My clients are generally small business people who enjoy 2 things: doing things for themselves, and doing them for cheap. In this post I am going to explore 3 marketing ideas that are free or very inexpensive.
1. The client is generally an expert in their field, say real estate. I usually recommend joining a forum or answering questions on yahoo answers. The more they can establish themselves as an expert, the better relationship they can establish with the participants of the forums. Place the link to your web site into the signature of your profile and this will translate into traffic to your site. Cost: Free – not including your time.
2. This tip may be more obvious to some, but simply putting your url into every available, newspaper ad, yellow pages ad, email signature, letterhead, and any other customer communication that your firm creates is often overlooked, and since you are doing these things anyway, adding the location of your website is very inexpensive. This may even include your back window of your vehicle(s).
3. One final tip is to start a newsletter. This is a commitment that some would be better off outsourcing, but it is relatively inexpensive to do it yourself. I usually recommend a service like ConstantContact.com to manage your list, send the emails and administer the emails. I have one client who implemented this and saw an increase in his traffic through the door of his practice in the week immediately following the release of the newsletter. Newsletter marketing is fairly inexpensive and can be more effective than direct mail if implemented properly – more about this in a future post.
Hope you enjoyed this post and Happy Marketing!