How Small Businesses Can Attract New Customers

To be successful at attracting new customers, today’s small business owners need a multi-faceted, multi-channel customer acquisition strategy that targets prospective customers where they surf, exchange information and shop. While there are many ways to do this, the following five strategies are highly effective, inexpensive (or free) and any size business can employ and benefit from them.

JetCity Devices (Click for larger image).

Think Locally

Miller also makes sure that each blog post includes a photo of one of his products, one that is similar to the type of furniture he is discussing in the blog post, and includes the price and a direct link to the product on the Hudson Goods e-commerce site. And he features a few of his favorite products on the sidebar of the blog, which are also linked to the online store.

To further attract customers, Miller runs contests and giveaways on both the Hudson Goods blog and on related design/furniture blogs with whom he’s established relationships.

And all that blogging has paid off by generating new sales. Thanks to Sitemeter, a Web site traffic tracking service, Miller knows that the Hudson Goods blog has been instrumental in driving traffic to the main Hudson Goods site.

“My blog recently hit a high of 400 new visitors a day,” he reported. “I have found that [about a third] of the visitors to the blog go to my online store and, once there, look — on average — at 10 different pages/products. And these are not random visitors. They have specifically clicked on a product they were interested in on the blog to go to the store.”