The Top 3 Most Effective Free Marketing Strategies
It doesn’t need to cost an arm and a leg to promote your website or online business. Many online marketing experts agree that the best approach to attract the highest amount of traffic is a combination of paid and free marketing techniques.
The three most effective free marketing strategies for driving new customers to your web pages are, not in any particular order:
1. Guest Blogging
A good marketing option which is free is to find blogs related to your niche and contact the authors. Ask them if they will allow a guest blog to be written. Because most bloggers eventually run out of ideas, in many cases they will agree.
When you provide an informative, well-written blog about your niche topic, you can build a reputation as an expert in your field and also include a link so you can drive traffic to your website.
Build relationships with other bloggers by leaving positive, supportive comments about their blog postings.
Even though there are millions of bloggers, the blogging community for each niche tends to be a small world. Getting acquainted with other bloggers can lead to testimonials, mutual support and cross-promotional opportunities.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking enables you to share sites you like with other people, such as friends, families, social media contacts and subscribers. If you have added a site to the “Favorites” bar on your Yahoo or Google page, you have used social bookmarking.
Some external sites use social bookmarking, including Pinterest, Digg, Mix, Reddit and BuzzFeed.
When users of these sites find something they like for example an article, a web page, an infographic, an image or video, etc. – they can upload it onto their social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter instantly so their followers can see it.
To promote a website using social bookmarking, create accounts at all the biggest social bookmarking sites and post links to your website, along with other things that you find on the internet that you enjoy. Then when people find your page, they can access your site.
Encourage visitors to your website to include it on their social bookmarking pages. The easiest way to do this is to include buttons on your site that instantly share your link on their pages.
If you built your website using WordPress or another mainstream blog hosting site, there are free plug-ins that you can drag and drop onto your pages to add these buttons.
E-mail marketing
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for internet marketers to use to promote their websites, products and services. Create a webpage in which something of value is offered in exchange for the visitor’s email address. It could be a free report, an eBook, an instructional video, or anything niche-related that people are going to want.
The email addresses you capture should then be added to your subscription list. You can then use an autoresponder – a program which allows you to manage email lists automatically to send a series of emails promoting your webpage, business or products.
Emails can be interspersed with those that don’t try to sell at all but instead offer high-value content the recipient can use. The purpose of alternating sales emails with content emails is to build trust bonds with the people on your email list.
Use your email sequence to promote a single offer or multiple offers. Many email marketing strategies promote a series of increasingly more expensive offers so you can convince your list to buy bigger and more products from you as the trust bonds become stronger.
Drawbacks of Email Marketing
Sadly, email marketing is not as effective as it once was because users today, especially younger people, don’t rely as much on email.
Texting and a range of other communication apps have replaced email as the primary web-based or smartphone-based method of communicating with other users. As a result, mobile marketing has challenged email marketing as the best way to promote your business online.
However, the concepts of mobile marketing are identical to email marketing. You still capture your subscribers’ addresses or other identifiers in exchange for something that they find valuable, such as a free giveaway, a discount or a special offer.
Use a program to send out a series of text messages which alternately promote your business and give them high-value content they can use.