How to set up and run a small business

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Sales, Marketing and PR for small businesses

Key Guides

Assuming that what your business sells is wanted by someone somewhere and you have already sold it once, selling more is pretty simple.

At a most basic level it’s a numbers game. Let’s say you discover that for every hundred people who visit your website, ten of them buy something. To sell another ten items, all you need to do is attract a further hundred website visitors.
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Marketing and PR can be difficult propositions for small businesses, where funds are often tight to begin with, and available finance can quickly become swallowed up by expansion and innovation.
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Good publicity can help to propel your small business to another level. Sadly many small businesses don’t make any effort to get any press coverage because they think it’s impossibly difficult to do so.
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Press releases are a good way of getting some publicity for your brand, but how do you get your press release out there in the first place?
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If you are looking to publicise your business website, but don’t have a blue-chip budget to promote it online, there are a number of ways to let people know about your new venture with very little cash (if any).
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Last year many companies integrated social media strategies; they recognised the importance of delivering valuable content on a regular basis, and this year will see even more business owners replicate their actions.

Social media integration in 2013 is no longer a choice for business owners but indeed a necessity. Here are 5 ways to maximise your business through social media in 2013, to assist you in gaining a positive presence across all your social networks.
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Most small business owners have an opinion on networking. For every person who enjoys and values it – you’ll find another who visibly shudders at the mere mention of the word.
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At Bytestart, we receive hundreds of press releases every week. Although around 40% are usually relevant to UK small businesses, out of these we probably only end up using 4 or 5 a week in our news articles. Many are not relevant to our business, some are poorly written, and the majority are not newsworthy.
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So you’ve got your website up and running and it’s looking fantastic. You’ve sourced a great range of products that people definitely want, you’ve got new unique photos, good descriptions, and a fulfilment system that’s capable of handling a thousand orders a day.

Well done. Now, what’s missing… oh… it’s people buying the products.
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Free publicity is a great way to spread the word about your business. If you can get your business featured regularly in the newspapers and magazines your target audience reads, it brings your business to the attention of potential customers, and at no cost.
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So you want to tweet, but you’re not convinced of the benefits of Twitter for small businesses?
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In the first four parts of this series, we looked at online and offline marketing techniques, how to build some buzz around your promotional campaign, and how to adopt a positive approach in other aspects of your business.

With this fifth and final part, we tie it all together by looking at a final few topics relating to streamlining your business, getting your affairs in order, and maximising your profit.
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Over the past three parts of this introduction to bootstrap marketing, we’ve looked at the different ways in which you can promote your brand. But obviously there are different approaches to adopt, even to the same marketing method – and it’s up to you to choose the style that’s best suited to your business.
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So far we’ve looked at promoting your business online and offline on a shoestring budget, but when it comes to really building a brand, you need your company to become more than just the sum of its marketing parts.

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Google AdWords is a powerful way to spread the word about your online business or website, with the opportunity to get yourself listed not only at the top of Google’s results pages, but also on relevant websites that are part of the AdSense advertising network.
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We’ve all heard it: You just have to be using social media marketing. In my conversations with small businesses, I’ve heard over and over that they are indeed keen to try it out. The problem is figuring out where to begin.  Following are ten simple tips that I hope will help any business starting out with social media, regardless of budget.
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If you’ve just started your own business, you might be making the mistake of overestimating the scope of publicity you wish to achieve.
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Here is our final set of web marketing tips to help small business owners compete on a level playing field with their larger rivals on the web.
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These tips were written by the Bytestart team. We’ve been optimising and publishing content sites since 1998 – with some success (and mistakes made) along the way. Hopefully these tips will help small business people increase the visibility of their websites on the Internet and save you time along the way.
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This is the second part of our Link Popularity Guide – Part 1 can be found here.
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