Internet Marketing for the Small Business

Typical small businesses trying to expand their reach though the web may find that the costs of keeping a permanent webmaster too expensive. Enter an array of ever-evolving Content Management Systems (CMS), most of them open source or offering additional services at reasonable rates. WordPress,which is the leading choice for many bloggers, has extended into CMS territory with the launch of it's latest 3.0 version, which enables far greater flexibility than its predecessors.

Wix.com proves a powerful tool for quickly creating webpages in an online, all-graphical interface. This type of web design software may be of great appeal to people trying avoiding HTML and that have been waiting for years for web design software to catch up and make it "as easy as making a Power Point presentation". So, with these new technologies, internet users are also becoming website builders at a very high rate.

Now, the ease of outsourcing design & programming activities for the internet has become so widespread that many of the more advanced features for websites, web marketing, and the production of valuable media content are available for very reasonable costs. Companies like eLance provide a marketplace to find and offer services to build and manage sites, matching companies across the globe.

Have you even heard of open source movie production? The animated short Elephant Dream was produced entirely in open source 3D animation suite Blender, which makes the point clear: small businesses don't have to bear huge costs to access similar tools as large enterprises.

Elephants Dream from Blender Foundation on Vimeo.