Cross Promotions

Cross promotions are things you see the big players do leveraging their web sites, TV and other media sites to get visibility to what they need to.

In today's world SMBs can also get this kind of cross promotion by taking advantage of the many free tools out there such as Facebook, Twitter and Blogs ("FTB").

How does this all work? Create a blog to talk about your product and / or services, twit about the blog posts on Twitter while adding shorter updates around the blog entries and finally add links to the blog posts to the Facebook page you setup for your company.

In terms of blogging there are many ways to create a blog, Google's Blogger site is the one I use as it gives you the tools to focus on creating your content.

In terms of Twitter, setup a separate account from the one you use for personal use.

In terms of Facebook, you can create a page for your company either under your personal Facebook account or just create a new Facebook profile for the person in your company that is going to post the updates.

Once you have all of these accounts setup, use a tool such as TweetDeck to monitor, update and manage your updates.

Some ideas for content:

• Have a coupon on your website? Twit about it and include a link to the coupon driving traffic to your business and to your website.
• Have a new product or service, don't just add it to your website, write a blog post and post a link to the blog post to Facebook and Twitter.
• Are you passionate about what you do and / or sell, then talk about your passion, not just the product or service, on twitter, write up a blog post, post it Facebook.
  

Keep in mind blog readers, Twitter users and Facebook fans are all a bit different in how they search for and want to consume their information so don't be afraid to do a bit of customization for each of these channels so you can gain an audience.

I know some of you are thinking this sounds like a lot of work, but once everything is setup, you just create some content and then use the tools to share / post these entries across all of the components of your FTB cross promotion strategy.