By Grant Miller, Salon Consultant

One eternal truth is that we all need a steady stream of new customers to ensure the existence of our businesses. Over time, a chunk of your customers move away, choose other solutions, get bored or are wooed away by more savvy competitors. The tick, then, is replacing the ones you lose with new ones, and hopefully with even better and higher valued new customers.

One of the hardest things for any business to accomplish is finding a reliable, predictable and cost effective method for getting all the quality new customers you can handle. When you finally have a large crowd of new customers begging you to take their money, you have just solved the majority of your business problem.

The trick then is, how do you find them and get them into your salon in a cost-effective manner? I spoke about this in detail during one of my training sessions at the Smart Tan Conference in November. I explained the value of having many fishing poles in the water and using multiple forms of media to reel in as many new clients as possible. The challenge is that not every salon can use all these forms of media. A single salon in Chicago probably will not be able to afford radio commercials.

In my salons, I currently use seven different forms of media to get new customers. Each of them is effective, but the most reliable source that casts the biggest net is using online media. And no, I’m not talking about tweeting or Facebooking all day.

These days, most consumers do at least some basic research online before deciding to give their money to a business. Finding their new tanning salon is no different. Here are some tips to put your salon’s best foot forward on the Internet.

Click here to read the entire article in the January issue of Smart Tan Magazine online.