It is important for your businesses to advertise its products or services. Advertising fuels your company’s growth and strengthens the brand. Nevertheless, some advertising methods such as banner and print ads can be expensive. Besides, even if yours is not a small business, you want to spend your cash on advertising that will give optimum results without hurting your budget. Here are some of the ways you can exploit the potential of online advertising on a budget.

Beginners Guide To Online Advertising On A Budget

1. Handle First Things First

Any business that is serious about tapping into the online customer base should have a website or at least a landing page. Many people are flocking the internet to find solutions to their needs. It would help if your business is one of the possible ideas they find when they search for a service or product that matches their needs.

With your website, you get to showcase what your business offers, your mission, values, and don’t forget to add some testimonials. Such information helps potential clients to connect and identify with you. This could influence their buying decision.

Designing a basic website doesn’t have to cost you an arm and leg. In fact, various resources such as Shopify, WordPress, and GoDaddy give all you need to set up a basic website on your own for your business. Visit such resources to see what you can achieve before you decide to invest in a professional designer.

2. List Your Business on Search Engines

Services as Yahoo Local, Bing Local, and Google Places are free. If you sign up, you can increase your chances of people within your area finding you. Do not limit your registration to only a few listings. The more search engines your business appears in the higher the number of clients you are likely to attract.

Also, join local forums or social networking groups that are relevant to your business. For instance, some Facebook groups help members find services and products within an area. In those groups, members recommend businesses they have dealt with for others to consider when in need of a related service or product. There are also location-depended forums any business should consider. An example is the Quentin’s Friends, a platform designed to help members find services, jobs, and apartments.

[RELATED: How to Create a Marketing Plan in 4 Easy Steps]

3. Create and Share Quality Content

In internet marketing, attractive content is what is going to draw the attention of possible visitors and keep them glued to your website. This makes it necessary to identify a subject matter, preferably, related to your business and blog about it. Create quality content that your audience will find useful.

When you create your content you can do two things: post it on your blog or send it to other topic-related bloggers to publish it on their blog as a guest post.

In either case, you should promote it as much possible and the best way to do that you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google +, Quora, LinkedIn and other social networks.

Whatever distribution channel you choose, make sure you include links that direct readers to your site.

Since many social media platforms are free, open accounts for your business in most of them. This is because the kind of followers you gather in Facebook could be different from those in YouTube, LinkedIn or Instagram. You can monitor your performance on each channel for some time and figure out which ones you want to concentrate your online marketing efforts on.

4. Create Viral Infographics

Consider including quality infographics that carry interesting information in your content plan. Most of the information you present in texts, like articles, can be turned into beautifully designed visuals. Did you know visuals stick longer in the mind than texts?

The best part is that you do not need to be a professional designer to create amazing infographics. With online resources such as Canva, Visually, Infogram, and Piktochart, among others, you may never hire a professional designer. All you need is your content, and the platforms provide you with a template equipped with charts, maps, icons and videos, among other functions you can use to create an appealing infographic.

As you share these on various social media platforms, link them to your site. Any irresistible post will be sure to generate huge traffic to your website. The catch is in keeping it simple and interesting, yet useful to your audience.

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways you can use to promote your business online for free. If your efforts on social media, social bookmarking, blog commenting, and guest posts are done properly and consistently, you will build traffic to your website. Then, you can nurture such visitors into buyers.