Web site maintenance, website management and web consulting services

In the previous installment of my small business guide to online lead generation, I spent some time establishing who my market is and how much money I’m willing to spend generating qualified sales leads. If you haven’t read the article yet, you can find it here. You may also want to read my introduction to online lead generation.

Google Adwords isn’t enough

While calculating my budget I discovered that I don’t have enough money to invest with Google to buy the advertising needed to grow my business. According to Google’s calculations, I would need to spend £1500 on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to achieve my goals.

As I’ve got less than £1000 in my budget, and I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, I’m going to have to use a little bit of imagination to find ways to advertise my services for free.

While there are plenty of ways to market your business online that cost little or nothing, I’ve decided to limit myself to the following 4 methods because they’re methods I know, so there’s no learning curve involved.

1. Forums - I’m already a member of two UK small business forums, so I’ll be using these to promote my services, (a) by answering people’s questions and being an overall helpful guy, and (b) by showing a short promotional message with a link in my forum signatures. Using a forum is a great way to market your services while being helpful to others.
2. Organic search - Using my blog to write more articles is already starting to pay off in terms of search engine results. I’m seeing an increase in traffic to my site, and I’m getting more enquiries. So I’m just going to carry on blogging without changing much.
3. Blog comments - Using a combination of no-follow and do-follow blogs (more on do-follow here), I’m trying to leave more comments with links back to my site. Just like forum posting, this works best when you’re providing value to people reading blog posts. It takes quite a while to do though, so I’m only really commenting when I’ve got something worthwhile to say.
4. Direct marketing - I have a personal project that’s helping me build a completely legitimate mailing list of people in my target market. I’ve been working with a PR company to help me design a high quality sales letter that I’ll be sending out over the next few months. Many people in my target market don’t necessarily use the Internet as their primary means of research, so I’m making sure I cover all my bases.

I’ve already signed up for Google Adwords and started showing PPC adverts for select search results. Over the next few weeks I’ll be spending more time promoting myself using the methods above, and hopefully I’ll start seeing results in the coming months.

In the next article, I’ll be discussing ways to increase the number of people giving me permission to use email to market directly to them. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you’ll be among the first to know how.