FREE Online Marketing Tips For Those On A Tight Budget. Part 3/3

This is the 3 part that I am sharing with regards to: FREE Online Marketing Tips For Those On A Tight Budget.

Reference from part 1 here.

Reference from part 2 here.

#Hashtag Campaign.

Nothing gets people excited like a hashtag campaign. Use a funny hashtag to get people talking about your subject on Twitter or Facebook. Remember to make the hashtag relate-able both to the target audience as well as to your brand. You could get the hashtag trending by collaborating with some influential players in the same niche as your target audience. You could also just promote the hashtag on Twitter by paying for it.

Similarly, you could also get the hashtag going on Instagram. But make sure you urge people to share their pictures by using the hashtag.

Blogging.

This is my favorite part! The more content on your site, the more opportunities there are for search engines to pick it up. Blogging can be a great (and free!) way to generate leads and links into your site. But don’t just be producing content to produce content. Write quality blog posts that will engage the readers. Guest blogging on more established blogs is another way to get more traffic to your own site.

Participate on Forums and Other Blogs.

Also you can visit other blogs, forums, and message boards frequently and leave informative comments and remarks. All of these give you the opportunity to provide a link to your website, which in turn helps with marketing your business. Participate often and become an active and respected member of sites you participate on.

The more you participate, the more you put your brand in front of prospective new customers.  Make sure the comments you leave are relevant and on target. Irrelevant comments made for the sake of leaving a link behind are often ignored or deleted or worse get you account banned.

What makes a good comment? Be sure to follow these quick tips:

• Read the article, then read it again. You don’t want to miss something that was already said in the post or misinterpret the author’s point.
• Be original. Take a once over of the comments already left and make sure your point adds to the conversation, or starts a whole new line of thought.
• Get there early. Comments in the first 1-5 spots are more likely to be viewed by readers. To ensure you aren’t tardy to a new post, sign up for email alerts for your very favorite blogs!

There you have it, 3 parts of FREE Online Marketing Tips For Those On A Tight Budget, brought to you by Matt! :-)

FREE Online Marketing Tips For Those On A Tight Budget. Part 2/3

Continued from my last post..

Know your market.

Your marketing strategy will never be successful if you do not have a clearly defined audience. Before you even spend a cent on marketing, figure out who your target market first. There’s no need to pay top dollar to hire a fancy market research firm. If you know your product, you should be able to figure out your market yourself. For example, who will be most interested in your product? Men or women? What is their age group? What are your customer’s interests? What is their likely financial situation?

Once you have a thorough profile of your customer, determining how and where to reach them is much easier. This step may take awhile, and that’s OK. If you start marketing before you have a clear customer profile though, you will likely be wasting your dollars in places that will never reach your customer.

Search engine optimization (SEO).

When someone enters a search query into a search engine about something relevant to your company, obviously you want to be one of the first results displayed. So how do you make this happen? Essentially, you need to make your website more appealing to search engines. Do this by using keywords that are commonly searched, back-linking your site, customizing the headline and description, etc.

SEO can admittedly be a complicated and time consuming process, however the time needs to be spent here to ensure your website is getting found. Your best bet is usually going to be spending a bit more of your budget and hiring the right people to do the proper research. We always empathize the importance of not including keywords to simply rank your site, but using the terms your audience is looking for.

Social media.

Don’t just sign up for these services and then forget about them. Start being active on social media. All these sites should be used to promote your blog posts and communicate with customers. However, most people don’t follow companies on social media unless the company gives them a reason to. So, of course, give them a reason!








Stay tuned for my next post (part 3) that I will be covering and sharing with you soon!