Marketing Worksheet: 31 Ways to Promote Your
Business
Customers are essential to any business's survival. To get those customers, you need to advertise your business
- but this doesn't mean that you need to place ads.
Business advertising includes not just ads - but free press, referrals, articles, blogging, business
cards, sponsorships, workshops, search engine and directory listings, webinars, autoresponders and lots
more.
Since each business is unique, some marketing strategies will work better for some businesses than
others (Free Sample Marketing Plans). You may also choose to use certain
promotional methods.
Although its not necessary to have a website to promote your business, it can be an extremely cost effective
marketing tool, and it enables you to use other marketing methods better - such as building an email list,
using search engine and directory advertising and many others.
Choose the marketing tools below that work best for you, your customers and your business and then put them
to work to grow your profits.
1. Get Free Publicity
Use the media to do the legwork and provide "free" advertising for you. Draw up a 1-page press release and
submit it to your local newspapers, TV and radio stations. This is basically an announcement of news or a
special event happening with your business. Don't have any news? Consider hosting a drawing or
contest. A press release does not have to be long. Check out free samples of
press releases
2. Hand Out Business Cards
Often overlooked, business cards can be a very efficient and low cost advertising method. See how you can
design your own professional business cards online, plus get simple tips for increasing your sales >>
Free Business Cards. See also: 30-50% off Postcards, Brochures and more Design your own marketing
materials online using professional templates. Designs provided, printing done for you.
3. Article
Marketing
You don't have to be an expert writer to produce articles that can effectively promote your business. If you
are willing to put in the time to compose articles, they can be well worth the effort. Articles you write can
position you as an expert in your field, getting potential customers to trust and respect you. Articles can
also be published multiple times in many different sources, which can sometimes give you much greater exposure
than a one-time ad.
4. Advertising with Coupons
Offer prospects the special gift of saving money. They will like you for it, and you will end up spending
less effort "selling". What if the prospect doesn't redeem the coupon? Well, you still benefit from
exposure, plus you're building your brand recognition. For this reason, try to make your coupon ad more
interesting, funny and memorable.
5. Mail out Direct Mail Sales
Letters
Learning to write a good sales letter is essential in any business. The same skills to write a letter can be
used to develop website copy, postcard content and all sorts of ads. It is well worth your time to get educated
in developing effective sales letters. Free mini-course on writing sales
letters
6. 
100 Postcards from $1.99
| Postcard
Marketing
Do a postcard mailing to introduce your company to potential customers in your area. Using low-cost online
services makes this an easy marketing task.
First, decide on a special offer or hold a grand opening sale. Second, design your postcards online using
professional postcard templates with VistaPrint (you can get
50% off here). And third, get targeted leads from a lead generation company like Resource Nation.
7. Advertise with
Signs
Use a car magnet to advertise your business while you are on the road, a yard sign to announce a sale or a
banner to promote your store's grand opening. You can design and create your own signs cheaply online
here.
8. Become a "Betterist" on Betterfly.com helping site visitors learn new skills via your knowledge and experience.
It's great exposure for your business, plus you can promote special offers to gain new clients. If your
business is in the teaching or education field, TeachStreet provides a marketplace for teachers to list their classes, events, workshops
and get new students.
9. Sponsor a Meetup Group
Meetup is a website that hosts a wide variety of different interest groups in thousands of different locations.
Each of these groups has members with similar interests who generally live in the same area. If you sell golf
clubs or own a golf course, for example, you could sponsor a Meetup group of golfers either with financial
support or other benefits in exchange for your logo displayed on their web pages. This is a good way for local
businesses to reach potential customers, but businesses don't have to be local, and you can sponsor multiple
Meetup groups.
10. Hold a
Webinar
A webinar is an online "seminar" that can be a course you teach, an interview you hold, a question and answer
session or something else of interest to your target market. With a webinar, you can conveniently hold the
event from your home, office or on the road. Listeners can easily participate from a remote location without
having to disrupt their regular schedule. This makes it easier for you to attract attendees.
11. Hold a Free
Workshop
By conducting a no-cost workshop, you can introduce yourself to prospects and share your knowledge and ideas in
a casual, low-key setting.
