4 Simple Ways to Leverage the Internet to Save Money

For small business owners, keeping costs down is one of the best ways to keep businesses profitable year after year. If you are looking for a few extra ways to keep your costs down while still maintaining the quality of your brand, the internet provides a wide variety of effective strategies for cost cutting.

1. Virtual Assistant: Looking for an employee to help you manage the day-to-day office work of your business? Hiring a full-time employee to work in your office can be expensive. That means another full salary and even benefits. A virtual assistant is an extremely cost-effective method for outsourcing a lot of your office work, scheduling, reporting, and customer service. These virtual assistants can even answer phone calls and emails for you.
2. Make Partnerships and Trades: Another quick and easy method to cut costs is to use the internet to find businesses to develop partnerships and strategic alliances with other businesses in your area. There are millions of potential partnerships out there to be made! The best way to start is to search through your local chamber of commerce for the businesses with partnership potential. You’d be surprised how open other businesses are to keeping costs down by forming new partnerships!
3. Use Social Media and Email: For small businesses, email marketing still remains one of the most cost-effective methods for marketing online. According to the Direct Marketing Association, for every $1 spent on email marketing, small businesses return on average approximately $43 in added revenue. In addition to bringing in added revenue, Email is great for reaching out to previous customers to keep your brand at the top of their minds. In addition to Email marketing, a strong social media presence can help businesses gain traction online and develop a strong following of loyal customers. Your customers are not going to visit your website every day, but for a strong majority of people, they will check their social media accounts every day. Posting strong content consistently on social media is an effective way to make sure that the target audience is engaging every day. If they see a brand every day and engage with it, more often than not, when they go to purchase, that business will be the first they think of.
4. Advertise on Google AdWords: Sick of expensive advertising in newspapers, TV, and radio without a lot of return on your investment? Give Google AdWords a try. Not only is Google AdWords an inexpensive way to drive a lot of traffic to your website and your business, but Google only gets paid only when the ads work they work! With traditional advertising methods, the ad is paid for with generally no idea whether or not it worked or not. With AdWords, your business can manage your advertising budget and see fully measurable results almost instantly.