How to Market Your Business In an Economic Recession - By: Duncan Wierman

Just because we are in the midst of a recession doesn't mean that you have to cut back on your marketing. You can't afford to do that. As a matter of fact, in the midst of a recession is the time that marketing efforts must be increased, not cut back.

Yet traditionally, the problem is that a recession or economic downturn means you have less business, less revenues, and the very first thing that business owners usually cut when revenues fall is the marketing and advertising budget. Nowadays, however, you can get a tremendous advantage over your traditionally-minded competitors by increasing your recession-time advertising and marketing without breaking the financial back of your business.

You can do this through harnessing the power of the Internet to spearhead your marketing methods. There are so many things that you can do online to market yourself that are either inexpensive or free that even in prosperous times you should be using them to market your business today.

The three things you must have to sell your house fast is

1. EXPOSURE to millions of eyes
2. GREAT AD COPY - Attract people to your offering
3. Creative Finance - People buy payments!

It goes without saying that any business today must have a website. If you don't have a presence on the Internet you are going to be left out in the cold and left behind by your competitors. However, many businesses have a website and little else online. They treat their website as a cursory online brochure. They have one simply because they know they are supposed to--but they really don't take it as seriously as they should. So the first thing you can do to increase your marketing power during a recession is to dramatically improve your website.

In the first place, websites that are kept fresh get higher search engine rankings. Web crawlers want to see fresh content. So if you are constantly keeping your website updated, you will see it come up much closer to the front of search engine results. Most people only check the first one to three pages of results for various key words (which to them are simply the words they selected to try to do a search for something), so the higher up you get the more traffic you will get at your site. What should you do for your website to keep it competitive?

*Constantly write more articles or blog posts for it. Use SEO techniques when you do this. *Keep it updated with more graphics and photographs. *Make your website very dynamic. Use animation, videos, and audio. *Keep your website as easy to navigate as possible. *Enable people to buy from you through your website. Make this process both convenient and secure.

Make your website always fresh, and make it a work of art. This will cause more people to beat a path to your virtual door. But there are other things you can do to drive that traffic to your website.

You can use Twitter, for one thing. Twitter, for those who may not be familiar with it, is a "mini blog site". For every "tweet" that you make at Twitter, you have a maximum of 150 characters to make a statement. The idea is to keep people constantly updated about your business or life or just your personal thoughts. But to use Twitter as a business and marketing tool there are some guidelines you should follow.

*Never make more than five tweets a day. If you exceed that, you run the risk of coming off as a spammer and you give the impression that you must not really be that busy at your business.

*Never do shameless marketing or selling with any tweet. Update people about your business activity or even your personal life, but never try to sell to people on Twitter. You want to use Twitter to build relationships and get people to come to you.

*Never say anything off color or otherwise impolite or inappropriate when you tweet. You never know who you may offend or what negative impression you may unintentionally give.

Another technique to use is Blog marketing. You can write and publish your articles and thoughts for free. Even if you feel that your writing skills or ideas aren't the best, it's possible for you to hire a ghost writer at very affordable rates to write articles in your name. Articles work as fantastic marketing tools because they are unobtrusive. People read them who are interested in your area, your insights, activities, and businesses in your area.

When they read your blog, you come off as a knowledgeable professional who is generous enough to share some free information. People then contact you, rather than you having to cold-call or prospect for them. You don't have to deal with people who aren't really interested in your house deals, which saves you time and money. You don't have to deal with people who will be offended by your business offers because, again, only interested people will be reading your content to begin with. Articles are online 24-seven, so they are working for you even while you sleep.

When you write your articles for your blog, you can make use of social networking tools including Facebook, Digg, and Stumble Upon among others to let your content reach as wide an audience as possible.

Social networking sites online work on the same principle as real-world networking at places like the local YMCA, boating club, rotary club, and wherever else you make acquaintances and introduce them to what you could do for them. But online, your outreach power is vastly multiplied and it's far less time-consuming.

So once again, you need to market your business more than ever during a recession. The Internet makes this possible for you.

About the Author

Duncan Wierman is an Ex Software company CEO turned Real Estate Investor and Marketer. Discover how you can use creative online marketing methods to do more deals online. For more details on how this type of automated internet marketing system works for real estate investors, please visit Duncan Wierman's website and get is free 14 day e-course. http://www.DuncanWierman.com

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