Implementing promotional marketing strategies for small businesses is one of the biggest hurdles most small business owners face in their business marketing.

The Internet is rife with all kinds of promotional marketing strategies and ideas: Write a company blog. Start a company Facebook fan page. Engage people on Twitter.

But actually implementing the promotional marketing tactics is tough for small business owners. “I’m already busy enough, and now I have to do more?”

We feel your pain. We’re in small business as well, so we’re constantly dealing with the same struggles. If you’re a single person operation, or a small partnership with big aspirations, you’re wearing a lot of hats. You’re in charge of sales and marketing, and then fulfilling whatever you sold. You manage the billing, accounts payable, and taxes. You make sure the office is running smoothly, and that you maintain your business network. And now you’re supposed to try some new promotional marketing strategies.

But don’t worry, we’re not asking for much. In fact, we may make your life easier. Here are a few ideas you can use to implement your promotional marketing strategies with a minimal amount of pain:

Track the performance of all your promotional marketing efforts.

This one is crucial. You need to know what’s working for you and what’s not. The mistake many small businesses make is they don’t keep track of the ROI of their promotional marketing. They’ll run Yellow Pages listings, newspaper ads, radio spots, and dabble in social media. But they don’t know what works and what doesn’t.

Do things like sticking unique discount codes on your promotional marketing campaigns. Use special phone numbers in your Yellow Pages listings. Put analytics tracking on your websites. Track the sources of your leads, and see which campaigns result in traffic to your location and your website.

Then count up all of that traffic, and see which leads turned into sales. Total up the sales from each promotional marketing campaign, and then subtract the money you spent on that campaign. The amount remaining is your ROI.

Drop the promotional marketing tactics that don’t work.

This part is easy. If the money you spent is bigger than the money you made, you lost money. If you made more than you spent, you have a positive ROI, and that promotional marketing effort was a success.

Drop all the campaigns that lost you money, including the ones you thought were doing you some good. (Note: this does not include youth team sponsorships. There are some things, like goodwill in the community, that you just don’t mess with!) Pour that reclaimed money back into the campaigns that worked the best. Or if they all made you money, drop the lowest performing ones.

Social media promotional marketing in minutes a day.

When you try something new, like blogging, Facebook, or Twitter, you shouldn’t jump into it with both feet, and spend hours a day on it. You’ll run out of time to do other things, and when you go to play catch-up, everything will be too overwhelming, and you’ll quit. Then, you’ll say it was a complete failure, when in actuality, you haven’t touched that promotional marketing tool in nine months.

Instead, just pace yourself. Work on it a little bit each day. If you’re blogging, just write one 300 word blog post per week. It should take you no more than an hour, and can take less time per day if you break it up. If you’re using Twitter, just spend 30 minutes a day on it, 15 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes in the afternoon. Eventually you’ll reach a point that you’re so good at it, you’ll find that you’re actually spending 20 minutes a day in 60 second intervals, throughout the day, and wondering if you’re doing too much, rather than not enough.

Promotional marketing for small business is going to be what keeps you in business, but only if you actually try out some of the tactics you read about. Don’t make the mistake of trying something for two weeks and then quitting when you don’t see any results. It takes time, patience, and some work. But if you can make the time to do these tactics, whatever ones you’ll choose, you’ll be rewarded.

Building your online brand through social media marketing is a snap. Okay, a long series of snaps spread out over several days, but still it’s easy, and it’s free.

If you’ve been paying attention to what people are doing online, you’ve heard of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogging. Basically, if you found this article, you’re technically savvy enough to deal with tools like that. You know they can build your online brand.

But, what most people don’t realize is that building an online brand doesn’t just involve opening up the social media toolbox and blasting out sales messages. Nothing will harm your online brand quicker than social media spam.

Social media marketing isn’t about numbers, it’s about relationships. Do your customers feel like they have a relationship with you? Do they know you care about them as people, not as sales targets? Online brands that build these relationships with people tend to be more successful than those that just treat them like numbers.

Here are five ways you can improve your brand through proper social media marketing techniques.

