3 Ways to Promote Your Website When You Have No Money In Your Marketing Budget

All businesses must start somewhere, and that place is typically always lean with an extremely limited, or even no marketing budget. It’s hard to grow your business without a big marketing budget, but guess what, you don’t need one.

You don’t need money to market your business. There, I said it.

So, you don’t have any money to spend on advertising. But thankfully we live in a digital world where everything is connected, and social media is free.

It costs you nothing to join every major social media platform and network available.

The other reason why you’re lucky is that you can create content in any form, videos, articles, audios, social media posts and so on. And you don’t have to spend money to do that – just some time and a little hard work.

Sure, it may sound simplistic or naïve to you, but it works. You create the content that people want, and you push them out in multiple formats. It’ll take some time, and you’ll need some patience, but stick to it, and you will get traffic.

3 Ways to Promote Your Business With Zero Ad Budget

Places to promote your business for free

Quora

First, go to Quora and type in all the questions people within your niche may have. Don’t worry, no matter how specific your market or product niche, there will be plenty of questions.

You’re going to see a bunch of questions. At this point you need to focus on the popular ones, the questions getting the most votes. Click into each question and answer them.

You’re going to spend some time proving your expertise and authority over your subject by helping people. This creates engagement and builds trust in your reputation. Now, I know it’s hard to refrain from marketing your business directly, but don’t. Just answer the questions, people will like your answers and check out your website which you’ll have in your bio on Quora.

A ServerWise client needed a way to build up his reputation (and backlinks) without increasing his advertising and marketing budget. I suggested this exact strategy to him and in the last three months he’s answered hundreds of questions and is currently receiving thousands of website visitors from Quora. It took time for him to see those answers become site visitors and leads and finally, sales. But it happened, and it will for you as well.

People need to develop trust before they purchase your product or service. By helping people out without the direct intention to make a sale, more people will see who you are, they’ll come back to your website, and then they’ll purchase.

It’s that simple.

Social Media

The second thing that you should be doing is posting your content on social media.

Here’s where Quora comes into play again. You know, all those questions you looked up and hopefully answered? Well, take a few of the most popular ones and use it as the basis of an article. Consider this, if an answer to a question on Quora had 30 votes, imagine how many people have the same question but didn’t post it online?

The answer is at least 100 times as many. Now all of those people are highly targeted to your product or service and even though most don’t have a Quora account, they all surely have at least a Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram account.

Write up the article based on popular relevant Quora questions and answers.

Post that article to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and even Instagram.

You want to share your content everywhere continually and consistently.

Before you hyperventilate at the thought of writing dozens of articles while trying to run a business,  you can squeeze multiple forms of content from just one well-written article. Break up a long form article into a series of tweets, or a podcast.

You write up your blog post and publish it on your website.

Then you post the same content on LinkedIn. But you’re only going to post the first few juicy paragraphs on LinkedIn along with a link that says something like, “Hey, click to continue reading the rest.” This draws readers to your website to finish the article.

You’ll also put a snippet of the same article on Twitter and because the platform only allows 140 characters, people must go to your site.

Facebook and Instagram are great resources for free marketing and exposure (and stronger backlinks to your site, which will increase your search engine rankings) and you should use them heavily.

While you’re on Twitter, engage with your future customers by searching for your niche or market and answering any questions other Twitter users may have. It’s the same thing you’re already doing on Quora, just in 140 characters or fewer. Don’t forget to include a link to any content you’ve created that relates to the question.

Again, it is that simple, and it does work, but you must put in the time and effort.

Forums

Finally, my last recommendation to get you free marketing and exposure may seem outdated to you, but it’s never been more relevant.

Pop on over to Google.com and type in your market space, niche or specific sector and add the word Forum after it.

You’re going to see a list of forums.

Spend some time and visit them all. Look at activity levels, which appear to be the most popular, which ones have members that most closely represents your buyer persona.

Join those forums and just like you did with Quora, you’re going to get engaged and help people out. Respond to questions that you can answer.

Here’s the most important part because remember, you’re not going to directly market yourself or your product in these forums. So instead, you need to make sure your signature is doing the promoting for you.

Make sure to include a link to your website in the footer of each of your forum responses.
Not only will this drive highly targeted visitors to your website, but the Google search algorithm loves forum engagement. And the more helpful responses you provide in each forum, the more often your link will be seen by Google. This is going to directly increase your search engine rankings.

As we all know – more relevant traffic, means more sales.

MARKETING ON A
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J. Fleischmann
J. Fleischmann
James is a content strategist, sites manager and copywriter for ServerWise. He's written 51 e-books for clients resulting in over 600,000 new leads as a ghostwriter. James lives in Texas with three dogs and has a Longhorn as a neighbor.