Time-Tested Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business Owners on a Shoestring Budget

I’m a huge fan of Bear Grylls!

Isn’t it amazing how he always manages to endure even in the toughest of situations? I mean, how many times has he survived on an uninhabited island? Not only that, he even managed to conquer the nothingness of the countless desserts that he was in without any provision from his crew.

When I think about his resourcefulness and the ingenuity that he used to approach the seemingly hopeless cards that are dealt to him, I end up feeling awe-inspired.

Why am I talking about Bear Grylls, you might ask?

Simple.

Every time I watch one of his episodes; I can’t help but think about the Bear Grylls-like marketing strategies that my team and I used to help my clients grow their sales online. By the way, most of my clients are small business owners with a very tight budget.

If you’re struggling with growing your online sales because your “marketing pockets” aren’t deep enough, then allow me to share with you the marketing strategies that my team and I use to help our clients skyrocket their sales.

These strategies are simple to implement, affordable, and most of all effective.

Let’s hop right in:

1. Add your discount coupons to coupon sites like Dealspotr.com

When we execute this strategy, our expenses rarely exceed $50.

It’s that cheap!

The only thing we spend on are the fees included for having the coupon design created. We had freelancers from Fiverr create the designs and pay about $5 to $10. We sometimes spend $15 depending on how many coupon designs we want to be made.

Once we’re happy with the designs, we then post it on our website and look for discount coupon sites that we can add them to.

I know that there are several coupon sites all over the web. However, we’ve been keen on using Dealspotr.com since it brings us the best returns in terms of sales. Our coupons usually end up getting shared countless times by the users, and we almost always get several upvotes as well.

If you give the site a quick gander, you’ll have an idea of why it’s quite possibly the best discount coupon site there is. Not only is their site clutter-free and easy to navigate, but they also have an active and friendly user-base that’s almost always willing to upvote, share, and of course, use the coupons as well.

Based on the strategy that I described above, the only thing you’ll end up spending your money on are the coupon designs. However, if you don’t have the time to look for more discount coupon sites in addition to Dealspotr, then you can hire a virtual assistant to help you with the research, and posting your coupons.

You can find professional virtual assistants in the Philippines for as little as $3 – $7 per hour. With that kind of rate, even if you hire them for 4 hours, you still won’t be spending anything more than $50.

2. Answer questions in Q&A sites

The strategy is pretty straightforward. All you need to do is go to Q&A sites like Quora.com, create an account, then start giving value-packed and comprehensive answers to the questions asked by your target audience.

There are several ways that you can benefit from this strategy:

1. You’ll be able to establish your brand as an expert in your industry. Because you’re giving out expert advice every time you answer their questions, they’ll see you (and your business) as the go-to-guy every time they need help.
2. You’ll be able to nurture your relationship with your audience.
3. Your brand will look even more “human” in the eyes of your audience since you’re interacting with them.
4. Traffic. You’ll get droves of them. If you go to similarweb to check the number of monthly visitors that Quora has, you’ll see that their monthly visitors are in the millions.
5. It helps you with generating content ideas.

Allow me to share with you a couple of tips to help you get the most out of this strategy:

1. Add your signature at the end of your answers. Your signature should have a link to your site.
2. Link to your website’s relevant pages whenever you can. Only add the links if it adds value. If it doesn’t, don’t ever insert it forcefully.
3. Always add a call-to-action at the bottom of your answers telling the readers to contact you if they need any help, or to visit your website for more information.
4. Avoid giving them one-liner answers. Make your answers as comprehensive as possible.
5. Avoid adding huge blocks of texts on your answers since it will only overwhelm your readers.
6. Format your responses accordingly. Use subheadings whenever possible.

As you can probably imagine, you won’t have to pay anyone if you’ll write the answers yourself. That being said, you won’t have to spend as much when compared to hiring an entire agency to market your products.

3. Repurpose your content then publish them on relevant platforms

Make no mistake, creating quality content can be quite expensive. It’s precisely because of this that most marketers and business owners revert to repurposing their content.

It’s a good strategy, I might add.

Here’s the gist of the strategy.

• Step 1. Create and publish high-quality content — a blog post, for example.
• Step 2. Hire someone to convert your blog post into a slide presentation.
• Step 3. Publish your presentation on websites like Slideshare.com.
• Step 4. Turn your slide presentation into instructional videos then publish on video websites like Youtube.com or Vimeo (among others).
• Step 5. Have an infographic created based on your blog post then publish it on relevant sites.
• Step 6. You can also turn the content into a podcast.
• Step 7. You can also convert the file into a PDF format.

With the steps that I detailed above, you’ll have several content pieces at your disposal. Once you publish these on their respective platforms, you’re sure to get several visitors to your site from these content pieces.

What’s next?

What are some of the effective, yet affordable marketing strategies that you can share to help our community of small business?

Please share your strategies in the comments section below. Cheers!