Where's Daddy Blog

Difficulties marketing yourself December 5, 2009

When you open for business, you want to spend as little money as possible to start with. This can make getting the word out a tedious and daunting task. You have to stay on top of  your business. However, even devoting your days to marketing  your company can prove fruitless and tiresome. Below, you will find a breakdown of the difficulties I have been encountering.

• Your business cards need to be printed with quality. – My wife controls the finances in my house. I just work like a dog. Unfortunately that means any expenditures I encounter need to be approved. So, getting my cards to the shop that i know has excellent quality (also a minimum order) is my first hurdle. I have gotten some printed at the local office supply store. The quality left a bad taste in my mouth for the print jobs in the corner of the store.
• Pass them out. – If you have a family to feed and shelter, your business is probably not your only job. If this is true, you may not have enough time between jobs to do much social interaction and get the cards passed out. I am currently working 3 jobs if you include my own business.
• Get a website up. – The cheapest way to do this is to build it yourself. This is not too hard with the free templates out there. The pain in the butt part is the free web hosting. You always get that sub-domain. It can make your website’s address ugly. In most cases you can buy the domain of your choice for only a few dollars a month, or even per year.
• Then you have to promote your site – This can bee one of the most difficult and expensive tasks. Start by submitting your site to search engines. Many of the submission sites give you good advice on how to get a better rank. You will also find some free tools to help you with meta tags that help the search engines find you. The expensive part is when you begin to try to set up links to your site on other sites. I prefer not to use link exchange sites because you can easily end up with some not so desireable  graphics on your site. You can also end up with many links and no content.
• The most important one is the word of mouth. – One thing to always remember… “One disatisfied customer speaks louder than 10 happy customers.” Always, I repeat, always do your job to the best of your abilities if not better.

Those are the current hurdles i am dealing with at the moment. Feel free to provide advice or or bring new, inexpensive ideas for marketing. That is all I have for now. I may ad to this posting at a later time.