The Holly Grail of free marketing?

All these are expert skills that take many years to learn the trade. (well at least many months). So if you want to become an online marketing expert in multiple fields, you need to start reading, and reading lots and expect to take a while to come together.

Did you not put together a business plan, or at least have an outline budget for marketing?

For e-commerce I'd be setting aside around 20-25% of projected turnover for marketing activities.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but it's probably better to focus on getting funding rather than trying to bootstrap your marketing. thumbsdown

Free is rarely free at all, in order to use methods such as S.E.O you will need to invest time in learning and implementation, benchmarking and testing, Bottomline when it comes down to it. if you can create content and distribute it effectively you are half way there...tracking is a whole different issue.

I don't know why a lot of business owners insist on 'marketing on a budget' ...this is after all the stuff that generates sales...

Thanks for your contribution LTL, but I fear that while you are right in saying that the ideal way to promote a business may be to throw plenty of money at targeted marketing (then fine tune to focus on what does work and drop what doesn't) and if you don't have the money to acquire it through bank or angel financing, that this just is not practical for many small businesses.

Of course you need to speculate to accumulate in business, but when your budget is tiny the 'speculation' part of that old adage looks a lot like 'risk' and risk means the possibility of losing your dwindling budget with little to show for it.

When setting up a new business on a small budget every penny counts and I just want to make sure that it is used correctly so that my business can self fund its promotional strategies.

As a web copywriter (in my other business) I completely understand the need for regular quality content, insightful blogs, social media engagement and PPC investment, but with a tiny budget to play with it's all about establishing which is most likely to achieve the best and the fastest results.

I also appreciate that the answer to that one is that all of them are important to the growth of the business (though some have longer term benefits), and the quickest way for a new business to test the market and gain instant feedback and results is through Google AdWords. My question was really aimed at pushing outside of this standard sales and marketing comfort zone and seeing whether there were any members of this forum who had experienced good results through any other promotional means that I may not have already considered.

Any ideas?

Have you considered doing JV's with gatekeepers ? You know people who are likely to have the customers you want to target ? Rememebr you can always hit up your old customers with a new offer

What are JV's?
As I mentioned previously we're a new business therefore we don't have any 'old customers' to utilise.

Copy on our site is starting to work as we have begun creeping up the SERPS for some terms, though this has not translated into significant traffic yet. AdWords campaign major tweak and restart, so we'll see how efficient that tac is this time around.

JV means join ventures. This is probably the fastest way to get traffic and affiliates for your products. You want to find people who can help you. This would be people in your niche, people who sell products in your niche that aren't direct competitors, etc.... In other words, you want to form alliances with other marketers/businesses.