In summary LinkedIn can be an incredibly powerful tool to make great contacts who you may never have the opportunity to hook up with otherwise.
But a word of warning-don’t try spamming your way to online or digital riches as you will soon be recognised as a spammer and any shred of credibility you may have to begin with will soon disappear.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Filed under LinkedIn, Social Media Marketing
