Competition can be a problem for many small “mom and pop” type companies as they generally operate on a limited budget and do not have the financial clout to advertise heavily through conventional channels and generally cannot afford to run “test' marketing campaigns to find out which advertising medium works best for their business model – every investment, no matter how small – has to pay off for them!

This of course, is widely touted as the major advantage of doing business online. very little to no cost marketing, with potentially a huge return when compared to off line publishing such as local newspapers, magazines and trade journals, or TV and radio marketing. According to web “guru's” it seems that an internet presence is essential for any business, large or small, high technology or heavy manufacturing, local or international, but is this the case? What are the pros and cons of marketing your business online?

Marketing online provides cost effective and long term marketing strategies
The Internet has become a part of life for most of the public when it comes to shopping or searching for information on products or services. The security stigma that prevented consumers shopping online is long gone, most people actually prefer to shop online nowadays. Today, the Internet has become the most powerful selling and marketing tool available. Internet marketing offers cost effective ways for small businesses to enhance their product or service distribution and even create their brand – something that would cost millions through conventional means! With online marketing their are no printing costs, media buying or centre/sales agent fees. In comparison with conventional forms of marketing the internet is cheap. Additionally unlike brochures or TV/radio ads they essentially last forever, once your marketing efforts are online they stay online! Whereas with brochures or TV advertisements or infomercials they have a limited run and if you want continued exposure you have to pay for it all over again! Most website content is timeless and will produce returns indefinitely. Website promotion provides enduring content. Whereas an advertisement in a newspaper or business magazine may quickly lose its sales generating value within a day or so or as soon as the next issue is published, Website promotion is genrally timeless. of course sometimes the dates of secial offers and prices may have to be changed occasionally, but the vast majority of your website marketing content will remain online for many years.

Time Saving
Another important advantage of doing business online is that it saves time in so many ways (although initially if small businesses are not comfortable with web technologies it may require some additional time to be invested in the internet side of the business). Having a good web presence will actually eliminate a lot of time informing customers about your products and services, how to use them, uses and benefits etc. A well used and customer friendly method is to publish a “frequently asked questions” section so customers can immediately find the information themselves and in many cases can then go online and make a purchase without the involvement of staff at all. This obviously saves time and money.

Disadvantages of doing business online
The only real disadvantage of promoting your business online seems to be that some time and effort will require to be invested in learning about internet marketing technologies and techniques. However this is a lot easier than it used to be. You no longer have to be a computer geek crunching hundreds of lines of raw code and have a computer science degree. Nowadays there are a number of software options available that will allow evn the biggest technophobe to create and upload a website. If you can write a letter on a PC using an application like Microsoft Word or similar then you can create a website no problem. Also marketing techniques for websites are freely available online for your information, so it all comes down to time and effort – but lets face it, it always has.

more website promotion software

website promotion tools

Like many young people my age, I have a prepaid cell phone, where you pay in advance for the minutes you use instead of getting a bill at the end of the month. After bouncing back and forth between a couple of different prepaid cellular companies, I finally settled on Virgin Mobile as my cell phone service provider. I like my Virgin Mobile service a lot, but I find that sometimes it can be expensive with the amount of minutes that I use. Luckily, a relatively new service from Virgin Mobile called Sugar Mama allows customers like me to earn free airtime, which really helps to cut down on my overall cell phone bill.

The Sugar Mama service from Virgin Mobile allows you to earn free airtime by watching & responding to ads, either online or via text message. If you already have Virgin Mobile as your cellular provider, you can get started using Sugar Mama right away. Just go to http://www.virginmobileusa.com and enter your cell phone number and vKey (numeric security code) to login to your account. From the “My Account” page, scroll down near the bottom and you should see a link to the Sugar Mama website. Click that link, then click the “Start Earning Airtime” button on the next page. Now, you're ready to get started!

The first time you use the Sugar Mama site, you'll be asked to answer a few demographic questions so that they can send you targeted advertising-but this literally takes less than two minutes. After that, you'll be taken to your first ad. Most ads are in the form of videos and are about a minute long. For watching a 1 minute ad, you get 1 minute of airtime. After watching the video, you'll be asked one or two questions about what you thought of it, then you'll be taken to a link to receive your free minute of airtime. Make sure you click this link, because if you don't you won't receive your free minute. It's as simple as that.

Sugar Mama will also send text messages to your cell phone about twice a week. It is important to remember that all messages sent to and received from Sugar Mama are absolutely free, so there's no charge for these ad messages. When you receive a Sugar Mama text message, it will tell you to reply with a single word (i.e. a text ad for Subway might require me to send the word “Sandwich” in response). Replying to these text messages is the key to receiving your free minutes. Once you send the appropriate response to Sugar Mama, you'll receive a text message back confirming that your reply was received. For every two text messages you respond to, you'll earn one minute of airtime. You receive less airtime for texts than videos because it takes less time to view the text ads.

Overall, I've found the Sugar Mama program to be very fun and a good use of my time. Virgin Mobile limits you to five free minutes per day through Sugar Mama, so I never spend much more than 5 minutes on the Sugar Mama site at a time. For a small amount of time over the last few months, I've earned 141 free airtime minutes, which is $14.10 worth of minutes with the plan I'm using. Sugar Mama probably won't allow you to receive your Virgin Mobile phone service completely free, but it can definitely help to cut down on those prepaid cell phone bills which can get very high at times. If you are a Virgin Mobile customer, I would definitely recommend checking out the Sugar Mama website.

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