Arts ‘N Crafts Business Alliance

Once you have your website set up, how do you get people to visit? One of the best ways is to take advantage of social networking sites like Squidoo.com and MySpace.com. MySpace.com is a huge site designed to let people keep in touch with others. However a lot of businesses set up MySpace profiles and send out “friend” invitations to clients and prospects. Retail store owners, service providers, authors, bands, magazines and even tourism companies do MySpace marketing. Same thing with Squidoo. This form of marketing is becoming even more powerful than reciprocal linking.

Don’t forget message boards, chat rooms and link exchanges either. They are great ways to get your word out. When you first began your low budget online marketing campaign, you’ll probably spend anywhere from 5 to 10 hours a week promoting your site, or you can train an employee, intern or your resident teenager to do it.

The simplest way of marketing your small business is to include your website address in your signature in emails and posts to message boards, even if they aren’t related to your business. 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 needs your services.

It’s very easy to do low budget online marketing for small business because so many things on the Internet are free — message boards, networking sites like Squidoo and MySpace, and of course, email. The main thing it will cost is time, but even that can be “bought” at budget prices on sites such as rentacoder.com and getafreelancer.com. So there’s no reason for even the busiest small business owner not to get their business online, even if they’re on a tight budget.

The internet is filled with many places that you can advertise for free. New places sprout up every single day. Take advantage of these free to use services, take some time daily to scour the net looking for them. Safelist are one of the many free to advertise medium that you may want to consider. Where members optin to receive ad messages from other members. Ad exchange sites is similar to a safelist also provide a very affordable means of getting your site noticed.

Many will require you to provide an email address, create one just for this reason. Time is what you’ll need to invest when you have a tight advertising budget. Searching and finding free or low fee advertising mediums to help your site get noticed will eventually pay off.

Marketing your online business can be frustrating especially when you’re just starting out. However, once you’ve gotten yourself into many of the free social networks or participate in bulletin boards, groups or click for ad credit type services. You’ll find these types of venues also avails you to new places or connections to help your business grow! The great part about it, all you really invested was your time.