Workshop events can be especially effective when you have an attractive personality. If you work personally
with customers in your business (like a hair stylist, consultant, etc), live events can be a great way to let
prospects meet you and see what you're all about. You don't have to worry about being a salesperson, because
instead of selling, you are informing and educating your market in a no-pressure way.
12. Design Your Own
Promo Items
Action Printing has lots of cool items that you can customize with your logo - hand them out to prospective
customers, and they will think you're cool too! This is an easy low- way to invite a client to do business with
you.
Gimmicks like magnets, small calendars and promotional pens are a inexpensive marketing tools - and useful
to people who receive them. You can find many of these "ads" around someone's house or office months - even
years after they've received them. Your business gets recognition again and again. Design your own promo items at Action Printing, Inc..
13. Generate Leads with Free Social Media
Tools
Social media is not just a new trend, it's quickly becoming a standard way of communicating - and marketing.
And social media is a great way to build lists and generate leads for your business.
With social media, however, you don't want to act like one giant sales pitch. Be yourself, be real, and
communicate like you would with friends and family. You can talk about what you do for your business, but also
share ideas and tips that would help your target market with what they're doing (ideas and tips that aren't
about your business).
By letting your personality show through and sharing your knowledge, you can gain trust and respect - and
that's when people will want to do business with you. On your social media page, you can add links to your
business website or blog, so that when people get to know you better, they can click through to your site and
shop at their convenience and without pressure.
Here are some popular social media sites that you can join for free and start gaining followers, networking
and generating leads vary quickly. See what other members are writing or adding on their pages to get ideas of
what works.
14. Print Classifieds - Nationwide
This is an easy way to place classified ads in newspapers across the US. Their online database includes 850
newspapers - reach millions of people and pay less! Search newspapers by state, place multiple ads at
one time, track your ads online. Check out their weekly specials
Newspaper ad writing tips:
- Mention your offer in your headline
- Do something to differentiate yourself from other ads in newspaper (humor can be a great tool)
- Use large type in headline (easy to read and gets attention even if ad is small)
- Include testimonials
- Add urgency to offer (limited time or quantity)
- Use a unique ad border
- Include a picture of the product in action
15. Amazon Product
Ads
Advertise your product or service in front of millions of shoppers - Amazon.com is now offering pay-per-click
advertising on their website with a program called Amazon Product Ads. Their
pay-per-click program is similar to that of Google Adwords or on Facebook. The big difference is that you are
advertising on a website where people go to buy stuff, not just search and socialize.
16. Email Marketing
If you have a website or online store for your supply business, you can save even more money by marketing to
your customers by email. No email list? No problem. Email marketing companies like ConstantContact will help
you build a customer list with their customizable website sign-up form. Autoresponders are another option.
They also give you email templates you can use to design professional emails. Their program delivers
emails for you, and they include real-time reporting. You can try their service free for 60 days, no credit
card is required.
Start now: ConstantContact 60-day free
trial. Have a list over 100,000? iContact.com
has special pricing for larger accounts. Watch free
video.
17. How to Place Ads in Ezines & How to Start Your Own Ezine
Instead of buying an email list, you can advertise to someone else's email list through their ezine. This can
often be cheaper, yet you can still reach a targeted market. With ezine advertising, your ad goes out in the
internet newsletter, rather than an exclusive mailing. However, with a quality ezine, you can a high readership
rate, sometimes higher than an exclusive email. How to Write Ezine Ads
18. Cheap Advertising with
Ecards
You can send ecards to clients on holidays, birthdays - or any time you want. Ecards services are easy and
quick to use. They also are cheap. In fact, some ecard services are free to use, and you don't have the
traditional expense of postage or materials. Delivery is instant.
19. Search Engine
Advertising
If you don't have a top rank in the search engines, you can pay for one. Write a short ad that links through to
your website, and you pay only if a visitor clicks on your ad and goes to your site. Spend as much or as little
money as you want - you set the budget. Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines all offer this service.
Get $100 in Free Clicks to advertise on Business.com.
