Marketing Ideas For New Entrepreneurs
If you believe everything you read both on and off the internet
, new entrepreneurs are starting up online businesses every day, and within a month or so are making 6-figure incomes. It is certainly true that work-from-home (or the beach or your holiday home, whichever ad you happen to be reading!) businesses have never been more popular - and why not? Who doesnt like the idea of working when you want, not having to sit for hours in your car or on public transport everyday and earning $10,000+ a month, all on autopilot!
While becoming self sufficient as an entrepreneur is certainly possible, when we first start out a large majority of people dont have a lot of lazy money sitting around to put into their online business, so are on a limited budget. However, its all very well setting up your website, selling the latest and best information/software/widgets etc, but unless people actually come and visit you, your bank account is going to stay empty. So you have to think up some marketing ideas.
But marketing or advertising can cost a lot of money, and before you know it your limited budget has gone, with nothing to show for it; you are depressed and disillusioned, and looking for another job.
So I thought I would put together some low cost or free marketing ideas, mainly for the new entrepreneur, but this is also for those of you who have been in the business for a while and are finding you are constantly spending more dollars than you are bringing in, and are running out of marketing ideas.
Free Classifieds
There are many, many sites to choose from: some of the more popular are Craigslist, USfreeads, Adland & WorldFreeAds, but run a search and you will find a whole heap more You need to check out the sites and choose 3 or 4 which you like the look of, sign up and away you go. They all give very clear instructions, so even if you are new to this you should have no problem. You will have to do LOTS of ads to get results, say 10 a day, and it is a good idea to keep a spreadsheet so as to know when the ad runs out. Most of them give you the opportunity to upgrade the ads to give you more traffic, which normally costs between $8 - $20, and depending on your budget I would suggest you pick 2 or 3 as a test run. Choose the ad title carefully, as this is what will make your prospective customer check it out or not
Social Networking Sites
The most popular are Twitter, Squidoo, Facebook, My Space and You Tube but there are a lot more you will come across. They all differ in the way the networking actually works, but the general idea is to build contacts, initially on a social basis, with the idea in time of turning some of the friends into prospects and team members. To start with just choose one or two of the sites, say Twitter and Facebook which can be nicely linked up (in addition to your website) as you need to be fairly diligent in adding new content regularly, and while you are learning it can get a bit overwhelming and take a lot of time. Do try and keep the time factor to around an hour maximum, otherwise it just eats into your daily routine too much.
Articles
Depending on what you are like at writing, articles are a great way to maximise your presence on the web, and start building your personal brand. There are some great free article sites, such as the one you are on right now, and most have plenty of article writing lessons to help put you on the right track. You need to be writing 5-10 articles a week to make an impression and start seeing traffic being funnelled to your website. They all have a resource box where you can give some information about yourself, with links to your website, blog or affiliate site.
Press Releases
Press Releases need to be written in the third person, and also need to be topical, but the search engines love them, so its worth doing one or two every week. There are one or two which are free, but normally there is a small charge for putting these on the sites, and this can vary, so be sure to check before you spend your time and energy on a particular site.
Website or Blog
Wordpress or Blogger are the easiest to get up and running by yourself if you dont have the budget to get one professionally built for you, and they both have detailed training webinars etc. It is important to update and add to your blog regularly, and also you need to learn about optimising it for the search engines. But take it step by step and you can get a great deal of enjoyment from it.
Depending on your budget, there are some excellent e-books and programs which go into more detail than I have, and which will give you a lot more marketing ideas. The particular one I started out with, and which I can definitely recommend, is written by Mike Dillard, who is one of the online marketing gurus. This was written with struggling and new entrepreneurs in mind, and among other things shows you free and low cost ways to generate traffic and get leads.
by: Janet Houghton
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