It’s a hard economy, what steps can you take which are not costly, benefit your business and are easy to do?

5 TIPS -

1) Start bartering with you local contacts for services. Use the bartering “topic”, as a means to network and meet more local businesses.  Take the topic out into your city or town and ask other local businesses, if they would be interested in bartering. If they don’t already, branch out and develop your bartering group. If you city or town doesn’t already have one this may be a fantastic networking opportunity for all of your contacts. Think of bartering as a way you can decrease your expenditures and still keep your business fully functional.

2) Offer you employees bartered services as bonuses. Many bartering groups use gift certificates. By offering your employees gift certificates, you form a good a working partnership with other companies. This will be a great way for you to form a new networking group. If you have more than just yourself to take advantage of bartering, you’ll spread your business name. Often your employee, will develop into a new repeat customer which is a winning situation for the other business.

3) Join as many coffee business networking groups as your time will allow. Often they are not advertised, so you may need to ask around and use the Internet to find the groups.

4) Rather than having to push yourself to always sell your business. Just invite local contacts you would possibly like to do business with to your coffee group. Let the natural friendships form.

5) Use social media to network your business. Often we use it solely for our personal use. Promote your specials, new products, bonus deals, coupons etc. with social media. You would be surprise how well it works. For those who use it regularly, no advertising compares to the reach which social media has.

Have you ever had one? I have had several lately.  I have found easy ways and free ways to network. Yes, I said free! Social Networking sites are great for networking. You can find others with similar interests to yours by joining the groups on the social sites.  A warm non pushy introduction is the best way to get to know others in the group.  Once you know the others in the group and they know you some,  you can start networking.  You can  send them a message about your business and offer your services or help.  Even better yet, ask them about their business as a conversation starter.  I usually ask if anyone is a Wahm like me, if it is a parenting type group or small business group.

I recently ordered a gift for a family member from a local business.  I looked it up online because it’s easier for me to compare businesses and products. It turned into a networking moment, because we live in the same area, there was an instant trust. I called the company to follow up on my order after I placed it.  I asked about her business. I told her I like her products and I told her about my businesses. I complimented her on her shopping cart and website (Which she did, herself.  I was impressed and told her so) and the conversation grew.  There are many honest good business owners out there. Share with other business owners and learn from them. During the process of networking and growing your own business.

Networking Wahm

Firstly let’s think about social networks generally and what their aims are. The best way to think about this is that they are similar to search engines where they want to make the best content available to users. However the value of the content is determined by the popularity from its members and not from a mathematical algorithm. For examples the articles with the largest number of diggs will find themselves on the front page of Digg.com.

I hear you asking, how can this benefit my business? Well let’s think about what social networks can bring you, firstly they can bring valuable exposure and so increasing traffic to your site. They also can bring more back links to your site and so helping to improve your search engine ranking which in turn will bring more traffic to your site, which is the aim of the game.

Now I bet your thinking, how can I take advantage of these opportunities? Well it is very simple really and below are the main steps to using social networks to improve the profile of your business:

1.Research the sites you want to use. There are the obvious ones in MySpace, Facebook and Digg but there may also be some that are business specific and industry specific.

2.Once you have decided on your sites then you will need to set up a profile. Make sure this includes as much interesting information on your company as possible and includes a link back to your website.

3.Now you need to make connections. Firstly start by finding old friends from school, university and previous jobs. It is also a good idea to search for people that are interested in areas that are related to your business and try and build relationships with them.

4.Get yourself seen. A good way to do this is to go to Forums on your selected sites and join in discussions. If people are having problems that you can help with make every effort to help them, remember to include a link to your site. This will not only increase the validity of you and your business but will also increase your connections on these sites.

5.Update your profile regularly. Many social networking sites will send a notice to your friends if your profile has been updated and as people are naturally nosey many will come to see what you have done which will increase the coverage you get.

6.Send out announcements to your friends. If you have some company news or you have a special offer it might be worth letting all your friends know about it, this may bring you valuable business. Remember though be reasonable with this, if you are continually sending out notices and leaving information for friends they will rapidly become annoyed and disinterested which may undo all the hard work you have done.

Conclusion

Social networking is a vital component to any online marketing campaign and it should be included but not overused. The best thing about using social networking is that you get advertising for free so if only 1% of the people in your network use your services or buy your products you will still have an amazing return on investment. Forget the power of social networking at your peril.

If you have found this article useful then you can get more information from Dazines – search engine optimization, London UK.

Dazines – a href=”http://www.dazines.co.uk”>website design and webdevelopment company London UK

Article Source: http://www.wahm-articles.com