Internet marketing on a shoestring budget

Sometimes start-ups and small companies don’t have large budgets to kick off online marketing campaigns. There are however quite a few FREE and low cost things that can be done to improve your website / business popularity.

Below is a short list of a few things you can look into to promote your business online, whether you have a website or not. BTW, if you’re looking for building a quick, free website, check out www.synthasite.com – they have some amazing new features and it’s as simple as drag and drop to build your website…

Blogging

Blogging has really come of age, and large corporates are even using it to create a more personal touch in communicating with their customers. There are many free blogging platforms (eg www.blogsome.com, www.blogger.com) which will allow you to set up your free blog.

Most blogging platforms come with RSS feeds, which gives you an easy way to syndicate the content that you write on your blog. You can plug that feed into blog aggregating portals like Digg.com, Afrigator (for South African blogs) and more to receive votes for your submitted articles, thereby increasing the visibility of your blog.

There are also dedicated blog search platforms, so just by writing a blog you increase your chances of exposure quite well. That said, don’t oversell your services and products. Rather take the approach of giving sound advice for free, build up a good relationship with your readers and then expose your readers to possibly marketing opportunities you might have.

Social Media

Social media is not always the desired platform to market your products or services, but in certain cases (if your products are geared towards the social environment) you could do very well. There are also dedicated social business to business platforms like www.linkedin.com and www.mygenius.com where you can create a profile for yourself and contribute while also relaying some marketing information to promote yourself.

Email Marketing

Email is still one of the most effective ways of marketing your business. There are some great bulk email providers out there with which you can add a “sign up” form on your website and have a professional newsletter DIY style (since they come with templates ready made). It’s not FREE, but still a good investment to make since you get realtime stats of how well any particular email campaign is doing.

On the FREE side you have your normal email client, like Outlook. Be sure to update your signature regularly, maybe with a one liner pitch of your latest product and a link to your website for more information. By using conventional email you’re essentially marketing your business every time you send out an email. Also remember the golden 90 day rule of contact. Try and stay in contact with prospects and existing customers at least once every 90 days to keep up that relationship.

Relationship management is one of the essential tools in marketing, so use it effectively, it’s free!

With email also comes various sub formats of email campaigns, which I’ll briefly mention:

• Viral Email Campaigns (not free, but can be very effective!) – You send a mail out to your existing database and they are asked to send the email on to a few friends, who all get the original email. Your database grows virally and suddenly you’re sitting with a load of new prospects. Please make sure however that you make use of online marketing professionals to assist in setting up these kind of campaigns.
• Competitions – Incentivised email campaigns with some profiling questions – if you profile your database you’ll be able to target subsets of your data the next email campaign round, and ensure higher levels of uptake on your offers.
• Surveys – Good way of measuring your ‘effectiveness’ in the market and also for profiling purposes. Can be incentivised.
• RSVP’s – Show your customers that you’re with the times and have an automated RSVP system. Good for events and extended brand awareness! The alternative would be FaceBook events, but not everyone’s on Facebook…

Web PR / Article Syndication

Web PR is the process of setting up public relation channels for distributing company news. There are some excellent portals for doing online PR, and by using the authoritive ones you enable your news to be syndicated to a wide range of websites. By adding a small biography on your articles with a link back to your site, you’re also busy link building (part of search engine optimisation) in the process. This increases the popularity of your website or blog! Check out www.prweb.com.

Google AdWords

This is a great way of promoting your website, products and services. You’re able to set daily limits on your spend and target exact or broad search phrases on which your ads will show. Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay, and from there the term Pay-Per-Click. You also bid against competing advertisers for specific phrases, so costs will vary. It can however be as low as $0.10 per click. The great thing about AdWords is that you control how much you want to spend and it’s also a great way of bridging the gap until your organic search rankings start picking up. I would recommend speaking to an internet marketing consultancy first to assist in setting up and optimising your campaigns.

That’s it for now, if you have any questions or would like toget a free quote, please visit our website here.