How else can I advertise my tiny little business?

[Cody]

A while ago, I started a little website to sell new-old-stock and used vacuum tubes. There is actually still a big market for them. There are many websites with millions of tubes in stock and they make tons of money. I have about 5,000 in stock. On my website, I say I will beat all competitor's prices, but I don't get that many customers. It's no big deal because it's a small amount of money to supplement my income, but I'd like to make more. I have a YouTube video advertising my site, and a Facebook page for it. I put a business card and a pencil with my web address in every box I send out. What else can I do?

[Jake]

Imagine what people are thinking of a step before searching for parts, you might have some articles on vintage electronics of the tube era, an explanation of why tubes are still the ultimate for rock and rollers, etc. interesting articles may earn more links to the site as well as providing more words for search engines to match up to. Backlinks = "judged popular" = higher search ranking = more visitors.

Perhaps the most important thing, reproduce all of the tube lookup charts you can find, they may already be on the web in pdf format, you might have to scan some yourself, you want the information to be machine readable text, not just a photocopy of the tables, again to provide more grist for the search engines, making the various model numbers findable is vital. You might also host user manuals for old electronics.

You might see what vacuum tube related searches are noted in the Google keyword tool, you would want to incorporate the popular searches in your content perhaps best the title of articles.
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

You should participate in any vintage electric, antique collection forums that hit the appropriate date, maybe some music sites as well where you may give advice on tubes you don't even carry just to look moer like an authority, you have to know at what point a link is OK. You could try creating business sites on the various social sites, Facebook allows a paget to be made in the business name, get something like 30 likes and you can shorten the name and eliminate the digits in the url.

Searching: vintage electronics forum
http://vintageelectronics.betamaxcollect.../forum.php
http://www.dtvusaforum.com/vintage-electronics-forum/
http://www.antiqueradios.com/forums/index.php
http://music-electronics-forum.com/f21/
http://www.radiomuseum.org/dsp_searchtubes.cfm

http://frank.pocnet.net/
http://tdsl.duncanamps.com/

[Stephanie]

In addition to optimizing your website with the keywords people use to search for your products, as suggested, here are some other ideas:

1. Make sure you're creating regular content on your website using those keywords. A blog is the easiest way to do this, and it guarantees very targeted traffic if you're blogging about topics your customers are interested in, such as, "How to [DO SOMETHING] with Vacuum Tubes," etc.

2. Optimize your YouTube videos with the same keywords in the title, description and script of your video. You also need to include a call to action right at the top of the description, something like, "Click here to save 50% off..." Get some keyword anchor text backlinks (you can Google that) to your videos to get them to Page 1 of Google so that more people will find them.

3. Run some Facebook ads to your website. You'll want to target the interests of people who buy your products.

4. Hold an auction on eBay. It's a great way to get in touch with a very large audience.

5. Craigslist is worth a shot, too. Refresh your ads every few days so that you stay on top of the recent searches.

[MICHAEL R]

Optimize your webpages:

1. Search for competitive key words and phrases
2. Create new pages ans use these kew words in the pages name, page title, pages H1 header and in the content of the page body.
3. Build incoming links to your website from web pages link linked ink, facebook etc.
4. Network locally ( design and print some business card - http://www.designsnprint.com )

[Roger]

You can. Focus more into startups & SME's rather than general business. Promote your business in b2b portals and classifieds. For example promote your business in Toboc.com a premier multinational B2B website that brings together suppliers, buyers, Transporters, Brokers and business service providers from across the world. They have built a vast database of Suppliers, Manufacturers & service providers from over 210 countries. Also check for other b2b portal which can take your business to the next level.