The hardest part of marketing is what time you get to the party. What I mean is that most of the information distributed by guru’s and marketing experts makes the majority of people “jonny-come-lately’s” to the method, and doesn’t help them stand above the crowd or their competition. So how do you stand out?
Well first you can be remarkable. That’s the simple solution. But what can you do to let people know where you are? Who you are? What you do?
For those of you who have checked out my other articles, you may get the impression that I’m a Google Guy. I’ve even got a tee shirt that says as much. (Want one? Send me an e-mail.) And Google has a host of tools you can use to promote your business for FREE!
If you are a bootstrapping business entrepreneur, Free is one of those magic promotion words that can increase your ROI to an infinite number. If you can generate ten clients per year off of a free listing on Google, then you’re looking at some serious marketing ROI. So your business should be listed in Google’s local business directory. That goes without saying.
But if you want to be the first on your block to use something new, then take your digital video camera and take pictures of your town, your area, and tag the photo’s with your business name, a link to your website or your USP, then add them to a page on your website with local specific information in the tags. Google images will crawl the photos on the page, just like they crawl WebPages. Then, as visitors do local searches or call up Google Maps, your photo’s and links back to your site are called up in the search results. This is basic SEO stuff, but by tagging the photo’s you’re going to improve your results.
Now how can you use a picture to promote your product? You don’t, you use the pictures around you to promote awareness of your brand or your business. How you choose to do so is up to you, yet this is an opportunity to go beyond the normal pictures of your product or logo. Think about beautiful sunsets over a local park or lake linked to your site. Or children playing soccer, or a flower. Whatever you find that would make a good photograph should go on your site, tagged, and indexed so that Google can crawl it and add it to search results.
Want to be even more of a community resource and drive traffic to your site? Set up a special page for an event, and then print up 100-1000 business cards on your computer using a simple business card printing software. Go to the event and shoot hundreds of high quality photographs, tag and index onto the special page and upload them to your site. While you’re at the event, pass out the business cards to invite people to view the pictures and download them. Also upload the pictures to share sites, like FLICKR, so that the visitors can order copies of them. Be sure to link to your business on the photo page, and include descriptions.
Take it even further and play around with photo editing software to add captions or funny phrases to the candid shots. You could build a whole series of pages around each event, with the goal of generating brand/product awareness and increasing your Google rankings in search results. The only limit is your own imagination.
