5 Frugal Online Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

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If you own a small business, marketing is an essential expense. However, it’s also one that can be overwhelmingly steep.

Many of the most successful sites online invest tens of thousands of dollars in marketing budgets to pay for pay-per-click ads, sleek videos and enticing promotions.  Catching up with that kind of competition can be tough, but you can still start the journey with some frugal tactics that will take you far.

The following tips are designed even for small business owners who don’t have much experience with online marketing. These fundamental practices and principles can be applied to almost any business in any field.

Spend a little time each week building your own links

Building links is one of the most important ways you can develop your authority as a brand and start ranking higher in search engine results. Fortunately, it doesn’t take any expertise to build some of your own links. In fact, it’s as easy as registering for any website.

Put aside some time each week to sign up for a new business directory and create a profile for your business. Business directories are sites like Insider Pages, Yellow Pages, Yahoo! Local, Yelp and Yell. Nearly all of them are free and they allow you to post information about your business that can then be searched.

Each profile you create should include your name, address and phone number, so that the information will be recognized as identifying your business. Search engines use the number of times your information appears online in different places as a sign of authority. That’s why it’s important to keep building new ones every week.

Update your social media pages over your website

A great website can also be a great expense if you plan to keep it constantly maintained and updated. If you’re working with a smaller budget, you’re probably better off with a simple, clean website and a very active — and much cheaper — presence on social media.

Building your audience directly by providing value to your readers or sharing good moments for your brand with them can be a powerful marketing technique. Social media profiles are usually located near the top of the search results because of the massive authority of sites like Facebook and Twitter. When users are searching for services, they can end up visiting these profiles and being encouraged by your interactions.

Replace some marketing costs with simple giveaways

Promising a prize to your visitors or followers can be a powerful technique with a very low price tag. If you’re careful, and you advertise your promotion with those active social media accounts we discussed above, the whole thing shouldn’t cost more than the cost of the prize and the shipping. You can get amazing prizes with even ¼ of the cost of a proper monthly advertising budget, and when you’re first starting out, this may be the entire amount you need to create a buzz around your business.

Curate content when you don’t have the budget to create it

Drawing people to your website or pages requires good content, making content one of the key parts of your marketing strategy. Also, your place in search results is determined by how well your content matches search results. However, creating your own unique content can be time-consuming and expensive. When you don’t have time, you can get by on curating content instead of creating it.

Provide value to your readers by finding excellent content elsewhere and linking it with some commentary of your own. As long as you’re skilled at picking out the best, you’ll still draw followers and build trust in your expertise.

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Forge great advertising relationships for free by reaching out

Another way you can get links is by approaching other websites, usually just by emailing them using the standard contact information, and trying to convince them that your services are valuable to their readers and worth linking out to. For example, if you own a website that sells ski equipment, you would have a lot in common with a website that handles booking for ski lodges. The owner of that website may be willing to let you write a post for his or her readers that could include your link.

These exchanges aren’t just small business owners helping each other out; they’re the acorns of amazing long-term partnerships. Be kind and helpful to the community of people who you share links with, because they’re in a great place to offer business opportunities you might never find otherwise.

About the Author:

Adam Steele is a builder of things, including agency and link building solution, Loganix, internet marketing agency The Magistrate, and among others, a Referral Spam Cleanup tool. He is always looking for a new hustle, and eager to help others with their marketing and business-related questions.

This is a guest post, courtesy of Adam Steele, the founder of Loganix, a popular SEO fulfillment company located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.