Leveraging In Business
Businesses tend to build momentum over time, where marketing
gets easier and less costly. One of the reasons this happens
is because the greater your customer base, the more you can
leverage it to your benefit.
Leveraging is nothing more than using success in one area
to make success in another area more likely.
When I built my first website, it took a year or more to
get any kind of response. Partly because I was green and did
not know how to properly market it, but also because I was
starting from a base of nothing.
Once that website was established, I could use it not only
for what I had originally intended, but I could use it to
promote anything new that I wanted to start.
This is leveraging at its simplest. Using an existing advantage
to create an additional benefit.
On a local (offline) basis, I began with offering computer
services. Later, I started a local newsletter format newspaper
(there is no news service here). That newspaper was built
on the foundation that my computer business formed. Then the
newspaper became a marketing tool for the computer business,
and for additional endeavors.
I now own over 30 separate websites, and am able to leverage
them to benefit my entire business in all sorts of ways. I
can also use them to help other businesses get a foot in the
door, through link exchanges or low cost ads.
There are many ways in which you can leverage once you get
started. Some of those ways include:
1. Cross linking websites. This is a very simple way of using
the pagerank and established search engine listings of one
site to jump-start a new site.
2. Cross promoting your businesses. Even if you have totally
unrelated offerings, you'll still have crossover customers
or viewers. You can use marketing campaigns in one line to
benefit another.
3. If you cross link your sites, then you can use Pay Per
Click on one site, and it can often increase the traffic to
other sites as well.
4. Joint Ventures. Once you have a customer base, you have
something to leverage against someone else's customer base.
You can join with other business owners to help one another.
Look under Collaborations on this site for details.
5. Combine two separate displays in an offline event, by
sharing a booth for multiple business lines. You need to keep
them at opposite ends of the booth if you do this, but it
can save you the cost of two booths or separate events.
6. Create a doorway site to market multiple websites with
a single promotional URL. This helps you consolidate your
advertising, and it can bring in crossover customers.
7. Create a double sided business card. Put a different business
on each side. This can also bring in crossover customers.
8. Participate in viral marketing projects. For many, if
you make multiple contributions, you can promote multiple
URLs. For very little extra time, you can promote a single
viral marketing item through several of your sites, and promote
multiple business lines.
The catch to it is, that you have to build a little bit of
a base from which to leverage, before you can use it in these
ways. It takes about a year of hard work to get to the point
where you have enough of a base to use it to any real advantage.
But once you have it, it will grow consistently, and sometimes
exponentially.
When you have more than one line of business, look at your
marketing methods, and consider how marketing one item might
be used to benefit others. Sometimes you can greatly reduce
your overall marketing costs just by setting things up so
that one marketing method spills over into another business
line.
Get the right types of marketing, combined with the right
cross promoting tactics, and your business will develop an
awesome marketing power.
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