Last Updated on by Azib Yaqoob
I know how difficult it seems when you want to promote your business online. We have all been there. Promoting an online business is complicated, but believe me, you will find it much more manageable after following these website promotion techniques. I have compiled a list of fast, free methods to promote your business online. These techniques will help you boost traffic and sales.
After reading this article, you should be able to decide which marketing methods work best for your business. Since every company targets a different audience and location, I recommend you try other marketing channels. Once you start seeing results, you can invest more money and resources to acquire more customers.
Please keep in mind that slow progress is still better than no progress. Keep patience, and you will achieve your goals.
How to Do Free Online advertising?
These are the best ways to promote your business for free. Most of these free marketing methods have worked for me, my clients, and a lot of other companies. You will surely see significant results after following these “promotion techniques.”
1. Ways to Promote a Business Using Social Media
Social networking for business is fun; you can share real-life stories, events, product benefits, user reviews, etc.
You should do it immediately if you haven’t already set up business accounts on all major social networks. Start promoting your online business on all relevant social pages. Find people in your niche, and connect with them. Find your potential customers and pitch them your product.
You can use these well-known social networks to promote your business online. If you are unsure which one you should focus on, you can try and find out which brings more traffic and sales. Then start building connections:
2. Develop and Execute Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is the new trend. It is helping many offline businesses to establish their presence on the Internet.
We all like to hear great stories. If you can deliver good stories to your target audience, you can attract many new customers.
What is Content Marketing?
It is a marketing concept that involves creating and sharing online material in videos, blogs, and social media posts. Content marketing can stimulate a user’s interest in your product or service.
That’s the textbook definition of content marketing but let me explain it further. Many brands use online content marketing to attract their target audience and convert them into customers later.
You can reach more people by creating helpful content for your target audience through blog posts, videos, infographics, pdf, and podcasts.
You can convert those visitors into paying customers by offering them something more for free.
Please check out my article about how to do content marketing for small businesses.
3. Email Marketing and List Building
Email marketing is an effective tool that works for many online businesses.
Over 3.7 billion email users worldwide, meaning the projected number of users by 2022 is 5.1 billion. Also, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.
You should immediately set up an account on MailChimp, AWeber, or Constant Contact. You can collect and approach leads using one of these services.
However, you need to set up lead magnets on essential places on your website to collect leads. After that, you can send them weekly updates, new discount offers, special packages, etc. The possibilities are endless. Here are some key points to remember when you create an email marketing campaign.
- Build Relationships: Build connections through personalized engagement.
- Brand Awareness: Keep your company and your services top-of-mind for the moment when your prospects are ready to engage.
- Content Promotion: Use email to share relevant blog content or valuable assets with your prospects.
- Lead Generation: Entice your subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for an asset that they’d find valuable.
- Product Marketing: Promote your products and services.
- Lead Nurturing: Delight your customers with content that can help them achieve their goals.
I have compiled a list of the best affordable email marketing services that you can try.
4. Ways to Use Cross-Promotion Techniques
If you have established connections with the right people, you can cross-promote your products on their website/social media platforms and give them the same opportunity.
Cross-promotion is a great way to promote your business online. However, cross-promotion doesn’t work for every business model out there.
You have to find out if businesses in your niche are already using this strategy or not; if yes, then you can promote using the same way as your competitors. Competition research is an essential part of understanding the niche.
Here are some ways to cross-promote your product in your niche.
- Find Influencers: Reach out to influencers in your industry to ask for a product review and opinion.
- Guest Posting: You can promote your product/services on the blogs within your niche. However, a guest post must also help the business on whose blog you are publishing.
- Joint Adverting: You can partner up with relevant brands and work together to create a deal. You can then promote this deal using different advertising platforms to reach more customers.
5. How to Promote Your Business on Google for Free?
Organic search traffic can give your business a new boost. It can help you grow your audience and customer base and improve brand recognition. SEO is a little different than other marketing channels mentioned in the post. It is one of the great ways to promote your business online.
It takes a lot of time, and there are chances that Google can penalize your website for over-optimization (it doesn’t happen very often, though).
You can use different white hat link building tools to build strong links and utilize these on-page SEO tips for beginners.
It would help if you kept a few things in mind when optimizing your website for search engines. Please read this small business SEO guide. It will help you follow a step-by-step process to improve your website’s SEO.
