Today I bring you a guest post from Alexander Berger, owner of www.RedFlareKits.com, originally posted in the Miva Merchant forums. The content below is in response to Allen of mice-rides.com asking what ecommerce marketing methods are available besides Google Adwords for his store.
I guess there is more then one way to build a business. If you have a lot of money for marketing – simply advertise, and eventually your efforts should pay off.
Of course, both of these statements: “Cash is King” and “It takes money to make money” are extremely true. (At least they were for us). If you are out of money, you have to close your doors.
Another method is when you have no, or very little money for marketing. For our marketing efforts we did all of the following in that order. Your needs may be different, so feel free to switch these around:
1. Post to relevant forums and become part of a community. Become an “expert” on at least one forum. This is quite possibly the most important in my opinion. Sometimes opportunities open up that you never even thought were possible. We got lucky because while I was having fun posting to one of the forums, an opportunity came up where we sponsored a key person in the industry to talk us up. Cost us a few K, but we made it back and broke even waaay earlier then we planned to go out of business! So in the end, it was money very well spent.
2. Advertise on Google and Yahoo for relevant terms. You may need to research these and possibly hire an expert on SEO/keywords. Once again, it will cost you an initial outlay to do so, but in the end it will likely pay for itself. Do a cost-benefit analysis when you work with a SEO/keywords experts.
3. Use free Google product search. We get a ton of traffic and don’t pay a penny for it.
4. Advertise on the above mentioned forums via banners and paid posts, once you get introduced by forum owners to the community.
5. Talk to relevant bloggers, get them to write about you.
6. Advertise on relevant blogs via banners, etc., once they get to know you and the products you are offering.
7. Email relevant site’s webmasters so they link to you. This is usually like pulling teeth, but don’t give up.
Have a plan for stop-loss also. When we started out, we said that if after 1 year we do not turn a profit, we go out of business. Luckily, we are about to go into our 4th year of operations.
Also see these guys www.score.org – Service Core of Retired Executives. They give invaluable advice and tips on running any sort of business.
Don’t give up, I think you have a cool site! Just improve the checkout as mentioned above.
Now I want to add a few suggestions Alexander did not mention that fit well into the strategies he suggests and round out the list to 10 tips for marketing on a budget.
8. Remember your local community and use sites such as meetup.com and craigslist.org. I find many online business owners ignore the local market and this is a mistake, especially when starting out. You can go to meetup events, introduce yourself and business, then listen & participate but don’t be giving sales pitches.
9. Building off of suggestion #1 with forums consider being active in facebook, myspace, twitter and linkedin. It takes more time in the beginning to setup but after that monitoring is relatively a small amount of time. Make sure you are open and transparent (you own the website).
10. Use video to help with “expert” status. You can share your videos on the social sites mentioned above plus the forums you participate on. You can also embed the videos on your own site. I recommend using a site such as tubemogul.com to promote the videos on more than one video sharing site. Good videos for e-commerce include product demonstrations, customers using the product, troubleshooting or how to videos.
These are just a few strategies for marketing on a budget for any business and with a little out of the box thinking you can come up with many more.
Special thanks to Alexander Berger owner of Red Flare Emergency Supplies a retailer & wholesaler specializing in emergency survival gear, disaster preparedness kits, first aid, camping & outdoor living items.