When I was twenty-three, I had what I believed was a good business idea. I was going to sell cheap holidays as I knew a contact in the industry.

At the same time I would also attempt to make money via offering a fostering services UK service to the people that I knew.

By reading a number of books on marketing for small businesses and by asking a good friend of mine who has a business which is to do with selling external doors, I managed to find some potential routes which could help me to get started.

Direct marketing

This happened to be the first area that I tried. I had a small leaflet produced which explained the speech coaching service that I was offering and then with the help of some friends and family, went around my local area delivering them. This was not as successful as I hoped it would be, however I am sure that this area of marketing could work well for other types of business.

Newspapers

I then decided to speculate to accumulate. I contacted a number of the local newspapers in my area and paid for an advertisment which would appear on a weekly basis. This advert would reach quite a large number of people and even though this was quite an expensive form of marketing, it did work for me in the early days.

Open days

I am sure that the majority of small business owners would like to attract additional visitors and of course additional sales – and I was exactly the same. I decided to hold an open day or presentation in various parts of the country which would help to promote my business.

I was actually quite surprised just how well this worked. The newspapers were virtually biting my hand off for the story, as it was something different that some of their readers were likely to find of interest. It was, of course, also an event that was to held locally to them.

Yellow pages

I advertised in the yellow pages for a number of years but their prices just seemed to increase to an unrealistic level. The majority of people in the United Kingdom now have access to the web and for me this is very much the future; there will even be “internet houses” within a few years. Yellow pages or as it is now called Yell, has become more expensive when in reality probably less people are using it.

These adverts were of benefit for a while and could well be of use to other small business owners. I just think that you can achieve better value for money these days by advertising in other areas such as the internet.

Websites

I paid a company to design and build me a website around seven years ago and this has by far been the best marketing investment I have made thus far. I have worked hard to promote this site and it is now doing well in the major search engines.

Radio and television marketing

I can not really write too much about this form of advertising as I have not personally given it a go. Why not? I hear you ask. Well purely because I think that it costs too much money. That being said I have read reports about just how beneficial radio and TV adverts can be for a business.

I am sure there are many other ways of marketing a small business and I will seek them out in the future for my own business.

The above ideas are what I have learnt about and as you may have read, I have tried some of them myself with mixed success. Every business is obviously different and it is basically a form of trial and error to find which ones will work.