Online marketing strategies for a start up company or business vary from one extreme to another but one cannot forget about the basic low cost marketing strategies that every company should have in the website marketing repertoire.
They are thousands of online marketing strategies on the internet and innovative marketers are inventing new ones every day. Some of these online marketing strategies are cost effective and not yet truly tested. Others are expensive ideas that may or may not work.
Using generic and low cost marketing strategies are time consuming but when a company’s online marketing budget is under $5,000; the options are limited.
Here are some basic low cost online marketing strategies for start up companies or any companies looking to save a buck:
Online Communities – Online communities like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and more boast over 500 million users. Each of these users is categorized in a way where you can target your ideal market.
The solution is simple, open a few profiles, make your profile popular for a specific demographic by making friends with people that are in your target market and voila!
If you work hard at it you can achieve over 10,000 people to advertise within a year at no cost to you except time.
Free Classifieds – They are a few thousand free classified advertising website on the internet. Probably half of them are not worth doing but these websites do get a lot of traffic.
So why not place a classified ad for your business in each one of them. The results will be poor but it can be worthwhile and will produce back links to your website.
Forums – What better way to advertise your company then by finding a forum that targets the specific clients you are looking for? All you have to do is spend a couple of hours a week posting and making post on these forums.
You get free advertisement from it by adding your website URL to your profile as well as on your signature. The more you post the more advertisement you get.
PPC – When you have a new website, even if you hire an SEO specialist it will still take time before your website is on the first search engine result page. The solution is to use pay-per-click advertising.
It can be an effective and low cost tool for conversions if you do your research correctly like finding the right keywords and when do put up your bids and what position to take.
Next week, we will go over more strategies in part 2 of this article. Just remember that even though the above marketing strategies are cost effective, they are time consuming. Low cost marketing strategies do work well if you are willing to put the effort into it.
Fred St. John is an internet marketing consultant with over 20 years of online marketing experience and has worked for some of the top Fortune 500 companies in the world. You can contact him at fred_stjohn@hotmail.com