1) Listen

Rather than sending out constant messages about upcoming sales and special offers, “turn the bullhorn around,” Tara Hunt says in her book, “The Whuffie Factor.” People are talking about you, whether it’s complaints, questions, feedback, or compliments. Social media tools help you listen to them, and answer back where they are, rather than where you want them to go.

It’s also important to listen before you just jump in and start talking. Whether it’s Twitter or a specialty social media group, listen to what people are saying before you start talking about your online brand. Learn what the tone of the group is, and match it. Make sure the tone is right for your online brand, and a place you would actually want to associate with people.

2) Answer questions

This is where your online brand can prove some real worth to potential customers. Take any opportunity you can to answer questions in your field, not just about your online brand. If you’re a video marketing consultant, answer anyone’s questions about how to make online videos. Whether it’s about the best video camera to buy, how to edit video clips, or even how to do video marketing (yes, seriously). By doing this, you’ll establish your online brand as being someone who is knowledgeable and helpful.

3) Be a resource

This goes hand in hand with answering questions. Rather than waiting for people to ask something you can answer, push out other helpful information and articles. Forward articles you’re reading to your network. Help them learn, and show potential customers that you’re constantly keeping up to date. By staying on top of industry trends, you’re more able to help them with their own issues.

4) Be yourself

This sounds like advice our parents gave to us in high school, but it’s still good advice, even [**system error**] years later. Nothing kills an online brand like being inauthentic. This is where your personality and your face needs to shine through. Remember, you are your brand. If you’re a funny, quirky person, then your online brand should match it (within reason, of course). If you’re a caring person, then your online brand should be caring as well.

5) Gather more people like you

This is the fun part. This is where you build your network of people who can be potential customers, or even potential referral partners. The easiest way to do it is just to check out people who are already in your network, and see who they’re following or are connected to. You can be fairly safe in assuming that the people they’re following are people who have similar interests and are in the same field.

These techniques will apply to any social media tool. Remember, social media marketing is about engaging in relationships and conversations with customers. By using these techniques, you can help build your online brand and reach your ideal customers.

Local Internet marketing is becoming increasingly important to your success on Google and other search engines. As Google continues to move toward local search results, your effectiveness at local Internet marketing can have a major effect on your bottom line.

Let’s try an experiment. Go to Google, and type in your industry or niche, and your city and state (e.g. Italian restaurant, Wichita, KS). What will pop up is a map of some of the Italian restaurants in Wichita (or whatever you typed in) that may or may not include yours. If it doesn’t, that’s a real problem, but it’s one that’s easily solved.

Optimizing for Google’s Local search is an important part of local Internet marketing. They’re the biggest search engine, so they’re the gold standard for search engine optimization. They also already have your company information in their servers, so it makes sense that they put that information to use by helping their users find you more easily.

The great thing about Google is that it also scans different review sites, like Yelp or Urban Spoon, for user reviews. So B2C businesses (business-to-consumer) may end up getting some great local Internet marketing juice if people leave positive reviews on the different review sites. These reviews also make Google map listings more useful, because people can see whether they want to visit your establishment or not.

Should Regional and Online Businesses Do Local Internet Marketing?

Even regional businesses and online businesses should optimize for local internet marketing. While most of your customers may not come to your location, this will still help improve your search engine ranking. In fact, local Internet marketing is one of the most effective and efficient forms of SEO.

That’s because you need as many inbound links to your website (links that go from another site to yours) as you can get. The more you have, the more valuable Google thinks your site is, and so the higher it appears in search results.

But you also never know when you are going to get a local visitor. While you may not want visitors at a home-based business, it’s worth doing if you have an actual office. You’re already going to do it for SEO reasons, so just consider any visitors who find you this way as a bonus.

Should B2B Do Local Internet Marketing?

Companies that focus on business-to-business should also take advantage of local Internet marketing. For one thing, a number of your customers may be local. You want them to know you’re in the area, so filling out your Google Local profile is going to be a big help.

While your local customers may only be two percent of your customer base, you might as well take advantage this. Besides, if your competitors are already on here, you want to make sure they’re not beating you. And if your customers aren’t on Google Local yet, you could be the first. Take advantage of their absence.

