Advertising on a Shoestring Budget

With advertising every little bit helps. You don’t have to have a monster advertising budget to increase your exposure. So I've put together a quick list of some which are a few good places to start that are either free or inexpensive.

With advertising every little bit helps. You don’t have to have a monster advertising budget to increase your exposure. Here are a few good places to start.

No Cost Advertising

Guest Posts - Find a blog or news site that is related to your product and write an article or blog post for them. This usually includes a link back to your site in the post, and it makes you look like an expert.

Link Sharing - This can help by bringing traffic directly into your site as well as increasing your search rankings. Find website with as much or more traffic than yours, that are also related to your products or service and share and offer to link to their site if they do the same for you.

Twitter - Getting the followers may take time but if your target audience is using the service you should be too.

Facebook Fan Page - Create a little fan page for your business. Start by getting your real life friends and family to follow you and grow from there.

Newsletters - Sometimes it can be hard getting that email list created but if you are an online merchant you should already have the emails of previous shoppers to get started with and they are often a lot more likely to make a second purchase than a new person to the site.

Free Classified Ads - Sites like Craigslist offer free classifieds. The results might not always be as effective as you would like but hey, if you have some extra time, free is free.

Low Cost Advertising

Along with the methods listed above you should also look into some low cost advertising methods.

Purchase Incentives - There are many ways to do this, offer free shipping on your products, no sales tax, a 10% discount for large purchases. Sometimes these little price reductions can turn a potential buyer into a sale.

Reviews - Send free products to bloggers, newspapers and magazines asking them to create a review of your products. You might not like the review you get but if your products are good this is a great way to promote your product and get some positive feedback. You can even refer customers to the review if it is particularly positive.

Facebook -  Yup I have Facebook listed twice. Facebook offers a great way to really target a specific niche audience and there ads can be pretty affordable.

Twitter Ads & paid tweets - Twitter is also now offering advertising opportunities, and you can also find popular people on twitter to promote your business with a tweet, many times for very reasonable prices.

Google Adwords - Google Adwords has long been a staple for many business. If you have a fairly large demographic, Adwords may be the way to go for you.