No Cost Marketing Strategies For People Operating A Small Business Online

Scores of small businesses are operated from people’s computers at home and do not get counted in business statistics. Whether you are working for a MLM company or selling decorated bird houses the difficulty of promoting your products without a budget is overwhelming. Let’s take on board the fact that $20 per month spent on classified ads is not going to will not lead to a flood of traffic. A home-grown business cannot do battle with their larger counterparts and expect to win. That is the reason in a lot of cases, owners are likely to tap into their personal relationships to sell their products and or services.

Like many of you I operate a small home based business and have learned thru trial and error exactly what works and what does not. Despite putting some “notches in my belt” I have hardly ever stopped learning. In the beginning, many years ago, I squandered funds buying different types of advertisements. None of them did the job well produced any results. Currently my budget is all but $0 and I pick up thousands of visitors a year. How did I do this?

Internet Marketing Strategy #1 Email:

As an alternative to paying for lists and probably getting into trouble for sending out unsolicited emails I send businesses a very personalized email message. How do I find these businesses? I find them by looking on the Internet, visiting their web page, checking them out, then sending them a personalized email about my product or service.

One of the keys to all of this is “personalization”.
My advice here would be to write a plain sales letter which outlines your merchandise, offers contact information and tell them how it can impact their specific type of business. Because I operate a periodical that survives through advertising revenue I’ve created template letters for the clothing industry, auto business, legal industry, etc. I then place their info inside the letter so that when they read it they say, “Wow! This guy understands what is important to me!”

Internet Marketing Strategy #2 Information (that is beneficial to the reader|Valuable Content}:

All Search Engines… and visitors to your website like useful articles. We all know of the saying, “knowledge is power”. Clients want to find out about their business all that they can. Posting useful posts on your web page will assist visitors to keep coming back for additional information and hold them there longer. Information also lifts your standing as a business to the would-be consumer. If they be in agreement with what you are stating they are more liable to buy from you. Search engines, like customers, are constantly searching with their spiders for content related information. If your articles are in relation to the merchandise you are selling odds are that search engines will position your site higher.

Internet Marketing Strategy #3 Off-line Marketing – Business Cards:

Off-line marketing has in no way gone out of style. Dare I say, its perhaps more needed today than it was in days gone by. Think about this: There are plenty of printers out there that encourage you to get free business cards in return for a placement of their business information on the reverse of the cards. In the majority of cases the printer’s information is insignificant and unobtrusive making the free deal a good deal! As a result, I acquire my cards for no more than the fee of shipping and handling.

What you do with these cards is almost as critical as how much you spend on them. People are interested in the self and love to talk about themselves as much as possible. Generally speaking, I pass out the cards under the idea that I may like to advance a particular conversation or I would like to keep in touch with them again. It is a cool way to get their card in your possession and make a good associate. Now that they have a personal relationship with me, they are much more likely to look at my web page and I can rolodex their info for networking purposes.

Strategy #4 Article Marketing:

As I said in Internet Marketing Strategy #2, people have a thing about free content. The very same articles you put up on your site for your present readers can also be the bait to entice fresh customers. By ensuring that your articles are enlightening, professional and commendable you can submit them to article databases for free content. Websites could then pick up the article to post on their own site. The ruse is to put your personal contact information either entrenched in the article or as a tag line on the end. For my part I utilize my web address and my name. The better your article, the more times it should be emblazoned throughout the web and the more customers you’ll acquire.

The four strategies work in concert to add to the status of a website and cut down the amount of time you waste day by day. Creating enlightening articles about your product and forwarding them to ezine directories helps to perk up your sites search engine rankings, hold on to your customers and augment general exposure.

Distributing business cards and networking with other owners works well together and kills two birds with one stone. Handing out personalized emails and reading things on your customers’ web page helps to augment your understanding of your customers’ requirements while advertising to them.

The overall strategy of business should be to produce more money and exhaust less time and resources doing it.

Have a great, successful and prosperous day. Thank you for dropping by and reading my post.

Sam D. Mann

What does Sam D. Mann Do? Good question. …and the answer can be found by doing a Google Search on the following (include the quotes) “sam d. mann” then you’ll perhaps know more about me than I do about myself!! LOL