What Can You Do With $50 and One Hour on the Internet to Market Your Business?
The answer is you can do quite a lot to market your business on the internet.
The reality is you will need to spend more time on the net but not necessarily more money. The reason for this is that so much is available on the internet in terms of resources and huge numbers of potential customers already on there. The issue for you is how to tap into that pool of prospects and gaining understand and skills to use the resources already there.
Nevertheless, you’re rich enough to have $50 to hand so let’s see what you can get done.
Build and Promote a Web Site
For $50 and around an hour, you can build yourself a landing page to promote your business, provide an overview of products and services and make sure your contact information is available for those prospects who want to speak to you.
You do not need to invest thousands in web designers or marketing specialists nor do you need specialist skills yourself. If you are new to e-commerce, search for free web design services and hosting and test the water first. If your project returns results, you can consider increasing your allocation of time and money resources and then call in the professionals. At most, you will need to spend $50 to pay for hosting or a website template to use.
Social Media and Networking Sites
Signing up and producing a profile with FaceBook, MySpace, Ning, Bebo, Orkut and the many other online networking sites is easy and best of all, free!
In return for signing up and generating a profile for your business or particular product or service line, you will be able to generate traffic to your own website off the networking site. In addition, you get a lot of users referring items of interest around the online networks which is what many marketing professionals look to achieve – getting their social media promotional activity to go “viral”.
We still haven’t spent the $50 yet, but if you feel like doing so, head over to LinkedIn, the business networking community and subscribe. You don’t have to pay to register and develop a profile but the paying subscribers get better exposure and access to more promotional tools.
Buy a Great Sounding Domain Name
Head over to GoDaddy or any of the domain name companies and you will see offers such as, “Get Your Domain Name for Free” or in any event, less than a few dollars. The reality is that most of the great sounding domain names have already been bought and if they are not actively being used by someone else, they will be gathering virtual dust as someone is holding the domain name for resale or because they no longer need it but haven’t thought of selling it.
For a great sounding domain name or to buy one from someone else who is no longer using it, be prepared to spend a little more time and a little more money to get a name which will really attract visitors to the site.
Establish a Blog
Setting up a blog is relatively simple and straight forward and you can do it for free as well – just head over to WordPress or Blogger and follow the step by step instructions.
Blogging is very popular and while it does not eclipse search engines for popularity amongst users, blogs have become the focus of a great deal of activity and discussion over the net.
If you want to spend some money, look at buying a domain name for use with your free blog with Wordpress who for $10 will let you use your own domain name without the wordpress.com extension and make yourself look more professional.
Dell Atlas – Article made possible by Exhibit Wholesale, online suppliers of trade show displays.
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