How to Market – 5 Free Marketing Ideas For Small Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

Small businesses owners have a unique marketing opportunity right now! There are literally hundreds of ways to do free marketing, including free blogs and websites, article marketing, social networking and even ordering free hard copy materials. This article will go over my favorite online and offline ideas for how to increase your small business marketing budget by using free marketing sources.

Here are my 5 favorite How To Do Free Marketing ideas:

Use Survey Monkey to find out the hot topics that your customers are interested in! If you THINK you know what your customers are interested in purchasing, I bet you are wrong! The only way to find out what they really want to know about is to ask! I did a survey recently asking my clients what their most pressing marketing needs were and found out that a full seventy five percent of the small business owners and entrepreneurs who responded said that their greatest need was to know how to utilize free websites to grow their businesses. That allowed me to structure a campaign based on using that keyword in conjunction with free marketing (a runner-up) to produce content I know my clients will like!

Bringing us to to number two on my list of free marketing ideas – free websites! I use Weebly to make my free websites as they have a great little blog feature built right in. Now I use Weebly and other free sites like Squidoo to drive traffic TO my main site BUT if you have no website or blog at all this is a great place to start! Make sure you have great content and that you update your free sites or blogs regularly so that it doesn’t get stale.

Once you have an idea what to sell and a place to put it online, the next thing I do to enhance my free marketing efforts is to send out email newsletters.

Now technically this is free since you could use your normal email client like AOL, gmail or outlook BUT I don’t recommend it! What I do recommend is using a service like Aweber or Constant Contact to manage your email newsletters. I KNOW – not free but at $ 20 per month, pretty darn close.

Now that you know what to sell, have a site or blog to sell it on and have a way to communicate to your clients, you can start social networking. Social Networking is free with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter being the big three that I focus on when doing my social networking. They make it VERY easy to communicate with past and potential clients in order to increase your online marketing reach. Facebook is great for B2C and B2B marketing, LinkedIn is good for B2B and employment networking and Twitter is just good overall for generating a large following of people who are interested in what you have to say.

My last free marketing tip is to write articles like this one! Writing articles allows you to become an expert in your field and also allows you generate incoming links to your website through the use of your resource box. If you are just starting out in article marketing, I HIGHLY recommend EzineArticles as they have tons of tutorials and provide great support to their authors.

There you have it – my top five favorite free marketing ideas. Now all you small business owners get out there and implement today. Find out what your customers need and start using some of these free marketing tips to get it to them!