Here’s a great list of the kinds of things a small business can do to grow their visibility, build new relationships and deliver value to their market. No business needs to do all of them but each of these technology options lets you, as the business owner, use your personal strengths and your business purpose as a guide to create more value than you could without using these kinds of technology available right now.
Enjoy!
Start a weekly or daily TV show where your market can interact with you by emailing in questions, have people twitter questions to you and answer them in real time, talk about relevant news that your market would benefit from. Would you believe that you can set up your own live broadcast through ustream for free? If you think that doing a regular video show is out of reach for a small business owner, you’ve got to check out Wine Library TV.
Get Connected to talk to people directly. As mentioned in an earlier post, your market is online and using social media. Your users are open to talking to you person to person. Take advantage of that with Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Podcast. If being in front of the camera is something you’d rather not do but still like the idea of getting your current and future customer and market to hear what you have to say, consider doing a podcast show. The distribution works just like a blog although by itself, podcasting is not a solo revenue channel. Instead, podcasting is an effective way of talking to your market, building a brand and awareness for your other products and services. It can serve as a great learning platform for interviews and client case studies too.
Print on Demand. Getting a book written that will benefit your market is no longer a feat to be accomplished. Digital Print on Demand companies like Lulu, Blurb and CreateSpace make the publishing part of having a book a non-issue. Anyone can publish their book. What is critical though is providing the value to your market and positioning yourself as the expert and give good content that others would want to read about in print. If a book sounds like too big an undertaking, HP has put together a Magazine on Demand print option called MagCloud. You can sign up for the beta as a publisher
Indie Music Distribution. This one is more for creative businesses than most other options on this post. The way music distribution has changed in the last few years enables musicians to reach their market and distribute their music with greater ease than before. iTunes, Amazon for distribution, Facebook and MySpace for connecting with fans and touring info. There’s a great startup helping musicians take care of the back end of music distribution, check out The E.A.R. Card.
Have a youtube vidoe channel for your niche. The benefit from the mass of users uploading content to Youtube by collecting the best of videos related to your niche. Be the leader in organizing the best of your niche on YouTube. You dont have to spend the time creating the videos for your industry, just editing down the list of the best.
Foster interaction within your niche community. Using a hosted service like Ning or an open source platform like Elgg.
Start small with new product manufacturing. A new company, Ponoko lets you turn your idea and design plans into a physical product.
If your own product is out of reach, how about branding existing products that would serve your industry. AliBaba provides the resources to do so.
Clothing on Demand with Cafepress and Printfection. For small businesses and entrepreneurs with events or looking for easy to get started add on product lines.
Bonus: Start Blogging. A blog lets you develop your expertise within your industry while keeping a two way communication going. Check out Wordpress.
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