New ways to market your Small Business

Being a small business,one cannot afford to spend a huge amount on marketing.So, one has to make the best use of the available avenues for marketing. Here are some of the different ways of reaching your target audience.

• Advertise regularly in a local newspaper : Look out for local newspaper/magazine in your area and the kind of audience it reaches.If this is the audience you are trying to reach , then start adverstising in it.The ad need not be a full page one .A small-sensible ad that brings out various aspects of your business each time is what is required. Repitition is the key here.People need to see your business time and again for them to remember your buiness.So, insert your ads periodically .
• Sponsor a Local Event : Sponsoring a local event like a flood light Football match, Cultural events in Schools/Colleges,Community Christmas celebrations can give great visibility to your business.
• SMS marketing : Send in a quick message about a discount that you are providing or some special offer to all your contacts in the area and request them to send it to their dear ones who may find it usefull.The message has to be non obtrusive and sensible.
• List you Business on Google Maps : As more and more people go online,it becomes imperative that you are present there waiting to grab your pie.So, it makes sense to make your prsence felt online.Google has an innovative feature -"Local Business Listings" where in you can list your business.Whenever a user googles out for something like "Florists in Daytona", it immediately lists out Florists in Daytona along with the Google maps.These maps can also take the user to your website/Blog,etc.Its a very innovative and effective way to reach your target audience online.And, above all, its free!
• List your Business on the Free Classifiede Websites: List your business on any of the Free Classifides websites in your city.This increases the chance of your prospective customers finding about your Buiness Online. You need not worry about the brand value of the websites where you will be inserting your free ads, because at the end of the day what matters is the Search Engine Optimization of the website, which leads the visitor based on the keywords to relevent Business Listings. Most of the Free Classfides Websites would have gone for search engine optimization.So, no need to worry.
• Word of Mouth marketing : Finally, there is the age old way of marketing thru words. You can turn this into a a very effective advertsing tool by bringing in some amount of discipline into it. Fix a goal that in one day, i will talk about my business to atleast 3 people.These need not be your clients or prospective customer.It can be your supplier, neighbour,etc. The aim here is to augment your mainstream Advertsing strategies with word of mouth advertsing. This can help you bring visibilty and build a Brand value to your Buiness in the long run.

Online Replication Tools

The following are the major Tools needed for replicating your small business online :

• Setup a small Website :First of all you setup a small website to market your product or service to the whole wide world. Setting up a small website is no big deal, especially with so many website builders and content management systems around, any one can build a website.Even a person with no knowledge of coding can setup and maintain a website with CMSes like Joomla,Drupal,etc.I will explain how to use Joomla and Drupal in my further posts.For now, just understand that setting up and maintaining a small website is pretty easy.
• Online Payment Facility: Next you need to provide your customers with a way to make payments online .This can be done easily by signing up to any of the payment processing gateways.Many of your banks provide payment gateways.But , it involves paying up a hefty setup Fees and monthly charges.But, we are not here to pay hefty amounts.So, we can sign up to free payment processing gateways like "PayPal" and "2Checkout".Once you sign up you will be provided with a code which you need to paste into your website.Once you do that , a customer after buying your product will be redirected to the payment gateway website and they can make payments over a secure channel.
• Live Sales Chat Facility : Next you need to have a chatback widget i.e Live Sales Chat widget that you have come across in many websites.You can also have a similar feature on your website at no cost.Just signup for the GTalk Chatback widget which i will explain in detail later.All you need to do is login to your Gtalk and stay online.All your site visitors will be able to chat with you in real time.
• Monetization : Next is the monetization part of your website.Yes , you can make your website self sufficient by using various means which i will explain to you later.

Thats it.These are the major tools needed to replicate your small business online.In my future posts , i will dwell on each of the tools at length giving you a clear picture about each one of them.We will discuss all aspects of each of the tool at length.

What does this online replication mean ?