6. Use Cold Emailing Technique
It is a trickier one. You need to send personalized emails to your prospect to gain business opportunities. If you are good at sales, you will do good with cold emailing. It is one of my favorite ways to promote a business online.
- Start establishing some connections before pitching your service or product.
- When you see your prospects interested, it is time to pitch them your excellent product.
- Ask them a question at the end of your email.
- They will most likely give you a response.
On the other hand, if you send an email blast to strangers, your email might get marked as spam. It will be no good for your business. Email blast techniques sometimes work, but for most of us, it is a waste of time. A great marketer can, however, receive an excellent opening rate using the email blast technique.
7. Using a Cold Calling Strategy
To collect leads, you can use local business directories, LinkedIn, Google my business listing, and so on. You need to find out the active phone number of your prospect.
When you have, let’s suppose, a set number of prospects, 50 – 100, you can start dialing. You’ll get many rejections, but if you keep doing it, you will find cold-calling scripts finally working. The average conversion rate through cold calling is relatively low.
It would help if you optimized your cold calling scripts to be short and to the point. Don’t waste your customer’s time; no one wants to be bothered with long promotional calls.
- Keep the conversation to the point.
- Give a little introduction and start your pitch right away.
- Make sure to end your sales pitch with a simple yes or no question.
8. Effective Forum and Group Promotion Techniques
There are thousands of Internet forums and groups that you can use to promote your business. You don’t have to sell your service/product directly to people, but you can help people by showing your expertise in the field. Answer their questions, and also ask your questions.
You can build some great business relationships using forums and Internet groups. These connections can help you grow your online community.
9. Guest Posting
Guest posting has recently become a necessity for every online business promotion. It will improve your domain authority in Google search (which is good for SEO). It is also an effective way to generate referral traffic.
How to submit a guest post?
The simple answer would be finding out which blogs your audience reads. Contact those blogs and pitch them your article idea. Most small blogs need new content on their blogs, so they welcome new guest posts.
Your guest blog post should be helpful and well-written. You can add a few nofollow backlinks to your main product/service page (make sure to optimize those pages for conversions).
It will bring some referral traffic to your website. Guest posting is a very effective marketing method to leverage and establish your brand and business online.
10. Blogging
If you haven’t already set up a blog on your website, then you are missing quite a lot of visitors.
Blogging has helped many online businesses and brands tell stories and impact their audience decisions.
It is challenging, and challenges are good. It is also a great way to learn new things.
Blogging will help build your online brand. More traffic on your blog means a boost in brand awareness.
Blogging can help you reach a wide range of people within and outside your network. It is also a great way to build a community around your brand.
Promote Your Business Online by Advertising
Advertising is also an effective method to promote a business online. However, most small businesses can’t afford to spend much advertising money to get online exposure. You can check out these top advertising methods to boost your online sales with a reasonable advertising budget.
1. Social Media Marketing
It has a mixed response regarding conversions; most marketers believe social media marketing is an excellent tool to generate leads that they can use later in their marketing campaigns.
Why?
Google and Bing show ads when people search for your product or a related query on search engines. So that means these people desire to either buy or know about the cost of a particular product.
On the other hand, when you see ads on Facebook, they are not always relevant, and I don’t think people search for products on Facebook. So, I think social media marketing won’t give you the same results as a PPC campaign.
That’s why Facebook has introduced retargeting ads. Facebook Pixel is a far better approach than showing direct ads. Please read this blog post on how to set up Facebook retargeting ads.
2. Promote Your Business with Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing or PPC advertising can help your business get direct sales. It is one of the widely used ways to promote business online.
It is expensive, but if you have a budget, search engine marketing is a great way to boost your online sales and promote your product/service.
To best learn search engine marketing, dive into guides posted by Google, Bing, and Yahoo PPC networks:
Here are other PPC networks that are also affordable due to low advertisers’ competition.
- Infolinks
- Bidvertiser
- Chitika
- Clicksor
3. Influencer Marketing
When it comes to marketing, there is no single channel you know right off the bet that would give you the best ROI. So, the most important thing is knowing your target audience, their needs, and their pains.
If you know your target audience quite clearly, it would be much easier to target a promotional campaign for them.
Now that you have found the industry, you should discover influencers. An influencer can be a blogger, vlogger, YouTuber, or anyone who influences your industry.
First, you need to connect with them using any social channel or anywhere you can find them.
Most of the time, if you build connections correctly, then you don’t need to pay an influencer. Offering them product samples or discounts is usually more than enough.
