I once described having a fabulous website but no marketing or SEO as being like building a luxury shop in the middle of a field where no one knows where it is.

With no roads leading to it, or signposts, it will never get any visitors, and that’s what online marketing and SEO do. They put signposts (when done correctly) in the places where people looking for your products or services are. The more signposts there are and the bigger they are then the more visitors that will find their way to you.

If you’ve gone to all the trouble of creating great products or services; spent all that time and effort on creating your business, but then when you open the doors, no one comes in, or calls, it’s not going to take too long before you’ll start to wonder what it is that you missed out.

What Next?

Should you do SEO? What about spending money on a business directory listing? How about Google adwords? Maybe you should use social media. Lets use Facebook, I hear Twitter is really powerful? These are all questions you may ask yourself and these are not simple tools to use, or particularly cost efficient in terms of ROI (return on investment) if you pick the wrong tool or tools or configure them incorrectly. Try to get your head around Google adwords. It’s quite a task to those not familiar with it.

The Twitter Trap

If you’re not careful you could fall into the Twitter trap. Sometimes described as being a time sink. Something that takes hours away from you and gives little back in return. I’ve seen it with lots of different types of businesses, especially owners of review sites and most significantly with home businesses. Just one look at the volume of tweets and the times of the day and it’s difficult to see just how much else is achieved each day. As I keep saying, your marketing should work for you not the other way round. If your core skill is making your product, then that’s what you should be spending as much time each day doing.

Spending hour upon hour on Twitter aimlessly trying to plug your product or service, begging for retweets, running endless discount offers on products that were already underpriced is unlikely to result in significant or sustained business growth. The obsession with retweets and followers is an interesting one. It’s not the statistics I would be focusing on.

The number of small home businesses for whom Twitter is their primary marketing tactic is shocking.

Here are some simple tips to prevent you falling into the Twitter Trap.

• Automate your twitter account – there are plenty of tools out there. Find one that suits your needs.
• If you have a blog use a plugin that tweets your posts.
• Write the Headings as though they were short tweets.
• Use hashtags appropriate to your business so that new people will find your account.
• Make sure you do still add a human element, it is social media after all. Check in just a few times a day and respond to retweets or mentions positively.
• If you get DMs (Direct Messages) try to redirect them to email or phone. It makes for better communication and a clearer discussion.
• Vary your messages, some marketing, some personal, some with interesting quotes. Mix it up.
• Use a tracking tool to see where your website’s visitors are coming from. It will quickly give you clear information what is worth spending your time on in terms of marketing effort.
• Track where your paying customers are coming from. If most of your customers are coming from one particular source then test whether more effort/spend on that would increase customer numbers further.

Marketing is not something you’re likely to pick up overnight. The danger is in believing one particular tool as being the solution to finding customers, perhaps because it is free. The more significant danger is not monitoring the time you spend on something and comparing it to what your business is getting in return.