In the second part of “10 Ways to market Your Product Almost for Free”, we take a look at methods to advertise your product for free on the internet.
As more people around the world have more and more access to the internet, online marketing is fast becoming the advertising medium of choice by many companies because of its low cost in comparison to traditional advertising allowing start-up companies a better chance at grabbing a piece of the pie.
Once again, any company can be successful at advertising their products or service online almost for free with some hard work and dedication.
Let’s take a look at the remaining best ways to advertise your product almost for free.
Groupon and Discount Websites
They are many discount websites out there and some of them even offer all or part of their advertising services for free. One example is Costa Rica Descuentos which gets about 2,000 visitors a month and offers most of its services for free depending on the area of the website you want to advertise your product.
Even though Groupon can be expensive and does not always bring a profit to the store, it is still worth mentioning because the company does not have to pay until the results promised have been delivered. In order to make a profit with Groupon though, the store has to thoroughly do its homework in estimating its ROI(Return On Investment).
Affiliate Program
An affiliate program is when you let people advertise for you and do not pay them until results have been delivered.
The payment programs will vary according to your preferences. The most popular payment methods are: affiliate commission where the affiliate received a percentage of the sale, per sale payment where the affiliate receives a flat fee for every customer brought to the website and per click where the affiliate receives compensation for every visitor that he brings to the merchant’s website.
They are a couple of different ways to create an affiliate program. The first one is where you must first buy the affiliate software or get a programmer to create one for you.
Affiliate programs will vary in price from $500 and up depending on the features you want available for your affiliates (If you are interested in an affiliate software please contact us). Once your affiliate program is in place, it’s just a matter of advertising your affiliate program on various affiliate network websites.
The second one is to join an affiliate program service where they will take care of everything from the software, to banner ads and tracking. This one however, does have a price which may not be right for most start-up companies.
Twitter is a fast and easy way to instantly share information with family and friends but like Facebook, it is a lot of work as you need a lot of people to follow you before you can get results.
Here are some ways to have a successful Twitter campaign.
- Do not post annoying things like, “I just ate a hamburger with a friend” if you are tweeting from the company Twitter account.
- Do not over post as people will drop you like a fly.
- Do follow other people that may be interested in your product or service.
- Advertize your twitter account on your website and emails
SEO
SEO marketing is one of the most efficient but difficult way to advertise your product. When I say difficult, I do not mean the theory. The theory is quite simple as you just need to have the right content and a lot of dofollow back links to the website or website page you are targeting.
The trick is to have the correct keywords linked to your website that are relevant to the content on your website. After that, the hard part is finding ways to create those back links. Here are some ways to help you get started, submit your website to directories, do some link exchanges, write articles, do some forum posting.
Another way to help you out would be to hire a quality SEO service company that can either do the SEO for you or serve as an SEO consultant for you where they will create an SEO program for you to follow.
Content Communities
A content community is where writing is king and the more you write articles the better your odds of getting traffic and free advertisement to your website. The key is to write very good articles that are informational, unique and fun to read.
Some of the most popular content article website are, www.squidoo.com, www.ezinearticles.com, and www.infobarrel.com. I am naming these ones in particular because the articles you post on these websites are also SEO friendly and have millions of monthly visitors. This means that the better your article, the more chances that someone will stumble on it and end up on your website.
If you are selling a product, the trick to article marketing is to write from a first person point of view about an experience you have had and in an offhand manner talk about how this particular product or service was useful to you. Remember, this is article writing so no blatant advertisement as it will probably bet rejected and if it does not, not many people will take the time to read it.
Here is an example of one such article called, “Best Places to Live in Costa Rica for Expats”. This article is well written and actually ranks on the first Google page for the keyword, best places to live in Costa Rica. This means that this article gets a decent amount of people reading it which gives it a good chance that someone will click on one of the links in the article thus leading to your website.
Article Bonus!
As an extra bonus, to this article let’s talk about YouTube.com. Yes, the big daddy of video sharing is a great way to advertise your product for free and you do not need to hire a professional video company or a quality video camera to do it because with a little imagination, some pictures and the right message, you can do it yourself.
If you happen to have Microsoft Windows on your computer, you have a video making software called, Windows Movie Maker so open the program and start playing with it.
Once you have created your article, just post it on YouTube and from there, start making your video popular by taking part of the YouTube community by watching other people’s videos and commenting on them. The more you do it the better the odds that someone will click on your profile and watch your video.
Overall, the key to success is all about not being shy about posting and telling people about your product on the internet.
Fred St. John is an internet marketing consultant with over 10 years of marketing and website design services experience and has worked for some of the top Fortune 500 companies in the world. You can contact him at fred@blindmonkeymedia.com