Online Replication , as the name itself indicates is replicating or creating a duplicate copy of your whole business , including all the transactions.

To explain the concept, let me take the example of a hardware store.Assume you own a hardware store that sells nuts,bolts,cement,floor tiles and other construction materials in your locality.
What are the basic elements that make up your hardware store ?

• A small space in a prime locality in the area where in you can setup your shop and showcase all the products that you sell.
• A Store keeper who can sit at the shop and answer the customers.
• A cashier who can check the products ordered by the customer, generate bills and collect cash from the customer.
• An accountant who can generate the reports like balance sheet,etc.
• A market where in , you can reach all your target customers.

So, if we can replicate all these elements online, its just another arm of your buiness.Lets see how we can replicate all the elements in the hardware store above .

• A small webspace is all you need to open an online hardware store. In this web space , you can put detailed catalogues of all the products that your store has including the product photos.Web space costs much much less than a normal office space.
• To replicate a store keeper one can have a chat back widget, where in a person from your store can login and wait for customer queries.The customer visting the site can talk to the store keeper in real time and resolve all the queries
• To replicate a cashier , we have the online shopping carts which customers can use to buy all the products from your online store and get the bills.Once the bills are ready, the customer has many options for paying like credit cards,debit cards,online money ransfer,etc.All these things will be taken care by payment gateways .
• For producing reports , one can use the reports generated by these payment gateways.If one is not satisfied with the reports produced by these payment gateways, one can further use other tools to get summarised info from these reports.

So, the final conclusion is that it is possible to replicate major aspects of your small business.

Introduction

Nowadays every business , small and big are going online.Right frompaying your utility bills like phone,electricity,etc to banking.Almost all the banks have net banking facilities that allow a customer to do deposit, withdrawals,taking bank statements, transfer money and all the banking transactions online, without even visiting the bank. How is it that all these transcations can be done online without physically being present at the location ?

That is the power of internet and the web technologies that make all these things possible.Using these technologies one can replicate all the normal transactions into an online one. This is the concept of online replication.So, can any transaction/business be replicated online ? The answer is yes.Everything can be replicated online, so that you build a self running enterprise , that is much less error prone and accurate than your normal enterprise.
Is online replication a costly affair ?
It depends on the kind of business that you want to replicate and the complexity of buiness transactions. But, the objective of writing this blog is to introduce simple concepts and tools that one can use to replicate a small business.Once you create an online replica of your business, you will have 2 different streams of business.One is the naormal business and the other is the online replica, that keeps on running even when you are sleeping and earning valuable revenue to your small business ,especially in these times of recession.

In the upcoming posts , i will break up this whole mumbo-jumbo of "Online Replication", so that you can setup an online replica of your small business with minimal costs.
Keep reading my further posts.

Contents

• Introduction
• What does this "Online Replication" mean ?
• How does this "Online Replication" work ?
• A small business case study
• Analysing the requirements of a small business
• Analysing the transactions carried out in the normal business
• How much does this online replication cost ?
• How to carry out the normal business transactions online ?
• Listing out the tools and resources needed to replicate your small business
• The First step
• Building an Online platform
• Maintaining the Online platform
• How to do small budget marketing campaigns
• How to make your online platform self sustaining ?
• How to get Customer Leads ?
• How to track performance of your online business ?
• Advantages of Online Replication
• Disadvantages of Online Replication
• Conclusion
• Tools
• Important Links and resources

Take your small business online

Hi Welcome to smallstreet.

The main objective of this blog is to help the small businesses take their business online.Yes, i mean replicating your whole business online,so that there will be 2 seperate streams of your business:

1. Normal business
2. Online Business.

Your normal business will continue as usual.But you will open up a new online business that will also work on its own and generate an additional revenue stream.

In the coming posts , i will explain to you, how you can achieve this in a step by step manner.While writing all these posts i will keep the needs and limitations of a small business, so that you can start your online venture without lightening your pockets.