Many small businesses are facing the greatest challenges in a generation thanks to diminishing sales, lower cash flow, lower access to credit, and general economic anxiety around the globe.   However there is no reason any small business needs to waffle on developing a safe and secure online marketing environment.   In fact to emphasize how simple this is I’m laying out a three hour plan below.

Although a highly robust and complex website and online marketing effort will require more time and money than this approach, this will be a good start for businesses that are intimidated by the costs and complexity of a major online marketing effort.

It is very clear from my own efforts coaching travel businesses that many of them completely misunderstand how expensive and counterproductive a “beautiful and elaborate and cool” website may turn out to be.   Traffic and relevancy rule the roost in terms of online marketing effectiveness and sales, so here is a good start in the right direction that any businessperson can tackle in less than a single afternoon or evening of three (yes, count them!) 3 hours.

Hour ONE:  The Blog – your first company web site.

Start blogging at Google’s free service “Blogger.com”.   You can open an account in less than 5 minutes and the simple blogging tool is intuitive and friendly.  Don’t worry about “messing up” at this point, just dive in and start writing a few articles about your product or service in a helpful way.  Cutting and pasting from marketing materials is acceptable at this early stage.  As you write start thinking about a good domain name for your business that is as simple as possible but reflects your unique qualities – you can buy that later from this environment and make your blog/website appear at that name later.   Write both helpfully and also specifically about what your company offers in terms of value for the service or product.  Use the types of words people would use when searching for your niche.   Go here for Google’s Blogger service.

Congratulations – you now have a company website and a company blog.

Hour TWO:  The Pay Per Click Marketing Campaign

Staying signed on to the new (free) Google account you set up in the first hour, sign up for an “Adwords” account with $25 on your credit card.  Do not start bidding on terms yet – your job for this hour is to browse around Google’s brilliant online marketing system to see how it works and get a feel for the terms people search for and what you can expect to pay for those.  If you are lucky and in a small niche business, you may be able to aquire website visitors for pennies and customers for a few dollars.  It’s hard to build a viable business without advertising and Adwords in many cases represent the highest ROI you’ll find anywhere, so learn this system well.

Hour THREE: Social Media Campaign

Sure you could spend $10,000  or more for a social media marketing consultant or hire a social media manager for $50,000 per year, but why not utilize the world’s best expert on your business – you.   Social media is exploding as a powerful and potentially inexpensive online tool to promote your business, make sales, and find other innovators who share your passion for excellence.   Maintaining a quality blog is generally considered a key component of a good social media strategy but you already have a blog from step one above, so move on to the following two social media tools:

Twitter The future business impact of Twitter is not to be underestimated as it quickly has become the standard for communicating via short notes and links sent to many people.   Where else can you send notes to CNN or President Obama and reasonably expect that somebody is actually reading them?   Setting up a Twitter account will take under five minutes, and by using Twitter’s search to find people in your company niche and then following those people and their followers you will soon have your own Twitter presence.   Go here to start

Facebook. Take 15 minutes to set up a Facebook account under your own real name.  For most small businesses your person to person social media approaches will yield better results than staying anonymous and only using your business name.  I should add that in my view Facebook is overrated as a business tool so feel free to spend more time at Twitter where you can quickly and easily spread the word about why you and your business offer such great value.  Note as with all online social media that your approach should seek to be helpful even as you promote your own business.  Overbearing approaches are generally considered too annoying and thus less valuable than sincere, informed, genuine advice and recommendations.  Go here to sign up.

Congratulations, you’ve just invested  $35 (Adwords $25 + Domain name $10) plus three hours of your time and you have a good start on a  robust web presence for your business.