The DIY Approach to Exposing Your Business on the Internet

One of the most worrying things about starting a business is how you can expose it. Without exposure, your business isn’t going to grow at all and you’re not going to have a good time trying to make it big in your chosen industry. A lack of initial exposure could ruin your chances of building up a customer base, and it ultimately defines how much momentum you have.

It’s worrying enough that your business could fail because you’re not doing enough to expose it, but it’s also worrying when you consider your advertising and marketing schemes could backfire and ultimately turn you into a laughing stock. There have been many failed promotional campaigns in the past that raised concerns or questions about a business. Although there’s a saying that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, those failed campaigns certainly left a sour taste in the mouths of people that saw them.

Expensive marketing campaigns aren’t the way to go for startups

When you first start a business, it’s seen as normal to try and recruit a service to help you expose your business. The usually handle things such as creating a logo, designing a website and getting you started on social media. However, there are some clear disadvantages to this approach that you have to understand before you decide to invest the money:

  • It’s expensive – there’s no denying that hiring someone or a company to help you set up an advertising campaign can become expensive. Not only are you hiring them for their time, but you’re also paying for their experience and any other third party contractors that they may need to hire in order to give you the best service available. As a result, the costs and hidden fees can mount up, and before you know it, you’ll be out of business because you didn’t expect how much it would cost you.
  • It’s not as personalised as you might think – advertisers and marketing gurus usually know best, but when you want to grow a brand it’s important to try and incorporate your own personality and style into the branding to give it a personal touch. When you hire logo designers, they usually work quickly and efficiently but unless it’s a talented designer that takes the time to question you and learn about your business, you’re not going to create a unique logo that sticks. Logo designs can become incredibly expensive if you want something that resonates with your company’s goals, and it’s usually more effective just to create your own or hire someone just for logo design instead of a full turnkey solution.
  • Doing it yourself gives you and your team a chance to grow – an often forgotten advantage of doing your own design is the ability to learn about the role for the future. If it’s your first startup, then it doesn’t make sense to invest too much money into your business because you’re likely going to fail, and failing faster is one of the quickest ways to learn. Plan your own marketing campaign and learn as much as you can about how it works so you can better prepare yourself in the future.

Although marketing companies will give you a good service, it’s expensive and ultimately doesn’t teach you as much as doing it yourself. So let’s get started and learn a few important tips that will help you reach out and become the international business you’ve always wanted to be.

Making waves with website design

As mentioned before, website design is important to expose yourself as a business. This is because your website typically serves as a landing page for anyone that wants to learn more about your business. There are many advantages that come with good web design, and here are just a couple:

  • A good landing page converts viewers into customers – the power to convince people with just a couple of words can make a lot of difference. Most people don’t need to be told what your service can offer. Instead, they like to know what benefits you can offer them. There’s no point telling your potential customers that you have 10 years of software development experience—that doesn’t translate well to a real-world scenario. Instead, tell them that your expertise in software development can help them create unique applications to help their business grow.
  • A terrible web page scares customers off – on the opposite spectrum, a bad web page is going to put people off. How many times have you arrived at a poorly designed landing page with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and stretched images? You’ve probably closed the page straight away and decided to look for an alternative—and no one could blame you. Professionalism is important especially when it comes to first impressions, so don’t neglect it.

As you can see, a website can make all the difference when you’re trying to convert people into customers, but you need to have a good understanding of how a web page works and what makes a good one. There are plenty of do-it-yourself web page designers, and in most cases, the content is far more important than the look of the website. As long as you’re not using ugly clashing colours, templates are fine and you can generally get away with having good information instead of a flashy landing page.

Proper usage of SEO

Your business is undiscoverable unless it’s on Google. Search engine optimisation is one of the fastest ways to get your website noticed, and it’s important that you understand how SEO works. We’ll talk briefly about some of the more important SEO subjects, but follow this guide on SEO strategy if you want a more in-depth look at how SEO works. For now, here are some quick tips to get you started:

  • Avoid machine SEO – there are many add ons and apps that promise to improve your SEO. However, what they don’t tell you is that these are based on robotic algorithms and formulas and could potentially destroy any personality that your content has. Good SEO comes from clever planning and thought, not a machine. SEO add ons can be helpful when you’re getting started, but it’s far better to read how it works instead of spamming keywords and relying on a robot to help you.
  • Original content is king – search engines love original content, which is why there are writing services available if you need content. If you’re not great at writing or find it difficult to piece together your thoughts, then hiring a content writing service can be a great boon to your business. It’s important to create original content because search engines are cracking down on repetitive and uninteresting articles and web pages that don’t offer much to the internet. If you want to stand out, then don’t copy other people’s content—invent your own!
  • Do your research – it’s no use targeting a keyword that isn’t popular. If you want to stay trendy and make the most of your online exposure, then you need to do research into keywords and use the correct terms that people are actively searching. It helps to release a steady stream of content so that you’re constantly able to target new viewers and customers and attract them to your website. The internet landscape can change drastically, which is why SEO can be a demanding job at times.

