41 Ways To Market Your Small Business Website On A Budget

How do you market your small business website on a shoestring budget?  There are many methods you can try that are free or low cost.  By free, I mean you pay with your time and don’t keep bashing the budget.

Some of these ideas to market your website are set and forget.  Others require implementing as part of an overall marketing strategy.

They key is not to get overwhelmed and try to do everything at once!  Set some time aside each week to get the word out about your small business website. 

41 Ways to Market Your Small Business Website On a Budget

1. Have a website that is useful to your target market.  What is your website there to do?  Make sure it does its job
2. Create a sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools (and Bing)
3. Create a Google Plus Profile and connect your website to get your profile photo into the search results.  Social Goddess Sue walks you through it over on her blog
4. Encourage people to sign up for updates, build a list of people wanting to hear from you by email.  Email them regularly
5. Create a landing page with an offer and email sign up to encourage people to subscribe to your updates.  Publish this link offline too
6. Add your website or landing page link to your business cards
7. Add your offer and link on your invoices
8. Add your links to your email signature
9. Add your link to your vehicle livery
10. Print your offer and link on every page of your brochures, flyers or leaflets
11. Add your offer and link to your offline ads – local paper, Yellow Pages – anywhere you have ads running
12. Get blogging! (I may have said that several times before)
13. Make it easy to share your content by adding social sharing buttons
14. Seek out blogs related to your business and leave thoughtful/useful/human comments.  Think relationship building rather than link building!
15. Similarly, seek out forums related to your business and take part. 
16. Ensure your website link is on every social profile you have
17. Seek out relevant groups on LinkedIn or Facebook and take an active part – don’t just promote your website!
18. Make use of the new Google Plus communities, again don’t just self-promote
19. Answer questions within these groups and communities, show your expertise.  Carefully and not overly salesy link back to answers, how tos and clarification on your website or blog within group guidelines
20. Offer to guest post on related blogs and community sites.
21. Set up a LinkedIn business page.  Another Social Goddess, Ginny shows you how on her blog
22. Set up a Facebook business page – if you are a local business create a local business page to take advantage of Facebook’s improved “nearby” feature
23. Claim your Google Places (Google+ Local) the old way… You can get details of how by filling in the box beneath this post
24. Add your business details including your website link to local directories.  There’s a list of 20 popular ones in my download, just fill in the box below
25. Join your local Chamber of Commerce and get your website and business details added to their directory
26. Upload industry relevant images on sharing sites such as Flickr and Picasa.  Make the images public and request attribution if used.  Don’t use images that you do not own the copyright
27. Pinterest is all the rage and is a great way to drive traffic to your website and ecommerce site.  Upload your images and product images and link back to your website
28. Create infographics from your information and stats.  Publish them on your blog and share on sites like Pinterest.  Community Goddess Bonnie goes over the basics of creating your own infographics and mentioned that she will be doing templates – so keep an eye out for that!
29. Create a YouTube Channel and upload videos.  You can create simple videos using a tool like Animoto or use screen cast software to record tutorials without a huge budget
30. Interview industry peers.  Video the interview and post on YouTube.  Transcribe the video and post it on your blog
31. Spotlight peers or customers on your blog, do some schmoozing as Bonnie called it.  People generally share content they have been mentioned in!
32. Collate related blog posts as PDFs and upload to sharing sites like Slideshare
33. Offer to talk at workshops and network meetings, let people know how they can find you online
34. Share your presentation slides on Slideshare
35. Write a press release and distribute online, to the local newspapers and trade or industry magazines
36. Sponsor or raise money for a local charity.  You could press release this too as well as get a link back to your website from the organisation involved.
37. Offer a website testimonial to a supplier or product developer
38. Ask for testimonials from your customers or clients and publish them on your website
39. Ask your friends, family and staff to plug your website on their personal social profiles from time to time.  Don’t go crazy with this, it gets old fast!
40. Give people something worth sharing – an offer, hold a competition, a white paper or free download.
41. Write a book, you’re the expert!  While you can self-publish a physical book, if you’re on a budget start with publishing for Kindle

Marketing your small business website on a shoestring budget can be time consuming and overwhelming.  You don’t need to do everything right now (and there are many other methods you can try!)

Make a plan of action, choose one way to market your website each day and implement it.

Over to you…

How many of the above ways to market your small business website have you implemented?  Do you have more to add to the list?

Leave your suggestions below and I’ll add it to the list with a link back to your website.