Avoid Spam While Marketing Your Small Business

Avoiding Spam while marketing your small business is easy when you follow a few simple tips that will build your brand and your reputation here in the BizSugar community and across the Web.

As the BizSugar online community grows by leaps and bounds, we’ve met many great small business people eager to share their expertise with us.

Though we’re sorry to say a very few have from time to time shown less respect for their fellow members then they should, in general we’ve found most are eager to share what they know and to be a resource for the community.

For those who may be new to BizSugar or to the world of social media sites in general, here are some tips to keep you on the straight and narrow:

• Share don’t advertise. Don’t post an advertisement promoting only yourself and your services or worse yet the front page of an e-commerce site or sign up form meant only to grab as many sales or leads as you can from fellow community members.
• No business opportunities please. Look, we’re sure there are lots of great business opportunities out there, and yours may be a dilly, but we’d like to ask you please not to use your membership here at BizSugar as a way to recruit people or to push your latest business idea. How to’s and tutorials showing your expertise in setting up a particular type of small business are fine but please be courteous of others.
• Link to something specific. Like a post or article sharing some tips or insight valuable to other BizSugar members, not just your main page with maybe a brief introduction and then a long explanation of what you do and why we should hire you to do it. Let members get to know you by sharing something you’ve found helpful with them. We’re sure once other members learn what you have to say they’ll be much more interested in working with you.
• Stick to the subject. The subject in the BizSugar community is small to medium sized business and entrepreneurship. Think about this when considering whether the post/posts you are planning to submit are appropriate. Off topic links and comments whether intended as spam or not will likely be received poorly by our audience and do little to attract interest in your site.

Why is all this stuff so important? Good question. In addition to the likelihood that spam or other inappropriate content submitted to this or other social media sites is very likely to get your submission removed, your account closed or both, these kinds of comments do nothing to build your reputation or brand and may even damage it in a way that could take great effort to undo.

Imagine attending a party full of people you know and some you don’t but instead of striking up a conversation and slowly making your rounds interacting in a give and take with others you simply stand in the middle of the room and shout or talk about yourself in a vain effort to get everyone’s attention.

Who would you listen to? Welcome to the party.