Promoting Your Business During Tough Times

Our second meeting was light in attendance since the devastating hit from Hurricane Ike; although we had some good discussion about staying positive and focused on our businesses. Some suggestions for promotion and marketing efforts were directed toward inexpensive and FREE ways of accomplishing this. Some ideas offered by members included:

Robert - Get a shirt with your company name on it and go volunteer somewhere. What a great idea! It's exposure for your company, excellent community service and the cost is a shirt and some time.

Susan - Buy vintage cards (often 20 - 30 for less than .50) at estate sales and garage sales. Use these cards to send a personal hand written note to clients or prospective clients. Often they may have the perfect image or saying to capture the sentiment.

Dr. Angie - Angie offered exposure for fellow business owners in the Bay Area Networking Group through her 'New Mom Mondays' (if your services/products relate or if you have promotional items to include as giveaways) as well as counter or lobby space for promotional material.

Kandi (suggested week before) - Newsletters mailed or distributed in the community to let people know about you or to let existing clients know that you're still in business and ready to assist with (your service/product here) - offer specials or discounts to track your efforts

Susan- Check your internal and external links for your website. Internal links are links on your site that include your page navigation, text links, and links that go to other sites from your site. External links are links that are on other people's web sites that when clicked come to your site. You should talk with colleagues within your industry about exchanging links with each other, especially those that would be complementary.


If anyone would like to add suggestions to our meeting topics, we would love for this to be a site to refer back to when we need to. So give us your ideas and thoughts and let's continue growing our companies!

Cheers~