How to advertise your business online and offline.
Congratulations on taking a step towards fulfilling your dream. As a new business owner, advertising is very important—if people don’t know about you, they can’t buy from you. But as a new business owner, your budget is probably limited which means you’ve probably spent most of your capital on developing your product line and establishing your company. Below are some simple, yet effective ways you can begin marketing your business on a low budget:
Start Locally
It is always a good idea to pitch your new business locally, even if it’s an online business.
Call up your local radio shows, television stations, and newspapers and pitch your company from a local angle. How does your product tie in locally? How can your business help the local community?
Place a business-size card ad, in the same spot, every week, in your areas free weekly paper. In your ad, change the sale often, but don’t change the look. Let locals come to recognize the ad and depend on it for keeping them up-to-date about your product.
Visit local stores, in person, and ask to speak to the owner or the person in charge of buying. Set up a meeting to discuss selling your product in the store. Be willing to do a trial run for the first few months by selling your product on consignment, and always get a signed contract.
Contact area Chambers of Commerce and ask for a list of events going on in the surrounding area. Can you purchase booths to sell your product, gain customer leads for your newsletter, and build name recognition?
Is your product child-friendly? Can you give a talk to school-age children in the surrounding area to help bring awareness to your product? You can discuss being your own business, the entrepreneurial spirit, or what it’s like to become an inventor, then pass out a brochure that matches your speech but also sells your product. And don’t be afraid to have a drawing or two at each visit. (And if you play your cards right, you could even get paid for visiting the school!)
Hit the Internet
Start a blog on your retail site, but don’t just “shoot the jab” use your blog as a tool to sell more of your product. Make it chit-chatty so readers will want to come back, don’t stick to marketing talk.
Visit other blogs where the audience would relate to your product. Leave comments and instead of leaving a link back to your blog or home page, link to a product page that matches the comment you’ve left. But remember, you’re not to “sale” your product in the comments area, you’re there to build relationships so keep your post related to the topic being discussed.
Write articles related to your product and distribute them to related websites. You can do this through free content groups or you can query publications and get paid for the article. If you can’t write, hire a ghostwriter to write the articles for you.
Send out press releases. There are several online distribution sites for press releases.
Advertise in the classified ads section of e-zines, newsletters, and websites.
Try pay-per-click advertising such as Google Adsense.
Above all, remember that it takes money to make money so for every dollar you take in, put at least 30-50 cents back into advertising until the product can begin to sell on its own merits. (And that might mean that you’ll be working for nothing in the beginning.)
Alyice Edrich is an affordable freelance writer specializing in how-to articles and Q&A interviews for the web. To view her freelance writing rates, or to hire her for your next writing project, visit http://alyiceedrich.net
