Marketing your online business on a budget

By Kathy Joyce
Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2004

Do you have a great online business but few customers, and a very limited budget to work with?

Just uploading your site onto the internet is not enough, even submitting to the main search engines and directories takes time. Often it may take months for a website to get listed.

You don't have to spend a fortune on marketing your site, the best methods are often very inexpensive or free.

1,Pay Per click search engines

Pay per click search engines work by bidding for keywords. This is an immediate way to get your site listed.
They work by bidding for specific targeted keywords related to your site.

You pay only for hits to your site and bidding can start as low as $0.1 depending on the popularity of the keyword.

For example if you sell blue widgets then "widgets" is too vague. "blue widgets" will get visitors who specifically want to buy blue widgets!!
"Widgets would probably be more expensive as it has a more general audience but "Blue widgets" is more targeted to a particular audience and would most probably be cheaper.
Here are a couple of well known ones, ((http://www.overture.com) and (http://www.go-click.com) )

2,Submit ezine articles

Submitting ezine articles are free and often one of the best ways of getting visitors to your site. Write an article about a subject that relates to your site giving useful information, but don't use it as an advert for your site or it probably won't be accepted. You can however advertise your website in a resource box at the end of your article.

Articles should be of a 65 character line length. Editpad lite is a free download enabling you to set character line lengths on your file. (http://www.editpro.com/editpadlite.html) Saves a lot of work in counting characters!! Another useful free program is (http://www.nch.com/.au/typecharge) it is designed to count characters and words in any document.

Submit your articles with online article directories at (http://www.ezine-writer.com/article-lists.html) ,(http://www.ezinewriter.com/top10.html) ,(http://www.ideamarketers.com) and (http://www.articlecity.com)

If your articles are of value with good content they will soon be circulated amongst many other websites providing you with links back to your site. Search engines love sites with lots of links so it will increase your website's popularity.

In time you will find that traffic to your site has dramatically increased. This will be targeted traffic from visitors having read your articles.

Success doesn't happen overnight and takes hard work and perseverance but if you write a couple of articles a week you will soon find an increase in visitors to your site.

3,Write your own ezine

Start your own ezine and publish it regularly. This is a good way of informing your visitors of any news and updates on your website. Have an opt in form on in a prominate place on your site so that people can subscribe to it.
The ezine should also have an unsubscribe option as well. Any visitors who do unsubscribe should be deleted from your database immediately.

You can install some free cgi scripting that enables visitors to subscribe and unsubscribe to your newsletter or ezine. Go to (http://www.siteinteractive.com/subscribe/index2.html) There are tutorials as well to help you install the script.

A good idea is to have a pop under box for visitors to subscribe. This will appear after they have closed your site. I personally find pop up boxes annoying, but with a pop under box the visitor has already left your site anyway.
You can get the cgi script for a pop under box at (http://www.clickforcontent.com/pop_under_script.htm)

If you need articles to put in your ezine there are many sites that have databases of free articles that you can use. Try (http://www.freezineweb.com)and (http://www.ezinearticles.com)

These are just some of the methods that you can use to get traffic to your site.
There are also many offline ways as well including just talking to people you meet!!

You could design and print out some flyers to advertise your business and place them in cafe's, libraries, supermarket customer advertising boards, and even place some on car windscreens in car parks that you are passing through. I have often gone back to my car after a shopping trip and found a flyer on my car advertising a business or local event!!

Design and print out business cards. You can get some nice quality paper for printing these out on to make them look professional. Hand these to everyone you meet and leave one with a bill whenever you eat in a restaurant.

How about designing a car sticker and place it on the rear windscreen of your car.

Placing an ad in your local paper is a good idea and reasonably inexpensive.

Always make sure that you carry some cards and flyers whenever you leave the house you never know when an opportunity will occur!!

About the Author
Kathy Joyce owns her own mlm home based business.(http://www.healthandbeautytowealth.co.uk) For more advice and resources on starting a home based business visit. (http://www.healthandbeautytowealth.co.uk/startahomebiz.html)