Top Digital Tips - promote your business free online

Marketing budgets are getting slashed and re-allocated all over the place. So, how do you go about promoting your brand without making a dent in that valuable marketing budget?

Read on for our top ten recession-beating tips to promote your business online for free this year. There’s nothing really new here, just simple, great advice for promoting your business without spending a penny.

1. Crowdstorming – get free ideas from your clients on what they want to see you doing next – check out what Dell are doing for more of an idea

2. Linkedin / Xing - Create a profile and join in with professional online networking – don’t lose touch with your business network, especially if they’re moving jobs this year!

3. Twitter - Get your message out there, be it promotions, news and info. Word is that Twitter is planning to charge companies for its use though. Great for monitoring what people say about your products or services.

4. Online PR – create more news stories for your website and build up a network of free PR distribution sites such as Pressbox.

5. Social networking presence – create free pages on the social networking sites, such as a fan page on Facebook.

6. Build your customer email database – sounds obvious, but you’ll be amazed how many businesses still aren’t doing this. If you already have one, use it! Start segmenting your messages to your audiences.

7. Be authoritative and authentic – have your say on opinion pieces, articles and user generated content relevant to your business to get your voice heard and to give your website an authentic presence.

8. Blogger / Wordpress - create a blog and get information out on the www – no time to blog? Why not share it amongst your team?

9. Social sharing – add a social share tool to your website and get your content out there – you could get over 10% increase in traffic by doing this- sharethis or addthis give you the tools to do it for free.

10. Create a mash up – pull free content into your website, use Yahoo Pipes to pull in RSS feeds for your industry news as we did on wetisdry.com or create videos for YouTube and feature them into your website.

Enjoy putting these into practice and if you do all this and still want more, give us a call!

11 tips for harnessing the power of the web

Spencer's last set of top 10 tips went down a storm…so here are 11 more top tips to end the financial year and to get you thinking...

1. Join Spencer and the presidential candidates, sign up to Twitter and blog your status on the fly - check out Hillary Clinton's Twitter.

2. Get an RSS reader for your mobile (if you haven’t already) - start with Newsgator.

3. Yahoo Pipes - it’s a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from the web.

4. Make a long URL short use http://www.tinyurl.com/.

5. Set-up an open id at ClaimID. Lots of social sites are moving to a single login driven by Google.

6. Make your website an authority. Build rich unique content around your business’ website and syndicate it by adding RSS and post to/share with links http://tinyurl.com/22ejr7.

7. Get a Business Social Media strategy - to communicate to your team, customers and prospects email Spencer for more info…

8. Social Networking in Plain English - thanks to Toby at Digital Parents for spotting this one!

9. Getting a social bookmark site such as del.icio.us is a great starting point, install the “add” icons on your browser!

10. Get a business blog and link it from your website try Blogger or Wordpress – better still get Bluhalo to integrate it!

11. Aggregate all your contacts and social media sites through http://www.plaxo.com/.

If you want any of this explaining in more detail or want to find out more about how Bluhalo can help your business, drop me an email or contact us online.

Top tips proving popular

We've detailed a number of top tips and top tens on our blog recently and these really seem to be gathering a bit of a fan base! We've received lots of compliments on our 'Top' lists, with a variety of people finding them a really useful 'tick sheet' for ensuring their online business success.

One of our top tens was even picked up by a couple of other news businesses, such as Catalogue and e-business, the publication most read by catalogue and online traders, and promoted via their email newsletter in a top features to add to your website this year listing.

So, as these top tips have proven so useful for so many, there'll be more to come, so watch this space!