20. Advertise on Cell Phones
With the development of Smartphones, more and more people are surfing the web via cell phones rather than
desktop or even laptop computers. You can now advertise specifically on phones - some of the benefits being
lower cost and less competition. Since this is such a new marketing medium, a few entrepreneurs, like
Mack Michaels, have taken advantage of the (currently) low competition in this
advertising space and even turned it into an income opportunity.
21. Advertise on Facebook
Facebook is growing fast in popularity, and they've made it really easy to advertise on the site. Similar to
search engine advertising, you can pay-per-click. Alternatively, you have the option to pay-per-impression.
Either way, you have the ability to target your ads to a very narrow market, using their ad filters. For
example, you can filter by location, age, gender, education, interests and more. This way, you're not wasting
your ad dollars advertising to the wrong market.
22. 5 Minute Traffic
Trick
Advertise on free high-traffic content networks like Squidoo and Hub Pages and generate lots of qualified
traffic to your own website. This 99 cent report shares a simple and fairly quick technique where you can start
generating your own qualified leads for free.
23. Online Classified Ads
Although online classifieds don't generally bring in a fast or qualified response, they are a cheap advertising
solution, and may work well for you. Some to try: UsFreeAds,
Craigslist, The Free Advertising Site and AdLandPro.
24. Need a Website?
Save money by creating your own website with simple online design programs, or outsource the job to an
affordable website designer. Whether you sell products online - or you use a website to display rates or
business hours, it's important to take advantage of this low-cost marketing resource that can help you get more
customers.
25. Submit Your Website to Search
Engines
If your business has a website, it's important to get listed in the search engines, because that is where
most shoppers start looking for products and services. There are a variety of ways you can do this, and it
doesn't have to cost a lot of money. In fact, you can submit your site for as little as... free. Submit Your Website
If your business provides products or services to other businesses, get listed in the Business.com
Directory. They receive millions of viewers per
month looking specifically for business-oriented solutions.
26. Local
Search
More and more people are looking for local businesses online
(instead of the traditional yellow pages) - and you don't want to miss out on this market. Local Search
sources that are affordable and receive substantial traffic include: Google Local, Yelp, Super Pages (and
more specialized sites Trip Advisor, Urban Spoon and Insider Pages).
27. Banner Advertising
Although website surfers usually don't click on blatant, flashy banner ads, well-designed banners can get a lot
of traffic and a worthwhile click-through rate without the high pricetag of other hight traffic ad sources. A
well-designed banner ad will create curiosity and many times doesn't even look like an advertisement. Many
successful ads use an "editorial style" ad format.
28. Get Other People to
Sell for You
You can set up your own affliate program for virtually no cost. This automated program will also take you very
little time to operate once you have it set up. Get people to promote and sell your products for you (as
affiliates), and you don't have to pay them until they actually sell your products and you have received the
profit. It's a win-win. (Another way you can get other people to "sell" for you for free is
through referral marketing. You can read more about it here: How to Get Referrals)
29. Translate Your Website to Reach
a Larger Market
Even if you don't know multiple languages, there are low cost services online that you can use to translate
your website. In this global economy, you could be missing out on a big opportunity that you don't even know
you are missing. Website translation is a one-time task that can pay for itself many times over in the long
run. In addition, a site available in multiple languages instantly has a competitive advantage over other
similar businesses.
30. More Proven Marketing Methods
If you are serious about getting lots of customers, and you don't want to pay thousands of dollars to an ad
agency, the Small Business Marketing Guide shows
you how to attract a steady stream of buyers - on the cheap.
Get the 1-Day Marketing Plan outline and over 29 proven success systems
that you can use over and over to increase profits and grow your business, including:
- Foolproof salesletter template, proven ad writing checklist and how to create an irresistible
offer.
- How to turn incoming phone calls into clients and turn one-time buyers into lucrative lifetime
customers.
- How to use other people's customers to get new business.
- The secret to getting free referrals when you ask - 90% of the time.
- Maximum profit pricing strategy and how to double your sales with simple packaging
techniques.
- 4 techniques for doubing sales - with no additional customers.
Small Business Marketing
Guide
31. Hire a Marketer:
Want other companies to do your marketing work for you? Get Free quotes:
Online Marketing | Telemarketing | Lead Generation | Search Engine
Optimization
