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You are here: Home / Small Business Marketing / 41 Ways To Market Your Small Business Website On A Budget

41 Ways To Market Your Small Business Website On A Budget

January 15, 2013 by Jan Kearney

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.

41 ways to market your small business on a shoe string 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 market your small business tip - Google authorship
  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 haveFacebook netiquette do's
  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.

41 Ways To Market Your Small Business Website On A Budget by Jan Kearney
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Filed Under: Small Business Marketing Tagged With: blogging, business online marketing, marketing ideas, social media marketing, website marketing strategies

About Jan Kearney

I believe that every business, no matter how small or how local can use the power of the web to gain more customers. I offer no bull coaching and mentoring so small business owners can strategically put the web to work for their business. I've been called a "compass" and a "navigator" and probably a few more names that aren't suitable for a profile!
Connect with me on Google+, Facebook, Pinterest

Comments

  1. Bonnie Gean says

    January 16, 2013 at 1:50 am

    Holy cow! That’s one heck of a list! 🙂

    Imagine how many infographics you could make with that list!

    I am bookmarking this page, it’s extraordinary!

    Thanks for sharing!

    • Jan Kearney says

      January 16, 2013 at 8:41 pm

      It’s a mini list lol You don’t have at least 41 more to add, Bonnie? Thanks for popping in, now all I need is your infographic tutorial to make a start!

  2. Denys Kelley says

    January 16, 2013 at 2:01 am

    What a great list of things to do on a budget! Or just to do period.
    There’s a few I still need to do- thank you. 🙂

    • Jan Kearney says

      January 16, 2013 at 8:40 pm

      oooh! get on with them Denys! Thanks for popping in and taking the time to comment 🙂

  3. Ginny Carter says

    January 17, 2013 at 2:32 pm

    Wow, is that all? 🙂 And thanks for the link, very much appreciated – a goddess indeed, shucks. Someone told me that Google Places is now called Google Plus is that right? Seems a bit odd to me.

    • Jan Kearney says

      January 17, 2013 at 11:29 pm

      Yes, a Goddess Ginny!
      Google Places is still Google Places where you log in. The new name is Google+ Local but the Places +Local is different to the Google+ Local Business page created through Google Plus – you can verify this Plus created page if you are not a service area business and it merges with the Places Plus page.
      Confused yet? I know Google is…

  4. Sue Worthington says

    January 19, 2013 at 7:31 pm

    Brilliant
    Thanks for the link Jan.
    Ginny welcome to the Goddess club!
    LOL
    Sue
    x

Meet Jan Kearney

I believe that every business, no matter how small or how local can use the power of the web to gain more customers. I offer no bull coaching and mentoring so small business owners can strategically put the web to work for their business. I've been called a "compass" and a "navigator" and probably a few more names that aren't suitable for a profile!
Connect with me on Google+, Facebook, Pinterest or Discover More About My Local Business Online…

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