Jan-17-2008
Articles and Tips

There’s a lot of pressure on those small and local business owners who have been holding out for a long time, hoping against hope that Internet Marketing will just fade away. Unfortunately for them, that’s not going to happen any time soon. As a matter of fact, it’s only getting bigger. The Kelsey Group has recently announced that around “70% of U.S. households now uses the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services.”

With statistics like this, it’s become undeniable that small business owners who don’t have an internet marketing strategy will soon be losing a lot of their business to their competitors.

A lot of small business owners want to go online and set up their very own internet marketing operations. However, marketing your business online is not as easy as some people assume. For one thing, a limited budget can be a big hindrance in setting up a website with all the necessary up-to-date features. And, as if creating a professional-looking website wasn’t expensive enough, promoting it through SEO and Email marketing is also an added burden on your wallet. Fortunately with a little work, there are some great low budget online marketing solutions for your small business.

First off, don’t jump on the first web space you find or register for the first domain name with the first site that pops up in Google. You shouldn’t throw your money at something without getting the full story.

Web space can be fairly expensive or fairly cheap, depending upon which company you go with. There are certain sites that can give you free hosting, however they will also oblige you to include banners or pop-up ads on your site. If you want to be taken seriously, you definitely do not want to host your business on these kind free hosting sites.

There are places on the web that offer a good amount of storage for less than $150 per year. Generally speaking, that is a very good deal. If you’re lucky, you might even find sites that will register your domain name for less than $10 per year.

Okay, you now have a website up and running. This brings us to our second problem: How do we get people to visit it? One of the smartest ways to get people curious is to take advantage of social networking sites like Squidoo.com and MySpace.com. If you’re still in the dark about this topic, MySpace.com and Squidoo are huge sites that are devoted in maintaining online social relationships. However, it is also possible for businesses, like yours, to set up MySpace profiles and send out “friend” invitations to their potential clients and customers. Retail shop owners, service providers, authors, bands, magazines and even tourism companies set up MySpace accounts for the very purpose of internet marketing. The same motives and agendas apply with Squidoo as well as other social networking sites. This form of marketing is on the rise and it is becoming as popular reciprocal linking.

In getting your clients interested, don’t forget about message boards, chat rooms and link exchanges. They are more traditional forms of internet marketing but they haven’t lost any of their effectiveness in giving websites traffic. When you first begin your low budget online marketing campaign, you’ll most likely spend around 5 to 10 hours a week promoting your site. If this is causing too much strain on your schedule, you can train your employee, intern or resident teenager to do it for you.

The easiest way of marketing a small business, like yours, is to include your website address in your signature in emails and posts on message boards, even if they aren’t related to your business. Your signature must also contain a link to your site, as well as your website’s address, so that your readers will be able to visit you if they find your post or contribution helpful. While this doesn’t market directly to your targeted audience, it does make people aware of your website. Who knows, maybe they’ll know someone who is more responsive to your message.

It’s quite easy to do low budget online marketing for a small business because so many things on the Internet are for free - things like, message boards and networking sites like Squidoo and MySpace, and of course, emails. Email Marketing companies like, Email Marketing Solutions, can help you increase the efficiency of your Emails in acquiring the attention and business of your customers. And it remains as one of the most popular internet marketing strategies employed by people today.

The main thing that low budget internet marketing will cost you is time, but even that can be “bought” at budget prices on some sites that can provide the relevant services. So, there’s really no reason for even the busiest small business owner to not to get his or her business on the net, even if they’re on a tight budget.

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