Why aggression is a good thing in marketing

If you stay passive, then no one is going to notice your business. You have to be aggressive if you want to get your products and ideas into the hands of paying customers. If you fail to do this, then you’re ultimately going to fail as a business unless a miracle happens and you go viral:

  • No one knows you – hence why you need to market aggressively. This can be done via social media, with blogger outreach or even by attending events to generate exposure. Although attending events isn’t exactly a way to use the internet to expose your business, it does work well together. 
  • You have to be persistent – if you give up after a single failed campaign or you notice your viewers and interaction dwindling, then you aren’t going to make it far in the world of business. You need to learn to be persistent so that people remember your business and your name constantly pops up in the industry.
  • Social media is a fantastic vessel – if you want to aggressively market your business, then you need to learn how to use social media to your advantage. Understanding how it works, how content spreads and how exposure is gained will ultimately give you an upper hand on businesses that don’t have social media managers.

Some final words

Doing your own marketing is cheap and effective if you know what you’re doing. Hopefully, these points have given you a good understanding of how you can expose your business without paying ludicrous amounts of money for something. As long as you’re willing to learn and soak up information about social media, SEO and website design, it’s possible to do all of your initial marketing with your own two hands, saving you a huge chunk of money that would otherwise be spent on expensive marketing campaigns and content creation.

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About Dequiana Jackson

Dequiana Jackson, Founder of Inspired Marketing, Inc., helps overachieving women entrepreneurs conquer limiting beliefs and create marketing plans that grow their businesses. This includes one-on-one marketing plan development, digital product creation, web design and content marketing. Dequiana is the author of Know Your Business: How to Attract Ideal Clients & Sell More and runs the award-winning blog, Entrepreneur-Resources.net.

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5 comments

  1. Completely agree with you Dequiana! When you are small and on a shoe string budget for your marketing efforts, hiring the services of any advertising company definitely is an expensive proposition. For designing a website, you can hire a freelancer at very competitive rates and can even buy one of the many customizable website templates available in the market and customize it as per your needs and yes SEO is something you can definitely do it yourself by going through lots of helpful articles and videos.
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  2. Dequiana thank you for this article. It is a starting point to help us with our website efforts. We finally have an online presence on Google with a website that was designed by a freelancer, however, we are told that having a website does not mean we will get our phones ringing. We were skeptical about what they were telling us, however, your article validates what they were telling us. However, given our operational expenses, we are hesitant on paying someone to do SEO on our website. We need to come up with some online strategy as to whether we focus on SEO, Facebook or whatever else there is out there. There certainly are so many options and choosing one seems to not be an easy thing.

    • Michael, I’m glad you were able to gain some value from the article. Yes, there are several online marketing options, and some you can do in-house for now. While you may not be able to pay a company to do SEO on your website, you can still take advantage of content marketing. Is there a blog on your site already? Updating that gives search engines a reason to crawl your site regularly. If not, you can still provide guest articles for other blogs, making sure to include a link back to your company in either the content or author bio. In terms of where to focus, try to find out where your customers are and show up there, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Good luck with your efforts!

  3. Thank you Miss Jackson! I have a website but I knew this would not be enough to bring in business. I like the comment where you mentioned content marketing. Can you maybe expand on that? I have someone doing SEO but I would love to know about the cheaper options. I want to have a great online presence but I understand it can take time. I love the social media tip! Thank you!

    • Hi Darren! I’m glad you enjoyed the article. Content marketing is about continuously creating relevant content for your potential clients. For example, you could add a blog to your current site or post articles on third-party sites, like LinkedIn, with links back to your website. You don’t have to link to the home page only. You can also speak directly about products and services and link there. If writing isn’t for you, consider adding audio or video entries. Good luck with your business!

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