Top 10 ways to advertise your business for free

As a small business you will recognise the need to promote your business.

With a bit of creativity and some work on your part there are a number of ways to advertise your business for free.

1. Write a press release
Writing a press release is the best way to generate some free publicity. Basically, most journalists do not have much time to write stories, so if you can provide them with easily written text it becomes quite easy for them to publish it.

But be careful and don’t presume that your story will be interesting. The fact that you sell a product is not very interesting. Interesting stories are more likely to be human interest, or about a new business opening. Look inside a publication to see what sorts of stories that they publish and write your press release like one of these.

2. Build a page on Facebook
Facebook, at least for the time being offers the ability to build a free page.  Then you fans can “Like” your page and any updates that you make will appear in the timeline.  It seems likely that over time Facebook will offer less free stuff for businesses and start charging for it.

We have written an article on how to build a following on Facebook.

presentationmagazine.com/how-to-use-facebook-to-market-your-business-for-free-16032.htm

3. Use your car window
Make a poster and put it in the back window of your car. This could be just a simple web address for your business.

4. Add comments at the bottom of web postings
If you do a reasonable job of an answer then many sites will be quite happy to include a link back to your website.

5. Build a following on Twitter
Twitter is a great way to promote your business.  It is quick and simple to do.  You can put up a page and start following people.   You can search for people in the search box.

You also can schedule Tweets in advance so that you can plan a steady stream of marketing ideas.

6. Shop windows
If you are holding a local event, many shops will be quite happy to put up a small A4 poster in their window. Many websites have events pages that do not charge to promote an event.

This is just one of a number of ways that you can advertise a local business.  We have built a range of different ways into the following article

How to use facebook to advertise your business for free

7. Free directory websites
There are a number of websites that offer a free directory. These include

Yellow Pages
http://www.bttradespace.com/
http://www.kellysearch.co.uk/
http://www.freeindex.co.uk/
Touch local
Applegate
Blue boomerang

8. Link swapping
Link swapping has gone a bit out of fashion of late, but it can present a very useful way to get traffic to your website. The free willy-nilly swapping of links was very popular a few years ago, but in the right circumstances it can prove very popular. The best way to go about doing this is to find out who is linking in to your competitors’ websites and ask if they will link back to you.

To find out who is linking, go to Google and type in “link:competitor.com” (changing competitor.com for the website you want to check out).

9. Start blogging
It can be a bit time consuming, but if you start a blog on your website, using software like WordPress or Typepad you can generate more traffic.

10. Generate reference material for your website
Another useful way to bring people to your website is to write useful reference material such as free how to guides.
One company that is using this to great effect is the hospital company BUPA. They wrote a number of health factsheets that they claim now have one million people a month visiting. While this has taken them quite a bit of effort to generate it is one of the best examples of free advertising that I can think about. And much cheaper than advertising on TV.

Other ideas include
– Send in articles to magazines.
– Speak at conferences.