This post is all about how to get yourself some highly effective, FREE advertising!
One of the main reasons most small and medium-sized businesses don’t advertise, is that they lack the finances.
They know they need to get their message in front of a wider number of targeted, prospective clients / customers; but they just don’t have the cash to invest in high quality advertising.
So, what do they do?
Free advertising
There are many great ways to promote or advertise your services to prospective clients, which cost nothing (other than a little of your time and some creative thinking!)
Here’s one I saw recently on twitter. It’s a very simple but effective ‘free’ advertising technique that’s used by Hugh Briss, from twitterimage.com. Hugh currently offers people like myself, who have more than 3,000 followers on twitter, a free, professionally designed twitter background.
Now, each background comes with a ‘credit’; showing that the background was designed by his company, with their URL clearly visible. I noticed that as well as myself, Hugh has also designed backgrounds for Darren Rowse, Chris Pirillo and Chris Brogan . Between us, we have almost 100,000 followers. That’s 100,000 people who have a twitter account – and who might want to buy one of his twitter background designs!
So, Hugh invests however long it takes to design the background and in return, he gets a sample of his work and his contact details in front of thousands of highly targeted, potential clients every day. I’m sure a few have also blogged about him, as I have just done, which gives him even more free publicity!
More free advertising
We all like to win awards don’t we? And when we win an award, what do we do? We tell people!
An effective but underused form of free Internet advertising, is to offer a monthly award for something; which is appropriate for your business.
Here’s how it works! For this example, imagine you offer a service, which is targeted at ‘women in business’ and you wanted to reach thousands of new potential clients.
You start off by offering a ’site of the month’ award – for the site you think is best serving the women in business community that month. You offer the award with a ‘button’ they can add to their site, which confirms that they won your award and links back to the article on YOUR site; where you tell the world how great their site is.
There are many outstanding sites on every topic you can imagine. By honouring these sites with your awards, you both spread the news about them AND potentially develop valuable links back to YOUR site too. Win, win as they say. Also, it’s quite likely the recipient of your award will want to share the news with their readers; which can be an extremely powerful way to introduce new prospective clients to your work!
I used this approach for a client of mine a few months ago and got a link back from The BBC; which instantly generated a stack of new visitors to my client’s blog and an increase in their Google PageRank.
Creative advertising can out-perform paid advertising
When people read an advertisement, they are aware that they are being sold to. This places an additional barrier between your message and your marketplace. However, when you creatively get your message in front of that same targeted group, without an advertisement, the barrier is removed.
There are many, many more ways to reach people, without investing in paid advertising; which I will share with you in future posts.
If YOU have any ideas for generating effective, free advertising; please share them in the comments section below!
Related posts:
Another great article from you Jim.
What can I say, these are a great advert for your services. Which is another way to advertise, great advice like this generates buzz, and I hope for you Jim lots of business.
It shows off your expertise, it gives to the community, win win situation.
Some, not all businesses could learn by following in your foot steps.
I like the first idea very much, but managing a ’site of the day’ contest or any contest in general comes along with a lot of work especially small businesses can hardly bear.
Contests have only very little winners and a lot of ‘losers’ which increases the likeliness of getting bad PR. So assessment criterions have to be especially accurate and comprehensible to avoid a surge of complaints small business can´t treat properly.
RocknRolli,
Thanks for the comment – but you seem to have misunderstood me.
There’s no competition!
You simply pick one site, which you would like to acknowledge each month (not each day as you suggested), with an award for being outstanding.
Now you’ve got me thinking how I can take advantage of my blog and twitter audience! As a photographer I’d love to be able to offer a related service, but it would have to be something I’d need to do in person, so that limits it to people in my city. However, that’s my potential clientele anyway.
Definitely have to mull this one over for a while
Thanks for another great, thought provoking article!
I love the bite-sized pieces of information, but I struggle to think how I could leverage something like that for an enterprise level investment product:
ERP, CRM, EAM/CMMS
Hi Jim. Thanks for using me as your first example. Guy Kawasaki’s background adds almost another 50,000 all by itself.
Also, there are the free backgrounds that I offer to anyone that just wants a photographic background, all of which also contain my credit line.
Jim…
“Dedicate some of your life to others. Your dedication will not be a sacrifice. It will be an exhilarating experience because it is an intense effort applied toward a meaningful end”.