How Can National Chains Do Local Internet Marketing?

You’re probably thinking I’m going to tell you to manually enter in each store location on Google’s Local Business section. And while they would be a great job to give the interns, you can just upload a list of your locations, including the addresses and phone numbers, and Google Maps will place the markers for you.

Where Else Should I Focus My Local Internet Marketing Efforts?

Don’t think that Google has the lock on local Internet marketing. There are several sites, including the aforementioned Yelp and Urban Spoon, that may be worth your time. There are also the Yellow Pages, Super Yellow Pages, Yahoo Yellow Pages, and other similar directories that can help your local Internet marketing. There’s also Yahoo’s listing service, and the new kid on the block, Bing, has a local business listing you can take advantage of. Visit them and update your listing information.

Local Internet marketing can greatly help your search engine results, but you don’t have to be a search engine optimization expert. This is something you can do in a matter of minutes, and it can make all the difference in the world. But if it seems like something you don’t want to mess with, call a local online marketing expert. They’ll be happy to help you out.

Online B2B marketing (business-to-business) is a completely different animal from B2C marketing (business-to-consumer). Whether it’s the medium, the message, or even how you target your audience, online B2B marketing needs to be handled differently from your typical online B2C marketing efforts. There are plenty of similarities: you’re trying to persuade people to take an action, whether it’s visit your website, download a special report, or even buy a product from you. But there are enough differences that online B2B marketing needs some special considerations.

How online B2B marketing differs from online B2C marketing

Online B2B marketing is a lot different from online B2C marketing. For one thing, it’s more formal. In an online B2C setting, you’re going to have customers and visitors with a wide variety of interests, education levels, tastes, and even sense of propriety and appropriateness. You need to make sure your message appeals to the widest possible audience in a B2C setting. With some variable data and creative programming, you can deliver more tailored messages to your audience, but you either have to write one message as generically as possible, or write several messages tailored to each possible group.

But with an online B2B marketing audience, you can narrow your appeal. You’re writing only to the decision makers. You can reasonably assume certain levels of education, attitude, and professionalism among your customers. So your messages can be tailored to a specific group of people, without worrying too much about the non-industry crowd.

How to create the online B2B marketing message

Don’t forget that your online B2B marketing audience is someone else’s B2C audience. They don’t just stick decision makers in a closet at 5:00, and pull them out at 8:00 the next morning. Your B2B customers go home every night, watch TV, get on Facebook, and in general, still respond to the same emotional cues and language at the office that they will at home. Appealing to a person’s fears and desires in your message, showing them how to avoid pain or achieve goals, will work in online B2B marketing the same way it does in B2C marketing.

In online B2B marketing, you also want to focus on the benefits of your product or service, rather than the features. Don’t tell your customers what your service can do (“our Kick-Starter booster is made of titanium and polypropylene”), tell them what they’ll get out of it. Of course, make sure you personalize it whenever possible: “Our Kick-Starter booster will increase productivity by 20%, which can mean an additional $100,000 each year for Jones & Wells.”

Where to find your online B2B marketing customers

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of social networks and apps that will help you find your customers. But rather than trying to reach as many people on as many networks as you can manage, focus most of your energy on the best networks. We typically find our online B2B marketing audience on places like Twitter, LinkedIn, and even industry-specific networks like you’d find on Ning.com. While it’s possible to find the B2B audience on Facebook, you’re going to be spending a lot of time and money trying to reach them, while broadcasting your audience to people who don’t care. It would be like buying TV ads in a city just to reach 10 people on it.

Take a look at your online B2B marketing audiences age and technology expertise too. How do they use technology? The basic tenets of Internet marketing assume that your audience are online somehow. But where are they getting their information? Is there a niche social network for your industry? Or are the decision makers getting most of their information from email and websites? Or do they use mobile videos and texting as their primary form of communication? Your marketing campaign needs to match where your customers are, not where you want them to be.

Business promotion is getting easier and cheaper, thanks to social media. However, don’t mistake cheap and easy with ineffective or a waste of time.

