Note: This is part 3 of our series on how to make a living online. If you have not read the first chapters you can start here.
Now that you are ready to sell, it is time to get some clients. Depending on your businesses demo and geographical target you may want to consider what is the best fit for you.
Here are some of my favorite ways to reach potential customers:
Local advertisement
To advertise locally, you can put notices in newspapers, or pay someone to give out fliers – in many cases, these options are cheaper than you might think. For online advertising, you can use Google Adwords to drive traffic to your website. You can target your audience by location, language, age, sex, and more, to reach your demographic. You can also make localized ads on social media which also tends to be very effective and often at a very low cost.
Google Adwords, Googles online advertisement offering, is much more expensive than local and social advertising, but it tends to have great results. This does require a bigger investment and a lot of research in order to not blow your budget as you can end up payin a lot for every single visitor to your site.
Social media
Twitter and Facebook are the biggest networks suited to this purpose, and Facebook tends to yield the best results of the two. Interact with your friends, get them to share your product, join groups and follow pages of interest and post links to your product in comments, pages and groups. On Facebook you can also use paid advertising, with targeting similar to Google Adwords, but cheaper. Create a Facebook page with your business’s information, and build a following. Get started with Facebook’s own guide here.
Facebook also allows you to ad an online store and much more, so there are some great possibilities there to get an online presence and set up a shop fast and free.
There are other social media where you can purchase adds or grow an audience in order to promote your services and/or products such as:
- SnapChat
Which ones you use can depend on what you are offering, so do a little research first which social platforms fit your services and products.
Networking
Reach out, talk to people, see if you can find some good contacts that can help to promote your services – perhaps a friend with social media presence or a local distributor that can help with your product. You may be surprised to you already have one or more contacts that can help you get started.
Thank you for reading the third part of a multi part series that will help you get started with your own online business. Follow us and stay tuned for the next chapter!
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