Imagine growing your e-commerce site from nothing to $50,000 in monthly revenue just three months after launching. Impossible?
Actually, I’ve seen case studies that prove it can and does happen.
“But it takes a big marketing budget, right?”
Nope. If you know what you’re doing and you’re willing to put in the work, every single sale can come from free online marketing tactics.
In fact, when you learn these methods, not only can you grow your revenue quickly – you might also be able to raise significant VC funding and gain some primo customers or clients very quickly.
Here are 33 free marketing tactics to consider. Will you use them all? Not likely, unless you have some good virtual assistants to help you out (hint hint!)
- 1. Submit a free press release for distribution using a service such as PRlog.
2 Create a lead magnet and use it to capture and market to leads. Promote your free lead magnet on forums and guest posts.
3. Create a white paper or “how to” guide showing how to achieve a certain goal (using your product, of course)
4. Haunt Quora and respond to questions in your niche. Look for questions that are getting a lot of play, or have a lot of people waiting for an answer.
5. Share your startup on Betalist, the daily list of newest startups.
6. Sign up for a social monitoring service like Mention.com. Respond to anyone that mentions your brand or one of your competitors. Answer relevant questions about your niche.
7. Cross promote with other companies or movers in your niche. Offer to trade mentions and tweets with social media accounts that have a similar number of followers.
8. Join Meetup, find appropriate groups and message the coordinators, asking for speaking gigs at their meetings or events.
9. Film yourself when you speak before a group, and post those videos on YouTube and your blog.
10. Create a Crunchbase page.
11. Share your website on Erlibird.com.
12. Write a post for each one of your competitors, comparing it to your product. This should attract search engine traffic looking for reviews of your competition (Sneaky, right?)
13. Launch your own topic at Scoop.it and place your website into your topic page.
14. Search for blogs using your most relevant keywords. Leave posts on those blogs linking back to your site.
15. Have infographics created that are highly relevant to your business, and then share them on free distribution sites such as Pinterest and Visual.ly.
16. Ask your existing users to help you by promoting your company or giving referrals.
17. Get your business featured on blogs and websites by showing specifically how it can help their readers. Offer the site owner an affiliate commission for each person who joins your list from the post and/or for each person who buys your product. This works especially well outside of the IM niche.
18. Guest post. A lot. Read up on how to guest post and become an expert at it. Entire businesses have been built from scratch to six or seven figures through guest posting alone.
19. Find newsletters that focus on startups – such as StartUp Digest – and get featured there.
20. Use a tool such as Majestic to discover who links to your competitors. Then reach out to those websites and ask for links.
21. Submit presentations to Slideshare.
22. Run a free giveaway or deal on social media to get your target audience to follow you.
23. Submit your site to Product Hunt.
24. Teach a class on Skill Share about your niche.
25. Find out what questions people in your niche are asking, then answer those questions in blogposts (great for SEO).
26. Create a deal on AppSumo.
27. Reach out to Twitter followers of your competition.
28. If you’re a B2B, reach out directly to possible customers on LinkedIn.
29. Grow your site traffic by making it super easy for your readers to share your content with a tool such as Twilighter.
30. Reach out to influencers in your niche on social media.
31. Give away your product free to influencers in exchange for reviews.
32. Become a source on your niche for ‘Help a Reporter Out’.
33. Write roundup posts – pick the 30 or so experts you would most like to mention you, your product or company. Ask each one to answer a super relevant question, then post all those answers in an article with a link back to each expert’s site. Let them know the article is live, and some of them will link to it from their sites or from social media.
Just a few of these, done properly, should see your new business growing fast and strong. Do them all and you will be an unstoppable powerhouse.
