If you are self employed or have set up your own company, you may have been happy with the amount of work you have had. But there often comes a time when that business wants or needs to expand and take on new customers. It can be tricky knowing exactly what to do in order to gain new customers. You may be wary about splashing thousands of pounds in to marketing without a guarantee that you will get it back two fold in sales.

If you don’t want to invest a lot of money in to the marketing you need to accept that it w

Is likely to take longer to grow the business. It may be that once you can see the positive effects the marketing is having you are happy to increase your budget and invest a bit more.

Using ways in which you can promote your business for free are great places to start. Many of the social media site such as Facebook and Twitter do not charge for you to have a profile. You can then promote this profile by running competitions, sharing interesting Information to build up a following.

Next week will mark the start of a new year. This year certainly has been very different for many of us and some businesses have really struggled whilst a small number have thrived.

It may be that you do not get your new marketing budget until April but even if that is the case, now is the perfect time to start to plan what you are going to do.

The coming year is filled with uncertainty at the moment and it may be that you are worried about spending money on marketing, but the fact remains that it is often the ones that invest most on to their marketing that do well.

You need to think carefully about what is the best marketing avenue for your business. It may be that social media is going to give you the best return or possibly that Google AdWords is the way forward. Whatever you decide to invest in make sure that you are able to track how successful it is and review your marketing often as you may need to make changes as you go along. Using a marketing company will cost more but can usually ensure that your budget is used as effectively as possible.

Most devices that run some sort of software will need to be updated from time to time. These include anything from phones, tablets and computers through to TV’s, routers and even smart watches.

As technology advances updates are needed to be able to feed new or improved functionality to your device. For example, on your phone, you may install an app update for your online banking which will add new functionality such as viewing previous statements etc. Updates also often include a lot of additional security functions and if you do not do them you may be leaving yourself vulnerable to a cyber attack or fraud.

Often if you do not do a number of updates you will start to find that may applications and services stop working or become unreliable.

Before you do updates it is important to try and take a back up of your important documents or pictures in case something goes wrong during the back up. Sometimes updates are scheduled to be done at set times, but if this is not going to be convenient for you, then schedule a new time when the device is not needed to be used.

Despite online marketing being around for a good number of years now, there are stills some companies that have yet to really get to grips with it. For businesses who are not yet actively marketing online, they could be missing out on a huge amount of revenue.

For many companies, the first thing they do when it comes to online marketing is have a website created. This can be used as a portfolio to showcase your products and services or an e-commerce site to sell online. If you are a little worried about ploughing that much money straight in to web development then you may want to explore the social media marketing platform first. You can advertise on here in several ways and do not need a website.

Setting up an account on the social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be a great way to communicate with people regardless of their location. Make sure that you update your profile regularly to ensure that the information is up to date and post content that is useful and interesting for your followers to read.  Be careful to get the balance right though as too many updates in a short space of time can become annoying and be seen as spamming, which will lose followers.

When it comes to online marketing it is important to understand the different types of visitors you can have. This will allow you to see what marketing avenues are working and which are not.

In internet marketing you may have heard the term traffic sources, this relates to how a visitor has come to find your website. There are many different forms of traffic but the main ones are referrals, direct, organic and paid for. Below is a quick overview of what they all mean:

Organic – An organic visit is counted when someone finds you via one of the search engine search results such as Bing, Google or Yahoo.

Referrals – this is the number of visits to your website that have come through another site. This may be a link that you have on another site to yours, this may or may not include social visits.

Social – This is referrals from Facebook, Twitter, Linked In for example. These may also be included in the referral figure.

Direct – this is the number of people that have come to your site by typing your address directly in to the address bar. Often these are repeat visitors or ones that have got your address off a business card, signage or maybe by calling you first.

Paid or PPC – Paid for traffic is when someone has clicked on a link and the business gets charged a fee for this.