–Dr Thomas Dooley
This is exactly what you do, Jim! Your CommUnity thanks you for the value you give ! I so enjoy following your site.
I will tell you this… I do not really follow many sites, however, every time your notification pops up a sense of serious curiosity kicks in and I just have to check what you have to offer your CommUnity.
“Unity” is what you have created here. Thank you for your “giving” heart!
I absolutely love simplicity!! Your site is simple and “straight” on. (My terminology)
Your suggestions are priceless. It brings competition together as it should.
Competition is not an enemy…it is your inspiration.
Keep up the great work and thanks again for giving all of us a big piece of your heart!
Hi Jim another great post, thanks for sharing this.
One thing I do that gives great exposure and helps others at the same time; is that I donate time and expertise to not-profit organisations.
I allocate a certain amount of hours to work on a project for an organisation, in return my business is “promoted” via newsletters, web-links, brochures/flyers etc.
All the best and thanks for sharing.
Graeme
the Twitter idea is grand. how about endorsements? lending your reputation to another reputable person’s service. same idea as the site button, but a little different. then your reputable choices add credence and u can dole them out as u see fit. this might work very well for the unregulated industry im in.
Thank you, once again, for more great advice. As I get closer to completing my book I will visit your blog (among others) religiously! Not many people are willing to share their expertise so freely.
Good post.People are always looking for stuff that is free. Why not write a short report or ebook and include recommended resources that point to your affiliate products or services in it?
Offer the report as a freebie for your newsletter to get new signups.
Having created a solution for frequent fliers and aviation enthusiasts, that is not sponsered by any 3rd party, we also thought about solutions to marekt our idea to other potential users.
And as only win/win situations really work,we came up with the idea of personal stats-pages at first and added a banner, that can be included into a forum or blog.
It really worked well and we can only advise to think about, what may make your partner – or as in our case user – support you while gaining an advantage/benefit at the same time. Not always easy, but surely worth it.
Example of the stats page:http://my.flightmemory.com/shoggoth
Example of the banner: http://my.flightmemory.com/banner/shoggoth.gif
Always a pleasure to read and see you, and I especially enjoyed this inspirational post re advertising. Thanks Jim.
Great info and advice as always. We often write current related articles for local papers and if they like it, they print it free and will include our name and telephone number.
Good article. Found it useful. Another technique to add to my large list of free advertising methods.
Love this idea.
Another good way for a local business is to run a coloring-in competition. It attracts the attention of the locals. Gets them talking, and if you can work it right, you might be able to get the local media to put a photo in the local paper of the winner presentation.
People are pretty immune today to traditional advertising. It screams ad so they avoid it. It is even intruding on Social sites like Facebook now. People don’t like it.
To be effective, it is about offering something of value for someone to look at your message. At that point, you need to build the trust relationship.
Doing this is what will lead to a profitable relationship with those surfing the worldwide web.
Creative approaches like the site award are a great idea. Other ideas are offering a free report with valuable content on the subject of interest. Also, you can offer a Video Course for free that shows step by step how to master something. You could offer a Free Audio interview of an industry authority.
The ideas are endless. Hope this helps.
To Success,
Joseph Parton
Offer your services to a club or event in exchange for being listed as a sponsor and/or a link to your website on their website.
Jim:
As always, a thoughht provoking post, full of ideas to inspire us.
Thank you very much!
Alex Kei
Wow, what a great blob, Jim. You share valuable information and are willing to share such valuable tips with those of us who are new to Twitter and blogs.
Thanks so much for being the great resource you are!
Sorry, I meant blog! My excitement at finding this blog outweighed my usual “perfection” (LOL)
Thanks, again, for being there…
Great post!
I think partnering with a local cause by donating in kind services is a good way to get some “free” advertising. An owner of a local subshop related to me how he sponsors the honor roll students at a local middle school and gives each honor roll student a coupon for a free sub. He was a little afraid when he saw a crowd of students coming into his shop, but perked up when he saw the parents and relatives who came as well (and would pay full price). He came out ahead on that promotion and created a positive experience for a large number of consumers.
Great article and ideas! You continue to impress with your innovative ways to look at business.
Gregg Zban
I should definitely give a try to that Twitter thingy. It pops up everywhere when I’m searching for the words “free advertising”