If you’ve never read Jay Levinson’s book, Guerilla Marketing, you need to go pick it up at the library or book store today and read it twice. For small business owners, whether it’s a computer repair business or a blog network, the marketing budget is usually thin. However, marketing is one of the most important elements of your business when it’s getting its feet off the ground. The fact is that you won’t bring in enough income to support yourself if people don’t know about you. Once people know about you and they are impressed with your product or service, you’ll start receiving referrals from those customers and you won’t need to market as much as you did in the beginning. Contrary to what some may believe, you can market your business for little to nothing. You don’t need a cheesy TV commercial or a sophisticated direct mail system, you just need some creativity and some sweat equity.
Here are six ways to market your business for free:
Take advantage of Craigslist. Many of you are familiar with Craigslist in terms of finding a good deal on furniture or finding a place for rent. But, have you thought about putting good looking advertisements in the small business section? This section is not as popular as some of the other categories on Craigslist, but it is growing fast, and it’s free to place an ad.
Submit a press release to the local newspaper. If you have a business that is different in some way or you are going to pledge a certain amount of profit to charity, you may want to submit a press release to the local television station or newspaper. If they decide to do a story on you, you’ll have instant publicity. But like I said, you need something that will make you different or an interesting story for the media to coverr.
Start a referral program. Viral marketing is your best friend. Word-of-mouth is extremely powerful, and it’s even stronger if you give customers an incentive to refer your business to others. Offer your service or product for free to every person that refers your service or product to someone else.
Pull a publicity stunt. This is a great way to get the community talking about you and generate a buzz about your business. Just make sure that it’s something legal and not something so over the top that it creates a negative buzz surrounding your business. Remember, philantropy is always a good way to go. Do something that helps or adds value to the community.
Create a Blog. You may have to spend a little bit of money to create a good looking blog with your own domain name, but you can also just create one with a free blogging service. Visit sites like problogger.net to gain valuable knowledge about how to start your blog and write quality content that advertises your blog and displays your expertise in the industry your business is involved in.
Conduct a Free Seminar. This is a great way to attract potential customers and for you to show off your expertise and knowledge of your service or product. If you are selling a product, you can do a demonstration, but make sure it doesn’t feel or sound like an info-mercial.
Try out these six ways to market your business for free, and let me know your results. I guarantee that if you focus on educating potential customers, bringing value to your community, and making great first impressions, viral marketing will take over and you’ll find yourself not needing to spend much time thinking about marketing.
- written by Erik
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Jon
Hey man – I really liked your theme so I am using it for our church’s student ministry. It looks awesome. I am using it on Wordpress and I am trying to figure out how to get the pages at the top to function with the pages at set-up in the Wordpress Control Panel (Home – About Us – Contact Us – etc.) If you have any advice that would be greatly appreciated – I left my email and if you email I can even give you my mobile. Thanks dude.
The Rookie Web Designer,
Jason
I’m a big fan of the viral marketing. We’ve had a real successful form for our online marketing service to small businesses. I did a post of it with the form at :
http://www.lazyowner.com/this-form-generated-27-client-referrals-last-month/
There are several ways to market a website or business with little or no cash. It just takes a lot more time and effort. I’d be interested to here more about what you are doing to market your websites to your target audience.
Those are some great tips. But you have to make sure your product is good, because just getting the people there is just half the work. You have to keep’em…
Market me!!
Nice article – good guest post.
“Try out these six ways to market your business for free, and let me know your results. I guarantee that if you focus on educating potential customers, bringing value to your community, and making great first impressions, viral marketing will take over and you’ll find yourself not needing to spend much time thinking about marketing.”
Nicejohn I like that, educate your customers,
also a good one is becoming an industy expert, newsletter or whatever branding ur name. JohnChow does a very good job of branding his ‘blogger expertise’
I dont have a blog yet so I can start work on this. Problem is that I dont like writing too much.
The first time i held a free seminar on Internet marketing i got so much publicity & goodwill from my local community leading to some web development jobs with some small business people.
What about write a column for a local paper each month? This has worked well for me in the past!
I have had a heck of a time navigating Craig’s List. No matter how careful you are with your ads, there are a lot of people with too mcuh time on their hands who live for getting advertisements pulled off the site as “spam”.
Hello! Good Site! Thanks you! hacwxeycsyxdmg
Plus with the iPhone coming, bloggers should try to get on YouTube somehow.
Nice tips Jon.
Very nice I love your tutorial!
and what about social network marketing?
Another great way is to publish your own underground newspaper. You can write a few articles and then print it out. Distribution is real easy. Go to the sit down food establishments around your business and ask them if you can leave them for customers to read. I have not been turned down yet. Make it fun and have a map to your location.
Rick