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Ten Ways to Grow Your Business For Free
By Sarath Samarasekera
December 11, 2006
What are you selling? More products are not better when it comes to marketing. In fact, the more targeted you can make your business the easier time you'll have with all the rest of the steps below and the more money you'll make.
If consumers are looking for a super store, they have plenty of choice and can shop at the giants like Amazon.com, Walmart.com and EBay.com. Trying to compete against these huge companies with your own "superstore" is foolhardy.
Create free Web spaces! Squidoo, MySpace and Facebook are excellent free opportunities to increase your reach. You've got to build buzz around your brand and some name recognition and these social networks is where the buzz is at. Use these sites and tools which are freely available to you and you'll be able to tap into their enormous online communities (MySpace has over 100 Million accounts!).
Blogs and RSS Feeds. It's quite easy and a blog will have many benefits for your business:
- It can help establish you as an expert in your field.
- Gives search engines the unique content that they're looking for; you'll get new visitors through natural search.
- Keeps your site fresh and provides legitimacy to your business.
- Gives you the chance to trade links with other bloggers (bloggers love linking to other bloggers).
Need blog software? Here are three solid options:
http://wordpress.com; http://www.movabletype.org ; http://www.textpattern.com
Offline marketing. Some of your most loyal customers may hear about you offline rather than online. So how can you market offline for free? Here are some ideas:
- Partner with local community groups like church's, schools and other non-profits for a mutually profitable campaign. Anywhere you can engage a pre-existing community you can achieve great success.
- Poster your town (anywhere you can put up a poster).
- Place your Web store and a coupon on business / post cards, leave them at complimentary businesses around the city.
- Classifieds in local papers, BuySell's are free!
- Add your store to directories like white pages, yellow pages.
Upload your product data feed to Google Base. Data feeds help you get your inventory out in front of buyers that are looking for the products you carry. Big stores can note this is one time that having a store that carries a lot of products will be an advantage to you.
Run sales, create coupons. Everybody wants a deal, so why not give them one? Here's some ideas for running sales and using coupons effectively:
- Run sales on popular items in your inventory that are fairly inexpensive. Cut your profit margin on them, then when the customer is purchasing the popular item, up sell them on related items and accessories and make your profit there.
- Offer a coupon to repeat customers and advertise that first time customers receive a discount on their next purchase.
- Create different coupons for different campaigns and track your campaigns that way. You'll know where your customers are coming from and what's working.
Search Engine Optimize your content and store. You can do a variety of things to help search engines pick up on your site:
- Pick keywords that your target customer is searching for and that you can actually compete on (Wordtracker.com is excellent software to do this with).
- Build content around those keywords (product description, company description, help articles, blogging etc). This not only helps you with the search engines, but it gives your customers a reason to come back and keeps your storefront fresh. Click here for a handy tool to check your keyword density.
- Get inbound links to your store (can be accomplished with a link exchange program or affiliate program). This is critical if you want to achieve good natural results in Google searches.
- Build page titles for each page around the keywords you want to be found under. Remember to give each page a unique page title.
- Add meta tags of your keywords and site description, customize them for each page on your site where possible.
- Put the keyword in the page URL.
- Focus your product descriptions around the keywords you are competing on.
Press – get yourself in the news. Write up a press release once every month or two for your business. Focus your release on something with a story feel. Rather than strictly informative, it can be a story about how your business got going; one of your customers and how they use your products or it can cover trends in your vertical. Post your press releases for free on http://www.i-newswire.com/ or www.prleap.com. Make sure you link to your storefront in the release as these will count as inbound links for search engine page rank and will drive traffic to your site.
Work your contacts. Word spreads quickly. Word-of-mouth is the most effective way to promote and advertise your store. It's as easy as it sounds. Tell your contacts, tell your friends – they're the most difficult customers for your competition to take away from you.
Find partners – exchange links. Contact others whose sites are related to yours, and exchange banners and other ads. Remember that there is a difference between competition and complementary sites. Competitive sites aim to take your visitors and your business. Complementary sites sell products or services that complement the ones you sell – they do not sell the same products you do.
