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 avenue on the net is to use free classified ads. There are literally hundreds of thousands of sites that you can post an ad on to sell your product or service. You are obviously not going to be able to put something up on all of them but you need to get to as many as possible that cater to your niche. A simple search engine inquiry will give you a very good idea of what sites are the best ones to go.
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.
Finally, at least as far as the web goes, you are going to have your own dedicated site. If you have a limited budget, you should start out with a simple blog that you can talk about your business and make some daily posts about what you are selling. All of these sites are totally free so it will not cost you a penny and you will be competing with the people that have spend thousands on getting their site up an running.
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.
That is something that will also work in your local business community, especially if you are in an area that is heavily populated with private businesses instead of the corporate bullies. A lot of times you will have one area that is saturated with all different types of shops. Most people will spend money on a mental trigger or impulse buy. If they are checking out at one store and then see a flyer for your store for something else they need, don't you think they will trust the judgement of the store owner that they are currently buying from. Again, business you probably would have never had for merely letting each other advertise in each others place of business.
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 avenue on the net is to use free classified ads. There are literally hundreds of thousands of sites that you can post an ad on to sell your product or service. You are obviously not going to be able to put something up on all of them but you need to get to as many as possible that cater to your niche. A simple search engine inquiry will give you a very good idea of what sites are the best ones to go.
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.
Finally, at least as far as the web goes, you are going to have your own dedicated site. If you have a limited budget, you should start out with a simple blog that you can talk about your business and make some daily posts about what you are selling. All of these sites are totally free so it will not cost you a penny and you will be competing with the people that have spend thousands on getting their site up an running.
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.
That is something that will also work in your local business community, especially if you are in an area that is heavily populated with private businesses instead of the corporate bullies. A lot of times you will have one area that is saturated with all different types of shops. Most people will spend money on a mental trigger or impulse buy. If they are checking out at one store and then see a flyer for your store for something else they need, don't you think they will trust the judgement of the store owner that they are currently buying from. Again, business you probably would have never had for merely letting each other advertise in each others place of business.
About the Author:
Alex Wu loves numbers and marketing. He operates a free advertising website that combines social networking with business marketing in this free ads network.
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