Establishing an advertising budget for a new or existing business is very challenging. Unless you have the money to spend on tracking your bounce back, you are not really sure how it is working for you. Not all businesses can afford real tracking and other than putting a coupon in with your ad, you have no real idea to know if it is effective or not.
You can have the best business idea in the world but if people don't know about it, it is a little hard to make money. The key is to get your name out there without breaking your bank. This even goes for a well established business. You can never lie dormant but with the economy being the way it is, you are also trying to save every penny that you can.
The first way you are going to save money on advertising is by making use of all the free advertising that is available on the internet. There are many different avenues that you can take and you should be exploiting them all. Not one of them will cost you a penny out of your pocket and will require you to do nothing more than spend a few hours a week on your computer.
The first facet is to post on as many free classified sites as you can find that involve your particular business. There are some well know national ones like Craig's List but there are thousands of other ones too. If you have no knowledge of them, do a search on the web and you will get the general idea of how many opportunities you have to advertise for free.
The next area you are going to use on the net is to get some pages going on social networks. If you check them out, Facebook, MySpace and Squidoo are not just for people making googoo eyes at each other. Most of these sites also offer some type of classified ad but you would really rather go the route of developing your own page or pages that will catch the attention of perspective buyers. Take some time to explore these sites and you will get the general idea.
The final thing you can take advantage of for free advertising on the internet is to develop your own webpage. Now I know you are thinking that this is a very expensive undertaking, but it doesn't have to be. True, eventually you are going to have to put out some cash and have to have a real site up, but in the meantime you can use a blog. You just need to get something on the web.
From there, you need to start going to forums and other bloggers to do link exchanges. This will enable everyone to send people to each others sites and it won't cost anyone a penny out of their pocket. In this case, you may actually want to diversify and make buddies with people who have sites that are totally different from yours as you want to hit as wide an audience as you can. You might be selling product x and someone is on a poker site and it hits them in the face when they sign on and check their forum. All of a sudden they remember that they are out of x and click on your link and make a purchase.
You can use this technique with the fellow members of your chamber. Most communities have a Chamber of Commerce and you need to join. You are going to buddy up with all of these guys and offer to promote their business if they promote yours. Nothing major, just a flyer, or maybe a poster in the local drugstore. Anything you can do to expose your business to more clientele. All of this will cost you not one cent and you will have more advertising for free that you would have ever thought possible.
You can have the best business idea in the world but if people don't know about it, it is a little hard to make money. The key is to get your name out there without breaking your bank. This even goes for a well established business. You can never lie dormant but with the economy being the way it is, you are also trying to save every penny that you can.
The first way you are going to save money on advertising is by making use of all the free advertising that is available on the internet. There are many different avenues that you can take and you should be exploiting them all. Not one of them will cost you a penny out of your pocket and will require you to do nothing more than spend a few hours a week on your computer.
The first facet is to post on as many free classified sites as you can find that involve your particular business. There are some well know national ones like Craig's List but there are thousands of other ones too. If you have no knowledge of them, do a search on the web and you will get the general idea of how many opportunities you have to advertise for free.
The next area you are going to use on the net is to get some pages going on social networks. If you check them out, Facebook, MySpace and Squidoo are not just for people making googoo eyes at each other. Most of these sites also offer some type of classified ad but you would really rather go the route of developing your own page or pages that will catch the attention of perspective buyers. Take some time to explore these sites and you will get the general idea.
The final thing you can take advantage of for free advertising on the internet is to develop your own webpage. Now I know you are thinking that this is a very expensive undertaking, but it doesn't have to be. True, eventually you are going to have to put out some cash and have to have a real site up, but in the meantime you can use a blog. You just need to get something on the web.
From there, you need to start going to forums and other bloggers to do link exchanges. This will enable everyone to send people to each others sites and it won't cost anyone a penny out of their pocket. In this case, you may actually want to diversify and make buddies with people who have sites that are totally different from yours as you want to hit as wide an audience as you can. You might be selling product x and someone is on a poker site and it hits them in the face when they sign on and check their forum. All of a sudden they remember that they are out of x and click on your link and make a purchase.
You can use this technique with the fellow members of your chamber. Most communities have a Chamber of Commerce and you need to join. You are going to buddy up with all of these guys and offer to promote their business if they promote yours. Nothing major, just a flyer, or maybe a poster in the local drugstore. Anything you can do to expose your business to more clientele. All of this will cost you not one cent and you will have more advertising for free that you would have ever thought possible.
About the Author:
Alex Wu is fascinated by numbers and trading in marketplace. He wants to build a free advertising site that leverages the power of social network to facilitate business hiring in his free ads website.
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