Many experienced businesspeople are still married to traditional marketing and business promotion techniques. They still think in terms of advertising in broadcast and print media. They still think about eyeballs, open rates, and CPMs (cost per thousand views). They’re thinking about impressions, drive time, and prime time. But business promotion has grown beyond traditional marketing and advertising, and moved online.

Why Is Business Promotion Changing?

It’s because of Generation Y and the explosive growth of social media. There are 82 million members of Generation Y (compared to the 78+ million Baby Boomers), and 96% of them are on a social network of some sort. Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, or other networks, these online tools have reshaped business promotion as we know it.

If you want to reach Generation Y through business promotion, consider social media as your best bet. It costs less than traditional advertising, can be targeted to reach only the people you want, and can easily be measured. The problem with traditional advertising is that you can’t effectively measure whether it was your TV commercials or billboards that resulted in increased sales, and even if one of them was more effective.

How Can I Use Social Media for Online Business Promotion?

Social media is all about communicating and building trust through relationships. By speaking to your customer base on their terms and their turf, you can earn their trust a lot more easily, which can make your business promotion much more effective. Generation Y spends a lot of time online, getting their news and entertainment from the web. They communicate via text messages on their cell phone. And they are the biggest consumer of mobile videos of any generation.

Social media is becoming more popular and widespread. The biggest demographic on Facebook may still be Generation Y, but the fastest growing one is women 50 and over. If that was your biggest customer base, how would you reach them? You could advertise during shows that women over 50 typically watch, but you’re not going to necessarily reach them. Plus, you need to repeat those ads many times, which will get expensive. But with Facebook, you can create fan pages and groups specifically for your target audience. You can even purchase ads that are served only to women in their 50s. You can’t do that with traditional advertising.

Your online business promotion campaign should consist of Twitter, Facebook and/or MySpace, and blogging. Set up accounts, fan pages, blogs, and communicate with your potential customers about the things they want to talk about. Don’t tell them what you do, talk to them about what they do, like, and enjoy. Become a resource for their interests by forwarding articles, providing tips, and telling people about other resources that meet their interests and needs.

Whenever possible, use online business promotions to support your offline promotions as well. If you’re attending a trade show, are sponsoring a special event or team, or are still using traditional marketing, tell people about it through your social networks.

If you’re at a trade show, encourage people on Twitter to stop by your booth. If you’re sponsoring a special event, talk it up on your Facebook fan page. Or if you’re sponsoring a sports team, consider setting up a fan page for that team. Put your Twitter account and Facebook URL in your advertisements, and encourage people to follow you or become fans. There’s no reason these two business promotion methods have to be separate.

While we’re not predicting the death of traditional marketing methods, we are encouraging you to add social media as a big part of your business promotion toolbox.

Reverse SEO’s importance never became more apparent than it did a couple of weeks ago. I got a call from a potential client — we’ll call him Ken H. Block — who had a Google problem.

Ken was a former sports anchor, well-known to sports fans in his area, and has been online for years. He does video marketing for a couple of very large, multi-national companies, as well as some smaller clients. He banked on his name, but hadn’t done very much to promote it. The problem was that there was another man — Ken S. Block, a convicted felon and scam artist — who had the same name. The problem became obvious when the CEO of one of the companies had Googled his name, and found Ken S. He knew Ken H. was not Ken S., but he couldn’t resist teasing him about it. During a phone call with other company executives.

Ken H needed some reverse SEO badly.

What is Reverse SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website so it appears at the top of search engine results. Conversely, reverse SEO means you push down unwanted, negative results by piling your pages on top of the negative one, pushing it right off the page.

Most people only have to worry about name doubles stealing their thunder, but Ken H. had a problem with people confusing him with a convicted felon. While it wasn’t an issue for the people who knew Ken, it could be a problem for the people who wanted to hire him. And short of paying for a Google Ad that said, “Ken S. Block the felon is not to be confused with Ken H. Block the video marketer,” reverse SEO was going to be his best option.

What can Reverse SEO do for me?

Since Ken H’s search results were a single blog post, it doesn’t look like it will be that difficult to knock from the top rank. But it is not always this easy. We know people who share names with other notable people, and they have worked hard to maintain a top search ranking. One friend shares a similar name with a Big Ten running back, which can sometimes lead to some interesting search results.

