How to Promote Your Local Business Online ?

[wiztech]

Seems like an awful lot of local businesses hit this wall. “I’ve registered my business, set up some products, built a website … now what?!”

As an entrepreneur that’s predominantly worked on things to enable small businesses, this question is near to my heart. And what sucks is that I don’t feel like there is a satisfactory answer to this question for local businesses right now.

The usual recommendations of content marketing and SEO are okay but they can take a long time to bear fruit and competitors and changing algorithms can wipe out a lot of hard earned progress overnight.

A couple of thoughts and options:

1. Google has a choke-hold on digital marketing and getting significant organic visibility through SEO or content marketing can be really time consuming. It’s worth doing but it’s a long-term investment and everybody else is trying to do the same thing and competing for the same top 10 positions. (The blogs at Unbounce and Copyblogger are really good resources for content marketing.)
2. Google’s Adwords or pay per click advertising has reached a level where it’s priced out a lot of small businesses. It’s easy to burn through a lot of money with pay per click advertising and if your landing pages and website aren’t converting visitors to customers very well then this can get reallllly expensive.
3. Groupon might be a good option for some businesses, because they are somewhat localized and have good reach. The problem is that their steep discounts and revenue sharing might result in a net loss if your profit margin isn’t very high and I haven’t heard a lot of good things about Groupon producing repeat customers (i.e., they’re just there for the deal, no brand loyalty.)
4. Advertising on Facebook, Twitter or other social media sites is another option but what strikes me about this approach is—people aren’t on there to see advertising, buy things or discover new products. They’re on there to talk to their friends or share pictures of their kids/cats/toys.
5. Word of mouth is great, but like any sort of viral marketing it can be rather elusive to plan for. It just sort of happens if you do a bunch of other things right.
6. Direct mail might be a viable channel, too. Some businesses swear by it and find a lot of success using it. I can’t remember the last time I chose a business that sent me direct advertising but I also understand that my habits aren’t representative of the entire world!
7. Share your knowledge or experience on Quora and find a relevant way to plug what you’re doing into the conversation—I’m doing this right now. (But don’t participate only in conversations that benefit you; I’m here on Quora mainly because I like answering questions and hope some of my answers are helpful for people!)
8. We’ve been working on tackling this question at Kahuti (A social network that connects people who live close to each other.) We’re trying to build a community-level social network that brings people and businesses in a community together in a way that increases visibility of local events, issues, conversations, products, businesses and so on.

[daikaads]

Do perform Free Classifieds Submission and Local Business Listings for promoting the business locally.

[RashidS45]

For promoting your local business online just do directory submission, classifieds, business listing in local locations for which you are targeting.