5 Steps to Publicize a Small Business without Paying for Advertising
Advertising is expensive, and often ineffective. I’m constantly amazed how often I’m trying to watch a video on YouTube only to be interrupted by an ad that has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m watching. I mean, I’ve gone on to watch children’s cartoons where they were running ads for car insurance! As I skip past these ads without watching them, I often think to myself, “Do people realize they’re paying money for me to skip their ads?”
Fortunately there are better ways to publicize a small business than mistargeted advertising, and the good news is, they’re less expensive, and they deliver a better return on investment. Here is a simple five-step plan that incorporates some of the most effective, least costly tactics.
1. Publish Articles on a Blog
A blog gives you an efficient, cost-effective platform you can use as a springboard to launch a publicity campaign. Post short articles featuring content that will appeal to your target market. For instance, a doctor specializing in back pain treatment might answer common questions about different types of pain and treatments. You can then invite people to your blog to read your articles, and tell them about what you offer in the process.
You don’t have to write a lot–in fact you don’t want to, because people online have short attention spans. 1 to 2 pages (about 250 to 500 words) is usually enough for one article. A couple 1-to-2-page articles a week will be enough to sustain your blog. At that rate you’d have over 100 articles in a year!
The cost of running a commercial blog is about $100 to $125 a year in domain and hosting fees. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer, you can install a WordPress blog and write your own articles for free. You can also outsource these tasks if you prefer. After a lot of practice as a website administrator and freelance writer, it takes me maybe an hour or two to install and configure a basic WordPress blog and the same amount of time to write a 1-to-2-page article. The first time you do these things, it will probably take you a bit longer. If you outsource these tasks, obviously it raises your costs a bit. But if you’re the back pain doctor in our illustration and you get one client out of your blog, you’ve probably already earned back your investment.
2. Offer Free Reports to Build a Mailing List
Once you’ve got people reading your blog, a great way to capitalize on this is to offer a free report as an incentive to get visitors to sign up for an email newsletter mailing list. You can create a report by combining some content from a few of your best articles and turning it into a PDF document of 10 to 20 pages in length. You can then install a form on your site offering your report in exchange for signing up for your email newsletter.
The cost of a good electronic mailing list service, called an autoresponder service, is about $200 a year for up to about 500 subscribers. After that rates go up incrementally every few thousand subscribers. So far between your blog and your mailing list we’re up to about $325 a year plus any outsourcing for web installation and writing.
3. Market to Your Mailing List
After you have a mailing list, you have a means to continue marketing to your blog visitors. A good strategy is to send them a periodic newsletter updating them on new content on your blog, mixed with announcements about sales and special discounts for people on your mailing list.
If you’re already paying for an autoresponder service, there is no additional fee for sending out emails: you can send out as many emails as you want for no additional charge. As with writing for your blog, you can write your emails yourself or outsource this.
How much you make from your mailing list is a game of numbers. For instance, let’s conservatively say that for every 2,000 visitors to your blog, 20 sign up for your mailing list. (There are strategies you can use to get this number a lot higher–as high as 1 out of every 2 or 3 visitors–but let’s be conservative for the sake of illustration.) Then let’s say for every 20 sign-ups, you get 1 sale. Depending on what you’re selling, 1 sale could be less than $10 or as high as several thousand dollars. If you’re selling a $10 ebook, 2,000 visitors might mean $10, but if you’re selling a $2,000 consulting service, 2,000 visitors might translate into $2,000. The trick to keeping this profitable is to find a traffic level and pricing point that covers the cost of the $325+ investment you laid out for your blog, email service, and any outsourcing.
4. Promote Your On-Site Content through Social Media
As you can see, there are a few factors that can drive your profitability up. One is increasing the amount you charge per sale. Another is increasing the number of visitors to your website. One of the most cost-effective ways to do this is by using social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest.
You can use these types of social media to connect with people in your target market. After connecting, you can let people know when you’ve posted content to your blog and invite them to come over and visit. You can also invite them to other events like webinars that steer them towards your blog and your products and services.
Using social media can exponentially multiply your opportunities to invite people to your blog. It also increases the odds that they will accept your invitation, since social media connects you with people in your target market. This makes it a lot more efficient and cost-effective than blind mass-market advertising where you don’t know who your audience is.
You can create accounts with most major social media services for free. Updating them is an investment in either time or money. You can get a lot of mileage out of just investing a couple hours a week updating your accounts to let people know about updates to your blog. Or you can hire someone to do this for you.
5. Track Your Numbers to Keep It Cost-Effective
The key to keeping this strategy cost-effective is to track your numbers. Keep track of how many visits to your blog you get per day or per month, how many visits it takes to get a sale, and how much you make per sale. You can then focus on adjusting your numbers to drive your profit margin up. You can adjust your numbers by taking steps to increase your visitor traffic, to increase the effectiveness of your sales conversion rate, or to increase the amount you make per sale.
Keeping your eyes on these numbers gives you a lot more control over your destiny than throwing money into advertising without being able to see where it’s going or what it’s bringing back. Using the strategy outlined here, you can see exactly what you’re paying for, what your return on investment is, and what you need to adjust to increase your profits.
This strategy also enables you to control what you spend and where you spend it. You can decide how much you want to do yourself and how much you want to outsource. When you do choose to outsource, you can direct your resources towards the part of your sales process that needs the most help, whether it’s driving more traffic to your site, improving the draw of the content on your site, or improving the effectiveness of your email follow-up. You can leverage your resources where they will do the most good and bring you your best return on investment.