There are only a few steps we would need to take for Ken S, but we need to do them many times until we achieve the desired result.

• Blogging is the primary tool in our reverse SEO toolbox, and should be the hub in your social media campaign. Ken H should blog about anything and everything related to his work. He should also write about the Ken S./Ken H. confusion (“I am not Ken S. Block”), and try to focus on getting that as a featured post so people will find it during future searches. By winning searches with that post, he can reverse SEO the Ken S. Block page down from the top position.
• YouTube videos are a great reverse SEO tool. And since Ken H. is a video marketer, he needs to use video to promote his work anyway. And as videos become more popular, easier to access, and available on mobile devices, this will become more important in reverse SEO campaigns.
• Backlink to your website. This is a practice for regular SEO, so you know it’s going to work for reverse SEO too. Basically, the search engines put more stock into websites with a lot of links going into them (that’s a backlink). The more you have, the higher your site appears. In Ken H’s case, if he were to increase his backlinks, his blog will rise to the top of the rankings, which will push Ken S’ name down.

Reverse SEO is not that difficult. It’s just time consuming. You can’t just do a couple of optimization tricks and sit back and relax. These steps need to be repeated many times, and in the right places, if you’re going to have a successful reverse SEO campaign.

The consumer loyalty promotion is still a way for companies to earn repeat business from customers. Whether it’s a coffee shop giving you your 10th latte for free, or an airline miles program that gives you a free ticket after 25,000 travel miles, consumer loyalty promotions are an effective way to bring customers back time and again.

Some of you may be old enough to remember the Green Stamps consumer loyalty promotion in the 60s and 70s and earlier. These consumer loyalty promotions actually started in the 1800s as a way to reward customers who paid with cash. Later, stamps were given to everyone who made a purchase. The stamps could be redeemed for store discounts, or for merchandise. The S&H Green Stamps were very popular in the 1960s and 1970s, and anyone in their 40s and older can remember their parents’ or even their own collections of the green stamps.

Nowadays, rather than giving stamps, many stores just give discounts, but only if you’re a member of one of their consumer loyalty promotions. You show your little card — usually kept on a keychain — when you check out, and they give you a discount on your groceries. Spend enough money, and the reward is usually a discount on their gasoline, in addition to the initial savings. Most people, about 75%, carry at least one of these consumer loyalty promotions cards.

The upside of a consumer loyalty promotion is that you can amass all kinds of purchasing information about your customers with their permission. Want to know how many people have recently begun buying diapers? Or cat food? Or prefer certain brands of beer? Direct mail marketers love to know this kind of information, and will pay for your consumer loyalty promotions lists just to find out new ways to get your customers to buy their products.

But consumer loyalty promotions are not just about selling mailing lists. They’re marketing tools. They encourage people to come back again and again, to earn the rewards you’re offering after 10 cups of coffee, 25,000 miles, $100 spent at a grocery store. The rewards in consumer loyalty promotions are there for you to continually show why your customers need to keep coming back. They’re not just a trick; they show your customers again and again why you’re their provider of choice.

In fact, that’s the point about a good consumer loyalty promotion: you can keep track of your customers, reward loyalty with prizes and discounts. You can also figure out ways to convert your occasional customers to loyal customers, and your loyal customers to raving fans.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, travel consumer loyalty promotions were all the rage. You got airline miles for flying a certain airlines, miles for staying in allied hotels, and could even double and triple those miles if you paid for the flight and night with your miles-earning credit cards. Some days it seemed like you needed a Ph.D. in customer loyalty management just to keep track of it all, but there were news stories of people who would take unnecessary flights just to reach the 500,000 mile platinum level for the next year.

If you’re thinking about setting up a consumer loyalty promotion of your own, be sure you give your customers something they want. It’s not enough just to give a discount, or a cheap piece of merchandise no one wanted in the first place, like the proverbial toaster for opening a new account. Figure out why your customers are there in the first place, and give them that. Sandwich shops give free sandwiches, airlines give free travel tickets. Give your customers something for free when they spend a certain amount of money or buy a specific number of items.

