Getting Into Marketing Your Business

What do you need to do, minimum, to stay on top of social media marketing for your design or development business? In this article, Linda lists free tools that can push your business to the top. The drawback? Your time for learning curves and to maintain activity.

Other Marketing Ideas

The list of nine marketing tools shown above just scratches the surface of what you can utilize to get your name out in front of online readers. Other ideas include:

• Branding: Learn more about how you can brand your name or business name through tools such as Chris Brogan's free eBook on the topic.

• Content Aggregation: Use sites such as AllTop and more to get your blog out to readers through venues other than RSS.

• Crowd Sourcing: Learn more about Crowd Sourcing at Wired. Crowdsourcing Directory also is a great source to learn more about this topic.

• Discussion Boards and Forums:  The list for boards and forums for graphic designers, Web designers and developers is too long to list here. This is one basic tool that can help you get your name out there in front of peers and potential clients as well as a format that can help you to resolve design and development problems and issues, stay on top of peer news and help develop a network or a community.

• Event Planning and Participation: Facebook provides a venue where you can become a fan of various groups and entities and get notices about their events. But, what If you want to plan your own event? Other than marketing that event, you might also need a tool that can help you to stay organized. One such tool includes Google Docs and Calendar for collaboration, or PayPal for event registration and payment options that you can add to a Web site or blog. You also can use a site such as Regonline to allow users to register for an event (they do charge for use, but sign-up is free).

• Mashups: If you're a developer, you know about the best mashup communities and blogs. But, for social media and marketing mashups, the best site to follow is Mashable.

• Organizing: Try Evernote to help get your office in order. I've managed to throw out hundreds of business cards simply by putting the information online. Additionally, the tagging feature in Evernote allows users to "file" information by tag or category. You also can use your email in most cases to organize contacts. This is useful for when you want to upload certain contacts to various social media sites.

• Presentation Sharing: What if you created a bang-up presentation to market your talents and work (yes, many people still use PowerPoint)? Use some free sites such as SlideServe, SlideShare and SlideSix to set those presentations free.

• Public Relations: Try Pitchengine to package stories and share them with journalists, bloggers, and influencers worldwide.

The list could go on, as I could add virtual worlds, rating services and more as tools that could put your name out there for many other viewers to see. But, designers and developers are busy folks – unless you plan to make marketing and social networking a career, the list above is going to stretch you a bit. Once you earn enough money to expand, however, you can hire a PR person who can help your business to expand even more. Just make sure that PR person knows about all the tools mentioned above, otherwise that person is not worth his or her salt.