subject: How to launch your business with no advertising budget [print this page] How to launch your business with no advertising budget
However, no matter how much you going to spend in building your product, it will still be unknown to the public if you do not have an efficient and effective marketing strategy in place. After having launched few web services already, I made a list of nine popular strategies to launch your product with no advertising budget.
Above all marketing strategies the first important and key ingredient of a successful marketing strategy is the product itself. If your product does not solve a great problem, it has no value and any marketing budget is useless. Second to that is its uniqueness, differentiate or die. Do not try to meet the needs of everyone, find your niche and focus on it.
Having no budget for advertising increases your creativity; the possibilities are endless as long as you use ethical ways to promote your new venture.
Make a compelling offer hard to resist. It is very hard to find an industry with very low or no competition these days, so take for granted that in order to create a big buzz you need to offer something really very compelling and hard to resist, break the rules. Back in 2006, when we launched an online file storage service, we offered 1GB of free storage, the demand and buzz were overwhelming because the offer was hard to resist at that time. Now is fairly common and easy to get 1GB of free storage space.
Use social networks. Spread the word about your new product to your friends at your social networks. People like to share things they like, it is just human nature.
Do guest blog posts. Blogging has huge power and can help you create traffic and build back links fairly fast. Locate blogs that are relevant to your product or service and do a guest post for them. It is free and will help you build brand awareness to your target market. On top of that it will position you as an expert in the field.
Submit your start up at relevant directories.
Ask for blogs relevant to your target market to write a review about your new product. Everyone loves to feature smart and unique products. For instance, if you launch an e-shop selling women accessories, ask fashion blogs to review your product.
Send out press releases. They are free and can help you spread the news fast. The key to press releases is syndication. There are thousands of other websites that take feed of this news and show them at their website. Your gain is twofold again: you build links and create exposure.
Work on your SEO. Try to be natural and select keywords with low competition. Use Google keyword tool to do that. Avoid generic terms such as "hosting" and use long tail terms such as "hosting for wordpress blogs ". It takes time and persistence to see results out of your SEO strategy, however, organic traffic is vital to your growth.
Comment on forums and blogs that are discussing about services or products relevant to yours. Use Google alerts tool to get informed when specific terms are mentioned on blogs and forums and actively participate in these discussions. If you provide web hosting, join forums of popular web scripts such as shopping carts and tech support forums. You can follow the same practice at popular social media websites like Digg.com, Reddit.com and Stumbleupon.com.