Referrals are another great form of consumer loyalty promotions. Customers are not just coming back themselves, they’re bringing their friends. If a customer comes to your store once a week and brings a friend who now comes once a week, that customer has actually doubled their value. They’re already fans, and by bringing in their friends, they will actually become more loyal to you and your company.

consumer loyalty promotions are a great way to not only thank your customers, but to market your company at no additional costs other than the rewards you gave out for your efforts.

Finding affordable SEO services can make the difference between success and failure for your online business. That’s because the once-popular pay-per-click model (where you pay for ads to be placed on a search engine, such as the right-hand side of Google search results) is not bringing in the results they once — if ever — did.

So why do you need affordable SEO services? What can they do that a pay-per-click campaign can’t. And why can’t you just create a website and count on people finding you that way?

Let’s test pay-per-click vs. affordable SEO services: the next time you do a Google search, pay attention to where your eyes go on the results page. If you’re like most people, they found the top of the search results, and quickly scanned to the bottom of the screen, not the bottom of the page. They didn’t jump to the right side and the paid ads, and they didn’t look at the sponsored links at the very top of the page. They looked at the actual search results, and skipped the stuff people paid for. You’re not alone. There have been several studies that examine eye tracking and heat mapping, and have found that users tend to skip the ads on a page, and zero in on the results.

In other words, the pay-per-click ads are not receiving the attention the online business owners were counting on, but the affordable SEO services are creating positive results.

And why doesn’t “if you build it, they will come” work either? Because most web designers don’t have the knowledge and skills an affordable SEO services firm has when it comes to optimizing your website for maximum search effectiveness.

That’s why affordable SEO services are very important. Search engine optimization is the idea that you make your website everything the search engines want to see. An affordable SEO services firm can help you with organic SEO consulting — putting your website at the top of the search results without paying for any ads or sponsored links.

An affordable SEO services firm will work with you to find the ideal keywords for your website, and then help you write your web copy, format your web pages, and even choose the best domain name and page titles to achieve those top rankings. A pay-per-click firm will just help you find the lowest price for getting your links on the part of the page people rarely look at.

Organic search results are more trusted and accepted by search users, because they’re real websites created by real people based on things people really want to find. They’re not bought and paid for by a pay-per-click campaign. They’re created by either the user or an affordable SEO services firm that specializes in organic search consulting.

But you can even forgo the affordable SEO services and take the DIY route instead. If you want to take the time to learn the proper formatting and web copy creation, you can create your own search success. It’s not that hard if you have the technical skills and patience to do it, although we should warn you that you’ll need to spend quite a bit of time each week keeping up with any changes to the accepted search techniques, to the algorithms the search engines use, and even to your competitors’ websites. (That’s why an affordable SEO services firm is often a better alternative.)

Investing in affordable SEO services is a great way to propel your website to the top of the search results. And when your online business relies on people finding you quickly and easily, it’s one of the smartest business decisions you can make.

Using traditional promotions to reach Generation Y doesn’t work.

Let’s just get that out of the way. We’re normally not supposed to start articles like this on a down note, but you need to know what doesn’t work before we can really talk about what does.

Generation Y — those born between 1977 and 1994 — don’t respond to regular promotions. They don’t watch TV, they don’t read billboards, they don’t do direct mail. But they’re such an important target to marketers, that most marketers are looking for any kind of promotions to reach Gen Y.

So why Y?

Because they’re a consumer power that actually outnumber the Baby Boomers. There are 82 million Gen Yers, give or take a few, and only 78 million Boomers. Generation Y are 26% of the population, and their spending power is more than $200 billion, plus they influence another $300 – $400 billion. According to some reports, Gen Yers influence over 50% of their family’s car choices.

Tantalizing, huh? But if you can’t reach them with traditional promotions, how do you do it?

That’s where online and digital promotions become important. Generation Y is online. That’s where they grew up, that’s where they get their information. When asked where they get their news, most Gen Yers said “Yahoo.” They watch YouTube videos on their phones. They communicate through texts, and use Facebook.

In short, Generation Y wants you to communicate with them, not market to them. So what are some promotions ideas you can use?

