The Basics of Market Presence Building

For a small to medium sized business, having a strong market presence can be hard. Competition is stiff, and it's hard to make your company's voice heard for all the shouting. That's why Internet marketing is such an amazing tool for small businesses, especially when it comes to market presence building.Online market presence building is basically like doing web PR - getting your name out there in different ways. The Internet makes many things possible and your first step to having a strong market presence online is an awesome website. After all, this is the new millennium and having an interactive, fully-loaded website is a necessity.A fully-loaded website shouldn't just list your products and services. It needs good, strong content; interesting, compelling design; lead generation forms and of course an industry-related blog and forum. Both a blog and forum are key to market presence building, as blog posts and forum threads often get heavy circulation across the web.In some ways, controlling your market presence building is like hiring a public relations manager to control your online reputation. What shows up in search engines for your company right now? Is it your site, blogs, new stories and favorable reviews of your company? Or does your name yield bad reviews, BBB complaints and rip-off reports? It's important that those types of things DO NOT come up on the first page of search engines when somebody looks up your company.You can become an industry expert online by writing 1-2 articles a week and releasing them to hundreds of article directories online. This is an easy method of market presence building. It's also an easy way to rebuild the search engines results for your business.It's also important to distribute press releases and blog regularly. They are an important addition to any market presence building plan. This leads to better brand recognition and therefore higher levels of lead generation.Search marketing through Google, Yahoo and other pay per click programs is a good way to supplement your market presence building. Basically, you build a campaign of keywords and ad text so when a user types in your keywords, your ad and website pop up. You only pay when the user actually clicks on your ad, which can better target your market and save you money on marketing.Search engine optimization (SEO) is a tougher topic and involves market presence building techniques that will result in your website coming up at the top of the search engines for the keywords or phrases that best pertain to your industry. SEO tends to be a longer process and involves getting many other sites to link to use yours, using your main keywords as anchor text, but in the long run can be an extremely powerful and inexpensive tool.Market presence building is key to having a good reputation online and generating your company more leads. Whatever plan you develop, be sure to involve several aspects, whether SEO, article writing, pay per click or press release distribution. It isn't a process that will happen overnight, but once you get it going, it is definitely a snowball affect!