Your Online Business Blog

With offline marketing I am marking myself first. I make it my daily goal to meet new people a day. I am not pushing my business just talking to them. I am looking to build confidence and trust in me. This is built up over a weeks or even months. This may seem a long drawn out process but remember I am meeting new people each day. When I have ascertained that they will benefit from what I have to offer and I would like to have them in my team I will talk to them about the business.

This way I do not scare them off and I have pre qualified them so I would be wasting my time with the wrong person some where down the track. If they are not interested that’s fine. You can often get referrals from these people because they trust you and like the way you operate.

To market yourself online isn’t a real lot different. You are still building relationships over time. It is just more time effective online. It can be done for a minimal cost. A couple ways to do this are:

Get yourself a Blog. People can visit your site, find out information about you. They can comment on any article you have there. Hence, you are building relationships with people.

Another way is to join an online forum, and take part in discussions. There or lots of topic specific forums. Remember you are building relationships. Do not use forums for selling.

Writing articles and submitting them to ezines is another good method. If people like what you write they will read more of your articles thus building that relationship. If you set up links to a landing page through an auto responder you can start generating your own free leads. By doing this you can be developing relationship with people automatically.

Another method is to join social websites. You can put information about your self, your interests, goals etc. One thing you do need to be careful of that you don’t just appear to be selling only. You want to appear as a real person first, the selling can come later. These sites are for building a relationship with people so they can like and trust what ever you may have to offer.

The thing to consider is that with the offline model you must find people to market your business. This can take a lot of time, but you are in control of who and how many you market to. The amount of people you market to is limited to the time you have and the amount of people you have to prospect to. There would be more prospects in a large city than a small country town.

With the online model people are coming to you through your various marketing methods. If done the right way you will get far more prospects online as you have a much wider market. If they are contacting you the chances of them being interested in what you have to offer is much greater.

In conclusion if you like the personal contacts the offline model may suit you. If you don’t like personal contacting and you want to appeal to a much global market the online method may suit you. Personally I think you should use both. Which ever one works best for you; you should concentrate your efforts into.