How to Promote Your Website with $100: Four Budget Marketing Tips

Budget marketing involves the promotion of a website with very little monetary expenses and incurred costs. This is a real life situation that most small businesses or webmasters encounter when the website they’ve set up isn’t going anywhere or getting the exposure it needs.

There are many ways to go about budget marketing and a lot actually depends on your objectives what you want to achieve.

Do you want to create a tremendous buzz or sensation surrounding your website? Or are you focusing on link-building for better search engine rankings in the long run?

In any case, there are broad arsenal of marketing tactics you can employ for immediate impact or long term benefits. What would you do if you’ve only got $100 in your pocket to promote your website?

This was exactly the scenario created by Patrick Sexton in a round table discussion on budget website marketing. Here’s the exact question posed by Patrick to marketing/SEO experts Aaron Wall, Lee Odden, Todd Malicoat, Andy Beal, Andy Hagans, Neil Patel and C.K Chung:

If you had to make a website soar but had only small chunks of money to spend on it what would you do? - (The “chunks” are 100 dollars, 250 dollars and 500 dollars.)

Here are the some of the suggestions which I’ve found useful from the discussion:

• Read and learn about your chosen niche topics.




• Be active in your community to build your perceived niche authority.




• Syndicate your content to well read channels.




• Reinvest your income earned by buying quality links or tools to further build your authority.




• Network offline by attending conferences or events in your niche.




• Hire a copyrighter to create a Top 100 list concerning the specific industry you are in and market the list on PR Web.




• Get listed in directories like Yahoo and Best of the Web.




• Leverage social media and spend the money creating linkbait to be heavily promoted on social websites which will give you links, traffic and strong search rankings.




• Purchase quality links and network with other members of your industry.




• Become a resource and market the story or mission statement behind the site to the media and other industry people.

I’ve always liked collaborative discussions and this one was fairly interesting although most of the experts seem to be keep repeating the same suggestions, i.e. create linkbait and network with your industry peers.

With the exception of Aaron Wall, I would have loved to see the other experts go more in depth on the topic. I guess that’s what their one-on-one consultation fees are for.

I would suggest checking out their websites/blogs as they each offer more useful information on search marketing and SEO, not to mention that each of these websites are good examples of how to brand your own business or services.

Dosh Dosh’s Four Budget Marketing Tips

Networking within your niche is extremely important and linkbaiting is a powerful method to generate massive exposure for your website. While you can certainly hire a copywriter and pay for offline conferences, not everyone really needs to do so.

If you are able to write your own linkbait and aren’t ready or willing to attend those conferences, here are some alternative budget marketing methods for your website:

1. Donate money to prominent bloggers in your niche.This is interesting to me because it’s very borderline. It’s not technically a bribe of any sort nor are you paying for a mention of your website.This does however in some way immediately highlight your website in the eyes of the blogger and may make it more difficult for him or her to refuse legit requests in the future.

   Donations are a great way to give back to bloggers you have learned a lot from and can also be seen as a networking tool of some sort.




2. Hire an experienced forum poster. Depending on your niche, there will usually be several forums with large numbers of members. If your website is relevant, it should not be difficult to draw them towards it.

Contact high profile forum members with large numbers of posts and offer to either buy their signature link or get them to mention your website in forum threads.

This can easily create regular buzz around your site. Note that both the forum poster and yourself must be comfortable with the ethics of this marketing tactic and disclosure should be something mutually agreed upon by both parties.




3. Start an affiliate program. This incurs costs over time but is a great word-of-mouth marketing technique that is guaranteed to promote your website. Agloco is a company that has achieved a large user base primarily through its multi-tier referral scheme.Set aside some money and create a percentage based referral scheme. If you’re selling a product you should be able to reinvest money in the affiliate program once sales start picking up. If you’re promoting a non or low profit website, restrict the affiliate program within a specific time-frame (e.g. 2 months) and operate via X dollars per 10 referrals scheme to maximize returns on investment.




4. Enter into Joint Ventures/Projects. This can run from mergers with other businesses on specific product developments to simple lateral coordination between bloggers through the use of co-operative advertising (i.e. run ads on a site in return for ads run on another site)Depending on the agreement, you may need to invest some money. Collaborative marketing lowers the cost of advertising over time and they usually have a long-term effect which defers from the immediate buzz generated by social websites.

My perspective on budget marketing has always been this: If you want to successfully promote a specific product or website, you need to become a voice which your target market can trust.

Even if you come up with a few well crafted linkbaits you may still be seen as a novelty website or an antiquated enterprise trying to rejuvenate itself through buzzwords and fluffy marketing maneuvers.

What is most important are recommendations given by the respected authorities or community users within your specific niche.

You usually can’t just buy your way in but whatever little money you have for marketing should be used to build bridges towards getting the seal of approval from this core group of people.

This isn’t at all about putting all the important people on your payroll because that’s impossible. But rather, this is all about reaching out to them, getting their attention and communicating the strengths and benefits of your website to their interests and needs.

By building credibility within your target market, you’re essentially laying a strong foundation for all future marketing efforts, which will not require large monetary costs.

This is because you will be able to easily receive viral recommendations automatically from within the communities that you’ve targeted and embraced from the onset.

What are your budget marketing tips?

How would you market your website if you were given a budget of $100 - 500? I’ll be very interested to know what you’ll do so please leave a comment with any recommendations you have.

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