6 Online Marketing Tactics That Cost Absolutely Nothing! Zilch, Zippo, Zero, Naught.

One of the biggest reasons why online marketing looks frightening to most businessmen and women is because they think it’s going to be expensive.

However, as a matter of fact, online marketing can easily be one of the most cost-effective ways to promote and market your business. It really doesn’t have to be expensive at all.

In the form of social media marketing, search engine optimisation, content marketing and email marketing, it offers endless possibilities to grow your business without spending anything whatsoever.

In this post, we are going to discuss 6 such online marketing tactics that cost absolutely nothing. Many reputable companies have used these techniques with great results. You can use them, too.

Yet, for any of this to work you must make sure you have a good product or service that provides real value to its target audience.

1.  Leverage Word of Mouth

Word of mouth is one of the best ways to effectively promote your business to your target audience.

If you keep providing high-quality services, you will eventually get a good reputation. However, there are ways by which you can incentivise the users to share good word of mouth and speed up the process.

For example, Dropbox incentivised their users to share about the Dropbox service by giving 500MB of free space for every successful signup.

Similarly, Trackr offers a $1 discount to anyone who shares them on Facebook or Twitter.

2. Introduce Affiliate Programs

Introducing affiliate programs is a great way to grow your business.

As it was with the above-mentioned technique, you incentivise other people to help you make more sales. And the best part of introducing affiliate programs is that you do not have to pay anything unless a sale is made. In other words, you just have to share the profit, which means you do not bear any additional expense.

You can use a tool like TapFiliate for easy management and tracking.

3. Outreach to Bloggers

If you have already a well-established blog with thousands of unique users, you already have a lot of exposure for your product or service. However, if you don’t have such a luxury, it is a very effective technique to contact other bloggers and leverage their reach.

The concept is to contact other well-established bloggers in your niche and request them to spread news about your product or service. If you really have a great product that provides excellent value to customers, bloggers will be more than happy to write about it.

You can also give your product for free to those bloggers in exchange of positive reviews.

4. Guest Blogging

When other bloggers spread positive news about your products and services, it’s good. When you do it on your own, it’s great!

Guest blogging has always been a very effective technique to explore new markets and groups of target audiences. It does not cost you anything, but it can easily be one of your biggest traffic sources.

5. Work Pro Bono

If you provide a service, work for free.

You do not have to do it for the rest of your life, but it is a proven way to kickstart your career. Furthermore, working pro bono can get you some reputable clients. You can get testimonials from those clients and that can help you land more business – which you can charge on your normal fee.

6. Leverage Existing Communities

There are various existing communities and online forums where your target audience hangs out. They post their problems and look for solutions. And if you can be there to introduce your service or product and how it can help them, you can get a great amount of exposure.

Facebook Groups, SubReddits, Quora, online forums, etc. are some of the places where you should be hanging out. It does not cost you anything but it can pave way to a huge amount of targeted traffic and potential customers.