These are undoubtedly difficult times for small businesses in London. Budgets are tight and increasingly businesses are looking within themselves to see where expenditure can be cut. When it comes to internet marketing this might be up for consideration but if your internet marketing is being done properly you should know exactly what value you are gaining from it and that should clearly prove that it is not a luxury but quite clearly as a necessity.

Whether you are using an agency or doing it yourself you must make sure you have the necessary metrics and analytics in place to measure the value of all of your internet marketing efforts.  If you are doing an email marketing campaign, track how many people are converting into a valued metric whether it be a sale, a registration or an enquiry for example then work out if the cost justifies your Return On Investment (ROI). The same with search engine optimisation for example; how many visitors to your site are being generated through organic search and how many of those are converting, what is the cost of that conversion and does the end result justify the means? If not, stop it and rethink! If your agency isn’t able to show you that then ditch them and find one that can!

If you’re on a really tight budget then there are few internet marketing activities that you can do which are cheap, non-technical but just require a bit of your time. A few things you can do are:

• Make sure your business is listed on Google Local as this is very quick and easy to set up and will cover your business for local searches on Google.
• Friends, family members, suppliers, clients and employees all of which which hopefully have a vested interest in you and your business and most of which will also have their own web presence of some description. If possible aske them to put a link on their website or blog to your website. Make sure that the link contains the keywords you want to be found for and not necessarily your business name and preferably that it is placed within relevant content on their website and not part of a whole heap of outgoing links.
• Free Directories; whether by industry sector or location or indeed some other parameter are an easy way to gain free advertising as well as an inbound link to your website. They are out there, you just need to search for them. Be aware some will have a much bigger benefit than others in terms of traffic to you website and the importance that search engines will give to them.
• Blogging is a great way of driving traffic to your website you can set up a free blog without any technical knowledge at Blogger. Blogs are also an excellent way of showcasing your expertise and interacting with potential clients. Each post and comment creates a nice link which search engines love!  Don’t be afraid to ineract with other blogs and where appropriate put links back to your website.
• Forums are often places where people are asking questions, seeking advice or solutions; again these can be a great place to showcase your expertise and link back to your website.

These are all free internet marketing activites that you can pursue so long as you have a bit of time on your hands!

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