Marketing on a budget and what you should focus on first

Marketing on a budget and what you should focus on first

Not every business is going to have hundreds of thousands of dollars to start marketing with, in fact, the majority of businesses have a shoestring budget and need to strategically spend their marketing dollars.  The beauty of online marketing is that it doesn't have to be expensive if you don't want it to be.  Of course, if you want to speed up the process, you'll have to spend a few bucks on the entire process but it's not necessary.  There are plenty of companies out there that didn't spend money on marketing in the beginning stages, they invested their time and effort in order to boost their traffic and sales, which you can do as well.

Just doing basic marketing isn't going to be enough, you'll need to work on your website first in order to actually get your traffic from the marketing efforts to convert.  Working on your own website should be the first thin you do in terms of marketing because it's going to sell more than your actual conversations with customers will.  Sure, you will convert a few people contacting you through a form into a sale, but the majority of people signing up or buying something will be converted solely because of the content on your website.

In this discussion I'll be going over some marketing tricks you can use if you're on a tight budget.  I'll also be covering what you need to do prior to marketing in order to convert more leads


Content creation
Creating captivating content is one of the best ways to convert someone into a sale.  If you aren't writing your own content, be sure to have someone that can write it in a way that will help increase your sales.  If you are the one writing your content, which will save you money, I would suggest reading up on a few tricks to help turn your content into a sales machine   Don't worry, I'll go over a few of them so you get the idea

• Be uplifting - When you're writing something that you want to help boost your sales, you need to make sure you're controlling the emotions of the reader and never letting them be anything but happy.  If you can be energetic within your writing, without seeming like you're fake, you will definitely boost your sales.
• Don't show any doubt - If you're going to be selling something online, it has to be seen as the best item or service that a person could purchase.  If you show any form of doubt in your content, your readers will doubt the product or service and not want to purchase anything.
• Provide answers - When you're writing your content, you will need to answer questions that might come up.  You shouldn't wait for the questions before you answer them, just add in a "Frequently asked questions" section so people can get their own answers.  If you're answering questions before they're asked, you're going to boost your sales guaranteed.
• Be an authority - No one wants to purchase from a random person online, they want to purchase only from authority figures within the industry.  If you can portray yourself as the person who needs to be followed, you will boost your sales exponentially. 

On page optimization
When it comes to marketing, not many people think of optimizing their content and other aspects of their page that Google wants to see in a better light.  If you can properly optimize your titles, descriptions, headers, titles, content, and alt tags for every page, you will boost your rankings within the search engines almost overnight.  You probably won't get top rankings in a short amount of time, but you'll be on the right path towards top SERP rankings which will send you a flood of traffic for free

On page optimization isn't something you can just learn right away, you will have to test it out on a few pages before you get it right.  Doing on page optimization for every page you have, and every page you publish later on, you will boost your sales exponentially over time since search engine traffic converts at a fairly high rate.


Social media
Locking down your social media profiles and pages is a must if you're on a shoestring budget for marketing.  There have been companies that make the majority of their money through social media marketing, and it's not as expensive as you think, it can actually be 100% free if you choose it to be!  The beauty of social media marketing is that you can post quality content to your business pages and get found within the search results inside the platform itself.  This is different than a search on Google, Yahoo!, or Bing since those are indexing every page on the internet, social media search engines are dedicated to every page within their own platform, and you can funnel that traffic to your website to boost your sales!

You won't build up your following overnight, it actually takes a bit of time, but you can combine this free marketing tactic with your content creation and send people to specific pages of your website for better results.  Of course, if you set up a small ad on Facebook, you will likely get more people coming in quicker than if you just posting the content to your business page.


Forum participation
When it comes to free marketing tricks because you're on a budget, forum participation is one of the best ones I have ever used   You will need to figure out what forums are within your niche, and target those for best results.  Targeting any other type of forum, like a marketing forum, won't have the biggest effect because it's not niche specific.  People on niche specific forums will see your posts and links that you share around, and they will gravitate towards them more than a forum that isn't niche specific.

Forum participation is great for many reasons, not just bringing in customers directly from the forum.  You can actually boost your search engine rankings due to adding a link within your signature that is aimed at your website.  Think about it, if you're on one niche related forum you will likely see a small boost in the rankings when you add a link to your signature, but imaging if you were on 10 or even 20


PPC campaigns
Since you're on a tight budget, you probably aren't thinking of running a PPC campaign, so this is more for the people who have successfully done the first few tricks and are now making a few bucks.  What you'll want to do is set up a Facebook PPC campaign and get super targeted with your ads.  This way you will know for sure you're not wasting any money on clicks because people might not have been super interested in your ad, but they wanted to click it anyway.  Facebook can't differentiate a person who is going to be super interested and clicks because they want to buy from someone who is just a little interested and might buy, but probably won't.  Sure, they have a super advanced targeting system for your ads, but nothing is perfect and a lot of "potential buyers" get put in the same pool of people who you might be targeting.  So, get super targeted when it comes to your ads and save money along the way  



In Conclusion
There are actually many ways to boost your traffic and sales through free marketing methods, I just touched on the first ones you should work with because they're known winners.  I've personally done all of them, and made money along the way until I had enough money to run a PPC campaign.  I like to boostrap all my websites because it will prove they are worth an investment, if they can't make their own money for advertising, then they might not be worth my time.  Remember, time is money, so if you're wasting it on a website that takes the majority of your money making time while not profiting much, you might want to switch gears and work on a different niche, website, method, etc.


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Thanks!

Razzy