First, you need to go where they are. Before you start any sort of Gen Y promotions campaign, get to know them. Figure out who your target audience is, and where they like to hang out, what they like to do, where they get their entertainment.

Vans Shoes, makers of the famous skateboard shoes, built skateboard parks in California and Florida. They sponsor a skateboard team. When their customers need to buy new skateboard shoes, they buy the ones they see at the skate parks, or on the shirts of the team from the skate competition.

Tampax sponsors a social network for young girls, without blatantly marketing to them. They place their logo discreetly on the network, while young girls connect with each other and discuss whatever young girls discuss. The logo just sits there. Then, when it’s time to go shopping for feminine products with their moms, they choose the product they see on their network.

Brands like Mountain Dew, Nokia, Coca-Cola, and Chrysler are paying video game developers for product placement promotions inside video games. Tony Hawk’s Ride, EA’s NBA “2K10,” and Need for Speed: Shift are just a few of the games that include ads. Whether it’s billboards, vending machines, or traditional sports advertising venues (like sponsor signs inside an arena), video game promotions are an excellent way to reach Gen Yers. Remember, Gen Y influences more than half of their family’s car purchases, so putting car ads in video games makes great promotions sense.

Text clubs are another form of digital promotions. Since most Gen Yers are communicating with each other via text, they’re a great way for local businesses like restaurants and clubs to reach Generation Y. Text clubs are opt-in marketing efforts. A restaurant can use text clubs to advertise hidden specials — “free appetizers with dinner, tonight only” — or a club can send out sneak previews about bands or drink specials.

When you’re creating your B2C marketing campaign, make sure you give digital promotions a good, hard look in order to reach the elusive Generation Y. With their spending power and large population, it’s important to connect with them now, so as they grow older and their spending power increases, you have earned their brand loyalty and top-of-mind awareness.

Congratulations! You’ve started your own online business and now you’re ready for online business promotion. There are a number of schools of thought about online business promotion, they all come down to the same basic techniques: social media, search engine optimization, and offline promotion. If you start this early on, the entire process can be automated and create recurring revenue for you

Online business promotion starts with a blog.

You’ve started your online business, the catalog and shopping cart software are running, and you’re carefully written dozens, if not hundreds, of product descriptions. But you’re not done. Make blogging a part of your online business promotion. Blog posts are great landing pages for your website, with a much longer and keyword-rich description than your catalog entries. Write articles about typical problems your customers will face, and show how your products are the solutions. Post customer testimonials and photos with the products in action. The blog will become the center of your social media campaign, and improve your search engine optimization results.

Use social media for online business promotion.

Social media is another important part of your online business promotion. Create accounts for yourself and/or your company on Twitter, Facebook, and any social networks that fall within your target market. Follow/friend people who fit within that niche, and focus only on them. But rather than spam them with product messages, promote your how-to articles on your blog, answer questions related to your product, and let them see you as a solution, not a pest.

Online business promotion means optimizing for search engines.

It’s crucial that your website is optimized for search engines, otherwise you’ll waste a big part of your online business promotion efforts. Do simple things, like use important keywords in headlines and anchor text, having back links to your website and blog posts. These will lead to higher search engine placement. As you rank higher in the search results, more people will find you, which will lead to more visits, which leads to increased sales.

Offline marketing is important for online business promotion.

Offline marketing is an important tool in the online business promotion toolbox, especially as you focus on a particular niche. If you sell hand degreaser to car mechanics, go to the places where the gearheads gather. Go to car shows, trade shows, and conventions. Visit the garages in your town and the surrounding area. Buy a mailing list of auto repair shops around the country, and send them a sample of your product.

Tell everyone they can only buy the product on your website. Make cards and brochures with your URL on it. While you can certainly sell your product at these events, a lot of people will say “not right now” or “maybe I’ll come back.” Give them a card and tell them to find you online when they’re ready.

By following these online business promotion steps, you can set your business to run on autopilot. What you’ll see is that your blog will be picked up by the search engines and seen by social media friends, they’ll continue to visit your website, buy your products, and this will be an automatic revenue generator for you.