Wanna get something for free? Most people do. The problem is, free usually comes with a price tag in this day and age. The old adage, “Nothing comes for free,” has become more and more true as time goes on. But not always.
With rising inflation and recessions imminent for more than just the U.S., marketing costs can get overwhelming quickly. This is especially true for small businesses and start-ups. So how do you market effectively with low (or no) cost and not work yourself to death? You read this article.
Now, this doesn’t mean that some of the high priced services and products out there don’t produce great results. And your ROI may be huge using a service like Shoutlet (that starts at about $300 a month). But let’s face it, in today’s economies, anytime you can get something for free, you should take advantage of it right?
I have 3 free marketing tools and tips just for you that are really free!
Spott.com: Spott is a free link exchange service. It operates similar to Goolge AdWords and AdSense with the posting of ads and the placement of ads. The big difference…it’s totally free; for right now anyway. It is in some beta stages still, but that is the time to get onboard with it if you are looking to save some money. Now, is this going to produce results like you can get from other paid services? Probably not, but it should produce results none the less if you use a decent ad model on your site and create quality ads.
PR.com: If your a business that can benefit from press releases then this is your bag, baby. PR.com a free press release service that offers the option of free releases. How cool is that? No more headaches of putting together lists of sites every time you do a release. They help you with all of that, all you have to do write the release.
(edit: for 23 more press release sites, both free and paid – check out our Press Release List – Jason)
Competitious.com: What are your competitors doing? You may be doing (or paying someone to do) a tremendous amount of work to answer this question. Or you may have no idea what your competition is doing because the task of keeping up on them just seems overwhelming. Don’t fret, check out Competitious. Its a free competitor monitoring service! Let them do the work for you so you can focus on more pressing matters.
Why are you still reading?
I just provided you with resources that you can use today. Now that you have three free marketing tools to go explore, you should be checking them out, not still reading. So get out there, market your site/brand/product…and don’t spend a dime.