How did you get your business out there?

[CheapestBusinessCards]

What we have always found to work, is get your website up and running, do the basic SEO yourself, then get a batch of business cards/leaflets printed up and get them all over your local area. You should then get orders from this, and you can use these orders to pay for some more SEO / development of your site.

Hope this helps

[Xenonsoft]

Cheers CBC. That's pretty much what we have planned, we've got a few jobs on the go, once they've come in we'll get our business cards printed and I'll probably leave them around potential business who need a website, possibly under window wipers on business vans.

[CheapestBusinessCards]

We have an offer on 5000 business cards at the moment that are just right for this offer of promotion.

5000 Biz Card Flyers £58

Have a good day

[VLAHAKISA]

I've barely ever spent money, and any time it's never worked.

I've marketed myself by doing my own search engine optimisation, which has proven very effective, and also by online and offline business networking.

If you spend some time (well a fair amount of time actually) on seo along with online business networking you really can sit back and wait for the orders to come rolling in. If you are consistent they will definitely come rolling in.

Time spent on seo probably amounts to no more than the time spent knocking doors or cold calling. Either method of marketing is fine depending on what you prefer. Both will work. Or maybe you could try all of them together.

I'm 7 years trading, and going strong still :) You don't need to spend a penny really if you don't want to.

Amanda

[Xenonsoft]

That's a nice page rank you've got there Amanda!

We have an offer on 5000 business cards at the moment that are just right for this offer of promotion.

5000 Biz Card Flyers £58

Have a good day

Cheers CBC, we're considering Matt Lam business cards but that offer is very tempting, I'll consider it for sure.

[Boss Hog]

I totally agree with Amanda as we have hardly spent anything in advertising, I think it just depends who you are targetting, online or your local business community.

Personally a bit of both is your safest bet as online marketing can take a while to get right and will take a lot of your time, especially from a SEO point of view, where as a local leafleting campaign or newspaper advertisement (or similar) can give you instant business (although this costs money).

[Xenonsoft]

Regarding the SEO side, what exactly did you and others do Damon? I checked your page rank and it's a fantastic 5/10.

Is that just following the article you posted in the SEO forum, and lots of networking (such as submitting to directories?)?

Our site's SEO is currently so bad we don't get to the top of the search 'Xenonsoft Studios', a directory submission from us does.