By John Carranza
If I had one piece of advice on how to best use the internet to grow your business, it would be to position yourself as an expert in your field. Like never before, the internet presents several opportunities to communicate with your current and future customers and allows you to share information and valuable resources that can position you as an expert in your industry.
An effective website is just one small part of the bigger picture. Today, by using blogs, YouTube and social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can present information and resources to your target market that are of real value to them. In doing so, you gain their trust as an authority in your market. This will lead to loyal customers who seek you out as opposed to the more traditional (and less effective) method of searching for customers by pushing your message to them – inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing.
Marketing has definitely changed recently as the internet revolutionized how businesses find customers. In reality, it is now a case of the customers finding the products or services they are interested in purchasing. If you are like me (and the research has proven that a huge percentage is), you go to Google first when looking for a product or service to buy. If you take advantage of the power of the internet and use those services I mentioned like blogs, YouTube, Facebook, etc. then you increase your chances dramatically that you will be found online. And today, that can be the difference between having a business that is thriving, or one that is barely surviving.