Business Promotion Outside the Box - Don't Be Afraid to Explore

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Holbrook's promotion is that he's still exploring new ways to get the word out about his offerings – and new ways to make money from them. For various reasons, the strip character who is “on Twitter” just realized that she's going to have to do something to maintain the appearance of being employed. She's decided that the best way to do this would be to set up an online business.

Holbrook's humor comes to the fore with one of her tweets: “This online business should be legit, without involving much in the way of actual profits. (Coming up with that shouldn't be too hard).” Ouch. That would hurt more if it wasn't likely that he was speaking from his own personal experience!

But you can guess what's going to happen now. Holbrook will probably tease his fans via this character's tweets for some time as to what this online business will actually be. Once he settles on something, he will probably set it up in the real world...and given his past record, his fans will be able to purchase its goods and/or services. Meanwhile, those same fans will speculate. Will it be an eBay store? An Etsy shop? A standalone website? Or will the online business offer services, like website design...or even online marketing for small businesses?

Okay, so I wasn't serious about that last comment. The point is, if you want to grow your online business, you want to expand in directions that intrigue your customers while giving them what they want. It goes without saying that you need to know your customers pretty well to do this, but that's something I hope you're making the effort to do already.

Knowing your customers becomes very important when you want to change your audience. I don't have the space to go into it here, but as a hint I'll point to the Old Spice Guy. Think about the image of Old Spice before he came along. It was something you gave your dad on Father's Day. Now, with its sassy and over-the-top series of commercials and Youtube videos, Old Spice is actually hip, funny, fun-loving, and yes, sexy. If there's interest, I'll expand on this in another article. In the meantime, keep using your imagination to reach your audience; it's probably less expensive than TV ads. Good luck!