There are many online marketing options you can pursue, both paid and free, whether or not you have a website. Following are free marketing ideas to get the ball rolling.
Free Online Marketing Ideas
- Social Networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…)
- Blogging (Blogger, WordPress)
- Blog Commenting
- Press Releases, 250-400 words with up to 2 links
- Search Engine Profiles (Google Maps, Manta, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Bing, Merchant Circle, Citysearch…)
- Link Building
- Video Marketing (YouTube, vimeo, Yahoo Video…)
- Article Marketing (Ezine)
- Industry Association Profiles (Chamber of Commerce, among others)
- Directory Submissions (Yahoo Directory, DMOZ Open Directory Project, Business.com…)
- Online Communication (include links in your emails… perhaps a visually appealing Email Signature?)
- Google Analytics (to track the success of your online marketing efforts)
Taking advantage of free online marketing opportunities should be done patiently over time. Because online marketing is also an SEO endeavor, search engines keep track of your business’ trust factor. In the event that you tackle all of these suggestions at once in the course of a few days, search engines may take that as someone trying to cheat the system, and in doing so, you may in fact HARM your online presence.
Instead, take your time! Schedule to complete one or two per week and mix up the method with which you are marketing. This week, perhaps fill out two new business profiles and write a blog post. Next week submit your previous blog post as an article to an online article marketing website. The following week, send out your news worthy press release to local news reporters; do not forget to include a helpful FULL link (http://) to your website in the article. After that, post a video to YouTube and update your Facebook and Twitter pages (or gosh almighty, start them if you haven’t already!!!).
Be the authority figure in your industry. In doing so, your consistent, online marketing efforts will be targeted towards helping and informing your audience. In turn, your website traffic and business can slowly increase.
Marketing + Link Building = Effective SEO
