8 Free Ways to Promote Your Business

Every business wants their products or services to be seen by potential customers. But, most of the traditional ways for promotion costs money and not everyone can afford it if they are just starting up the business. Well, there are ways to promote your business without spending a dime. So, let’s get into the list of the ways of 8 ways to promote your business. These ideas will not cost you money but they will surely cost you some of your precious time.

Optimization of Website for Search Engines

In this digital world, what people do when they want to buy something? Well, they search for the product or service on Google or other search engines of their choice. The process of information gathering takes place about the product. They try to collect data from the internet so if your website is not the list which they are searching for their information on, so you virtually do not exist.

The easy fix for this is to hire a digital agency that can do the optimization of your website for you but, even in that case you need to be aware of the process, so that Google cannot penalize your website for some wrongdoings or against its algorithm. By reading some guides on SEO you can tweak your website and rank higher on Google and on other search engines as well. The good thing is agencies would not be able to fool you if you know some of the processes.

Business Listing

Vendors are being searched on business directories by buyers. If your products are mostly B2B, add a free listing on IndiaMart, Trade India and Indian Yellow Pages. These are some popular business to business directories.

And if you’re products or services are B2C then you can list your business on Just Dial, Ask Me and Get It for free. The biggest advantage of these platforms is that they have mobile apps and that attracts a huge audience.

If your business is selling software’s then SoftwareSuggest is a very good directory to list your business. The categorization of the software’s on this website is quite good, like HR, CRM, ERP, etc. Many small businesses have been profited by this.

Listing On Google My Business

Google is trying to make the search personal and now displays results that are tailored for your location. For example, if we search for McDonald’s, Google will show you the outlets in your city with a map. So, if your list your business on Google, it will be very beneficial for you, and it is necessary to get listed on Google as the rate of competition is increasing very rapidly.

Adding your business is very easy, Google made sure that the process is simple for addition and managing the added business for the location on the map.

Social Media is Powerful

Social Media Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, not only help you get more customers but also the engagement to get quality feedback from them for your products or services. One can get around 20% of traffic only from social media.

The key point in achieving most out of social media is the frequency of our posts, if we post regularly, the rate of popularity and loyal customers will increase. Business updates or news related updates can be shared with your industry. Competitor analysis on social media is very easy as well; we can follow some influencers and monitor their activity. Recommended is to post twice to thrice a week on Facebook and 2-3 times a day on Twitter.

Answering Questions

It happens most of the time that people don’t get their desired answers on the Google search, so they turn up towards forums on the internet to solve their problems. QnA sites like Quora and Yahoo answers are one of the popular places where you can find new customers. There are LinkedIn Groups that are also used for the QnA website.

How can we benefit from these sites? We first have to create accounts on these websites and start searching for your product or services; we will get a lot of questions related to your product or services. People will ask about the top companies that sell this product and they will compare different products and so on.

Always start by answering easy questions and then move the levels up a bit by bit. For Example in Ouriken, I searched for a web design and development company on Quora and got hundreds of questions related to the topic. Then, like I said start answering easy questions and keep recommending your website in the answers so that you will get organic traffic to your website that too, free of cost.

The same thing could be done on Yahoo answers and LinkedIn groups, all 3 of them are a good source for organic traffic and very influential. Talking about good things, all these websites are crawled or indexed by Google so your answers will get displayed on Google whenever someone will search for it. Tip for answering in these websites is to have the intention of helping the needy first then we can sell our things in between. Nobody likes hard upselling.

Attending Networking Events/Meetups

The Concept is to visit Events/Expos/Meetups and increase your network in order to find new customers. You can just search for “Business events in (your city)” and Google will come up with the list of upcoming events if there are any. Most of the events are free of cost, you just have to bear the travel expenses and they attract potential customers as well as distributors/resellers/consultants.

Gradually, there will be a realization in you that people attend these events just to meet other people and increasing their network, eventually increasing their customers. Meetup is a site through which we can meet a lot of entrepreneurs and startup owners meet frequently using this site. People with open minds come here to meet and or open for new ideas sharing and partnerships in the existing startups.

Uploading Videos on YouTube

Over 4 billion videos are played on YouTube every day, and this number is growing exponentially. So, uploading videos on YouTube of your product or service is a no brainer. The best part is, search results of your videos will appear on the Google search result page giving your website more visibility.

For product, a 2 min demo video of the product will do, and for service, you can upload a testimonial of the client and upload it. You should always remember to put keywords in the title or description of the video so it ranks up. If you come up with interesting content that has the potential to go viral and hit the jackpot, leads will flood into your inbox.

Offering a Deal to Customers

Deal sites like Groupon and Coupon Dunia attract millions of users to their portals. So, have a meeting with the deal website guys, brainstorm with them and come up with a deal that your customers cannot resist. And you can a good number of buyers at no cost.

Once you have decided the discount to give to your customers, the deals website will do the promotion for you. Since they have a large database of registered users. This process of offering deals will be more or less will remain similar in other websites as well.

Conclusion

These are just 8 ways, there can be or there are many more ways of promoting your business. You just have to be creative and have an out of the box thinking. Some of the points mentioned above will yield results instantly, and some will take its own natural time. If you’re on a tight budget for marketing you have to invest your time in it instead to promote your business. There are some startups who succeeded with literally ZERO marketing budget. If you have any other ideas to add in this list, I know there are. Feel free to comment down below.

Ouriken is a standalone web design and digital agency. We design and implements powerful solutions for small and medium businesses in technology, business, and operations.