10 Marketing Tools For Small Businesses and Traffic Tactics To Help You Get More Customers

10 Marketing Tools For Small Businesses and Traffic Tactics To Help You Get More Customers

I get asked often…”what marketing tools and traffic tactics do you use to run your business?” I thought I would start by sharing 10 today that I use regularly that help us get more customers and also help get more customers for our customers.

The best part is most all of what I’m going to share with you today is 100% FREE.

1. Zamzar.com – It’s a free online file converter that lets you convert files from one format to another, without the need to download software and fill up your hard drive. The site supports a variety of different formats from .pdf to .gif to .jpg and more. So, let’s say you have an image in a .pdf you want to convert to a .jpg to use in a blog post then this site can do it for you.
2. Ubersuggest.org – I use this site all the time because I’m constantly thinking about what we are going to write about that people may be searching. This free site suggest keyword ideas based on your “keyword idea” and gives from A-Z what people on the net are searching. So, for example I entered “marketing tools” and up pops “marketing tools for small businesses”, “marketing tools for realtors”, “marketing tools ecommerce”…you get the idea. It’s a wonderful free tool to see what people are searching for in your industry or niche.
3. Google Alerts  – A tremendous timesaver and it’s completely free. Simply create an alert by providing Google with a keyword, i.e. “glass replacement”, “duct cleaning”, “rolling stones”, etc. and set the volume to show how often you would like to be alerted…every day, once a week, etc. and you’ll get an email everytime something about that keyword is published on the web.
4. Google Analytics – This is a tracking and statistical tool offered for free by Google that we place on every website we create. If you are marketing online then this tool will provide you with the number of visitors plus a plethora of tracking and statistical variations including where your visitors are coming from…the search engines, social sites, etc.
5. Thesarus.com – When you just can’t think of the word you want to use when writing a blog post, an ebook, or a promotional letter go to this free site. Just enter the word you have in mind and the site will present you with tons of alternatives. Definitely relieves brain freeze which I get quite often.
6. Dropbox.com – Have you ever had a file you needed to send to someone but it was so large you couldn’t send it through email? Then Dropbox is the tool you need to get your large documents there. You can upload that large file to your dropbox account and provide a link to the person who you want to have this file in an email and they can download it via the link. Cool huh?
7. Stock.xchng – If you ever want to spruce up your blog posts, website, marketing promotions, direct mailers, etc. then jump over to Stock.xchng and pick up some images free of charge. With over 400,000 photos on this site as of the writing of this post, you can download one or two that will be sure to get your message across.
8. Mailinator.com – If you have ever run across a sale page or website that ask you to download your email address to see their offer but you don’t want to give up your email address just to be spammed by another 100 emails. Then, the Mailinator is for you. Head over to this site where you can pick up a free, disposable email when you are curious about an offer and let them eat the spam.
9. Coupons – This is a great source of marketing traffic where you give away coupons and promote them in coupon directories. If your business offers coupons of any kind, then you can submit to hundreds of different coupon websites online for exposure and traffic. Although not inclusive here are a couple of the more popular sites:
   

   Super Cool Steals
   Coupon Cabin
   Ultimate Coupons
   Free Shipping
   Deal Taker

10. Produce Videos – Many of you know this is my absolute favorite marketing and traffic generation technique and one that is getting more popular everyday. That is to product simple videos…then upload them to YouTube. I mentioned in several posts that one of the largest search engines next to Google is YouTube. That’s why it’s critical to your marketing efforts to have a presence on YouTube. Simply create your on YouTube Channel and begin uploading informative, interesting videos about your business or industry. Use the annotation feature inherent in YouTube to add a call to action to send visitors to your website. You’ll be amazed at the traffic videos will bring you.

Until next time…