If you’re looking for low cost marketing ideas for small businesses, look no further! I’ve implemented many of these strategies to build a successful affiliate business from my laptop and many of these are useful for any business, large or small. So whatever size your business is, these strategies can help you build new trickles of customers at very low cost.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – A Website Obviously!
If you don’t already have a website, it’s an obvious starting point. You can purchase a domain name from namecheap.com for less than $10 a year and hosting can cost under $5 a month. There’s also totally free website building sites such as Weebly.com so you can totally set one up for free if your budget doesn’t allow. Ideally though, you’ll want a domain you own and your own hosting.
If you haven’t yet started building a website, you can build it in such a way to start generating traffic for free too. Checkout my article how to build a niche website for more on this topic. A niche website can be built around a specific keyword phrase so as to rank on the search engines for that particular phrase. When done well, this can give you a dramatic traffic boost at very low cost. This website, for example, was built on a specific keyword to attract visitors.
If you have a physical business which is based in a specific place, this works all the better. There’s far less competition in a specific place. So buying a domain name with your place name in it can make all the difference. For example I built a website for a friend which had the town name in it: http://scarboroughwingchun.co.uk/. You can do this for your business too, to give yourself an advantage when it comes to ranking for your main keywords.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – Blogging
Once you have a website built, you can use many strategies to attract people to it. Traffic generation at low cost is best done by creating content on your site – blogging. However, there’s around 600 million blogs on the internet so in almost every topic there’s huge competition. One way around this is to find long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
Most keyword phrases, and particularly the shorter ones have too much competition on Google to have a chance at ranking. So by finding the phrases which have the lowest competition, you have a much better chance at ranking your content on the SERPS – Search Engines Results Pages.
Once you start ranking your content, your domain authority goes up. This can lead to more and more of your content getting found, even if you’re using more competitive terms as you continue to add content to your blog.
See also niche blogging for profit.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – A Free Google Places Listing
Google offers locally based businesses a free listing through Google My Business (formerly Google Places). This is well worth the half hour of your time to create.
As long as you can verify your business address, you can create a listing for your business. Google will send out a postcard with a code so you can do this.
You can also do the same thing on other search engines such as Bing/Microsoft. These types of listings will often come up before any others (even paid ads) when you do a locally based search, so it’s well worth creating one.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a must for any business. It’s super cheap and super effective. You will need an email autoresponder to collect email addresses from your website and deliver emails automatically. To do this, you need to offer something of value from your website in exchange for your visitor’s details. For example, on this website I offer information for learning how to build an online business.
Once someone joins my email list, my autoresponder follows up with an email marketing campaign which is completely automated. Email follow ups should offer some kind of value to your subscribers. You can keep them informed about your products and send them to discounts and offers.
Email marketing is very effective because it allows you to build a longer term relationship with your visitors. Whereas on a website, most visitors will leave within a few minutes, you can keep in touch via email for months or even years. See also the power of email marketing.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Business – A Facebook Business Page
A Facebook business page can be built absolutely for free so this is well worth doing. Use a specified keyword phrase appropriate to your business to give your listing more traction. When people search for a particular phrase which matches your own, they are more likely to find your listing. Here’s an example of a page I created for my online business:
Look for “Pages” on your Facebook side bar and click on the pages icon. Fill out all the fields and input as much information as you can to give your listing the best chance. You can also promote your page and place your blog content on it once you have built it.
Low Cost Marketing Ideas For Small Businesses – Quora
Quora.com is a question and answer website with millions of users. It can be used to bring people back to your website. To do this you need to create some useful content on your website first. So building a blog is a good strategy to be used with this one. Once you have some content on your website, you can use Quora to answer questions relevant to your content.
Then, link to your content in your question. Quora does allow this if it’s relevant in answering the questions. Read their terms and conditions though because you can easily get answers removed if you start spamming your links. See also using Quora to drive traffic.
YouTube
YouTube is another great way to find people who are looking for information relating to your products and services. By uploading information videos to YouTube, and tagging them with relevant keywords which relate to your business, you can attract free traffic organically. YouTube is a daughter company of Google, and Google itself sometimes markets YouTube as the second largest search engine on the web.
Organic traffic is much harder to obtain than paid traffic. But if you have the time and energy to create some informational videos, uploading them to YouTube regularly can give you a nice stream of traffic back to your website. Make sure your traffic is well targeted though before you spend a huge amount of time. See customer avatar for more on targeting.
