There's nothing worse than when hard work goes unrecognized, so if you've broken your back on something to improve your business - then how on earth do you make sure you get noticed?                                                                                          

This morning I had a gorgeous piece of news to wax lyrical about, the property search engine I work for here in rainy London had started to offer national listings. As you can imagine, this is huge news for us - suddenly we were offering a service that all of merry ol' England could enjoy - not just those in the capital. But without a large marketing budget, how could we shout it from the rooftops without having to get out a ladder and actually climb up on the office roof? After all, we have very active rain here this time of year!

The obvious thing to do might be a mass email to everyone in your mailing list, but this isn't problem free. People receive email after email from people offering their services, unless they're a particularly loyal person your message may go unopened. An easy solution? Make your point in the email subject. This way, as people scan their inboxes they'll get the core of your message regardless of whether or not they open the email and read more details. The liklihood is that if your news is of relevance to them then the punchy subject will compel them to open up anyway.

If you have the technical knowhow, put an eyegrabbing link on your homepage to tell people that are on your site. Like with the email, you want something short, sweet and to the point with the option for people to 'click thru' to read all the details.

And what about social networking sites? Are you using Facebook Pages? My company have a Facebook Page, which allows users to identify themselves as 'Fans' of our company. The Facebook Page can be a great way to promote yourself, as can a Facebook Group. We have both, and use both to update people on our news. The best thing is though, you can directly message all your fans or people in your group within a few seconds. In my experience, marketing I do on Facebook is incredibly productive. I know this because I can see how people come to my site, using Google Analytics. Although it's a matter for another post, if you're not using an analytics tool to see how people find you online then you really should be, it may surprise you where you're getting your traffic from!

Of course, if you have a blog on your own site, write a post about your news! And tell us all here, at ActiveRain, heck that's what I'm doing now!

All the methods above are incredibly simple and FREE ways to get your message across to people quickly. So next time you work hard on something, make sure you put a bit of work into letting people know about it. After all, a good piece of work that nobody knows about is not much use to anyone!