eBusinessAppraisals.com offers business owners a guide on how to take their marketing online and make it work for their business.

1. Expand Client Base, Increase Business Value: A Business Owner’s Guide to Online Marketing eBusinessAppraisals.com offers business owners a guide on how to take their marketing online and make it work for their business.

2. Introduction Still haven’t taken your marketing online? It’s costing you the customers you are seeking for your business! As your prospective customers spend more time online, they increasingly rely on the web for information on the goods that they consume, as they continue to be exposed to the online marketing messages of other brands and services. Besides this, you are also limiting the reach of your message by sticking to traditional marketing platforms. By increasing awareness for your brand/product, and driving sales by bringing in new customers as it nurtures existing ones, online marketing can help impact the overall value of your business. When it is time to sell your business, a strong online marketing presence will increase your business value and net you a higher sale price at the closing table. Getting started with online marketing is not as complicated as it looks. eBusinessAppraisals.com guides you on how to utilize online marketing to benefit your business, based on the tips shared by Hubspot.

3. Words are key to being found - develop keywords! The web is made up of countless pages, and even more innumerable words and images within those pages. How does the web make sense of all these? By crawling the web for pages that match the word or a handful of words that you enter when you make a search, say on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search tool.

4. Use keywords to your business’s advantage by using the obvious words associated with your business. For instance, if you are in the business of making tie-dyed shirts, then you can use “tie-dyed shirts” or “custom tie-dyed shirts.” To further help prospective searchers, you can be more specific with your keywords by including “slim fit tie-dyed shirts” or “tie-dyed shirts Atlanta.”Using a keyword-grader can help you develop an effective keyword strategy to guide search engines and those searching for your product or service to your website.

5. 2. Create a catchy homepage Make a good first impression about your business through your homepage. Think of it as your storefront, the one that captures your customers’ attention and makes them want to go in. Your homepage is usually the first page a searcher sees upon clicking the link from the search engines.

6. Be sure your company name and logo are very recognizable within the homepage. Besides having a captivating appearance, your homepage should also be organized so that they can easily find what it is that they’re looking for, as well as what you want them to find. Think of your homepage as the table of contents in a magazine, and make it as user-friendly as possible. Using a website grader tool can help optimize your pages so they are search-engine friendly.

7. 3. Content your customer with your content The web offers users so much information and choices from various sources that they can easily switch from one to another. You have to ensure that your content is interesting and useful. It has to engage readers to make them want to know more about your product or service, and ideally want to buy them. It certainly helps to influence them do something by including a Call to Action in several of your web pages, such as a click button to a statement such as “Place order now.”

8. To keep your content fresh, relevant and updated, you may opt to have a blog linked to your business. A blog (short for Web log) can be set up and created at no cost. Websites such as Wordpress, Blogspot, and LiveJournal, among others, host both free and paid blogs, and allows for plug-ins that enable certain features such as video uploading and connection to different social media. Write about topics that will interest your customers, such as questions they frequently ask about, amusing trivia about your product or service, or even on-the-job anecdotes that tell of your business’s character.

9. 4. Spread the word Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn - you might have heard of them. They have become the big three of the social media world. Posting to any one of them guarantees exposure of your content to your account’s connections: your friends, followers, and contacts. If any one of them reposts your content, then that exposes it to their own connections, and so on. The information you post passes on from user to user, driving the chances of your content to be found on the web much more likely.

10. Other social media have since sprung up, with others even older than those three. The viral nature of the information posted in these sites makes them ideal springboards to promote your business, product, or what-have-you easily and cost-efficiently.

11. 5. Attract leads By this time, you would have developed a dynamic inbound marketing campaign for your business, and your website should be generating traffic already. Take this opportunity to convert your online visitors to leads or prospective customers. Design a call to action that would lead visitors to leave their essential information: their name, phone number, and email address.

12. Offer an enticement, such as a free download, regular newsletter subscription, or a product or service discount when you require their information. It may take you several ideas before getting the offer right.

13. 6. Nurture your leads Taking your visitors’ info was challenging enough, so you have to treat each lead with care to prevent it from going to waste. Consider the appropriate approach to the succeeding form of contact you will decide on, such as email campaigns and invitations to be a contact on different social media. Review the content of your email and gauge its relevance to the lead. Come up with good offers that could benefit your lead. Measure and refine your campaigns as you try different approaches, depending on responses received.

14. 7. Measure the success of your effort The advantage of inbound marketing is the ability of measuring how effective your campaign is. You get to know who responded to what campaign, what pages in your website are visited, and where traffic to your online presence is coming from. This provides insight to what is successful or not, and what else can be done to better communicate with your target audience based on a pattern of lead/customer actions. Tools such as Google Analytics and those offered by inbound marketing service companies make quantifying the success of your efforts easier and more easily understood.

15. eBusinessAppraisals.com is a professional, third-party business valuation company focused on value-enhancement techniques designed to maximize the value of businesses, and meet the exit strategy objectives of its owners. We have more than two decades of advising and deal-making experience with middle-market businesses. Consider a business valuation for your company and let it be your starting point in preparation for a loan application.

16. AteBusinessAppraisals.com, we provide affordable,custom solutions to help every business owner charta course to higher value. Now for a limited time, we are offering afreeassessment of your business. Contact ustoday to learn how to take advantage of this great offer! ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Learn more about why Value Matters. Follow us on Twitter: @ebizappraisals Join our Linkedin group: eBusinessAppraisals.com Check out Facebook page: eBusinessAppraisals.com