The following is a guest post by Jiyan Wei, director of product management for PRWeb leader in online news distribution and online publicity. For more tips on using press releases, follow @PRWeb on Twitter or like them on Facebook.

Operating a Small Business can be daunting enough without having to compete against the already established companies in your industry. However, with online PR, you can quickly gain a firm footing and begin to assert your company’s presence. Despite their size, small businesses have several advantages over their larger sized counterparts:

• Small Businesses are much more nimble
• Online PR is best if done incrementally, doesn’t require large resources up front
• Creativity levels the playing field
• Online PR is still a relatively new field
• Success can come quickly, if you’re sharp

Being a Small Business Has its Advantages

The size of a small business should not be a reason for failure.  If anything it should be a reason to succeed. In the online world, larger businesses have more people who wish to have a say in making decisions – decision by committee. The CEO, the CTO, the CFO, VPs, and marketing directors all have a say in how the company operates online. A small business on the other hand can react and respond much quicker. Take for example a customer who may have had a negative experience, they voice their concerns on social media channels and so now all their contacts know about their experience. A large business is likely to have protocols for how they respond to customers online and may not get to do so within an acceptable time frame.

Since there is no decision by committee for a small business, they are able to decide what to do quickly and efficiently, address the customer’s concerns, and provide a more transparent form of feedback. The customer now knows their opinion is valued and is much more likely to become an evangelist for the company.

It’s Not What You Have, But Who You Have

In the corporate world there are departments on one side of the business who aren’t aware of what another part of the business is doing. When decisions are being made about anything in the online space, marketing, IT, and customer development departments all have a say in what happens. Consider the small business that may only have a management team of three each performing multiple roles and you have a much quicker decision making process.

An Even Playing Field

A lot of the strategies which work for the larger companies also work for smaller sized business. When thinking about the different internet marketing approaches such as social media, search engine optimization, and press release distribution services, there isn’t a marketing technique which is more favorable toward a large company than a smaller sized operation. In all of these areas, brains defeat wallet size, so if you’re a truly savvy small business you can dominate much larger players unwilling or unable to be as creative.

The Online World is Still New

There’s still a lot to learn about online PR, and as technology advances, larger businesses have no distinct advantages over the smaller sized business in terms of establishing a knowledge base. People who’ve been in the online world for years will tell you the only constant for the web is change. If a small business is prepared for change, there should be no reason why they have to fear or worry about not performing.

Potentially Quick Success Rate

Small businesses can quickly establish themselves with efficient participation in online PR. Defining success – whether it’s ranking high in search engines, selling more product items, increasing brand mentions, or receiving more traffic – is within your reach. The fluidity of a small business is often the catalyst to online success, propelling start-up companies to previously impossible levels of visibility and brand recognition.

Consider just 5 – 10 years ago where the Internet was far less populated and tradition media was the main form of ‘PR’. There was a much larger separation between large corporate entities and the smaller-sized businesses. Now, with a medium accessible by nearly everyone, that vast separation has been leveled.

PRWeb is a TopRank Online Marketing client.