Marketing doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg.  There are plenty of ways businesses today can use the internet to drive traffic to their website and increase their customer base, without spending an absolute fortune.  Here are just a few of them.

SEO

Search engine optimisation isn’t some kind of magical wizardry that only trained professionals can do, you’re perfectly capable of applying some of the more common SEO techniques to your website yourself.  A good place to start is with Google Analytics.  If you don’t have an account already, you really need one or some other suitable traffic tracking software.

Analytics will tell you how your users are finding you, which pages they prefer, how long they stay with you and where they bounce off to next.  All of this is valuable SEO information.  Check out the most common keywords people use to find you and start applying them cleverly throughout your site (though don’t ‘stuff’ your site with keywords, search engines are wise to this and will penalise you).

Social Networking

If you haven’t already, you need to get yourself on Facebook and Twitter pronto.  Setting up accounts provide you with a great (not to mention free) medium for contacting your loyal customers, keeping them up to date with what you’re doing and, most importantly, letting them know about your great deals and offers.  If you have a blog, Facebook and Twitter are a great medium for getting your new posts out to your followers.  Getting people to follow you will ensure you’re ever-present in their news feed and therefore never far from their mind.

Email Marketing

Do you already get a lot of traffic to your website?  Start getting your visitors to sign up to a weekly/monthly newsletter by submitting their email address.  It’s easy to add a form to your site and it’s a great way to build up a valuable list of interested customers.  You can then form a regular newsletter containing information about your products or services, current deals and general news.  Keep yourself in your customers’ minds on a regular basis and you’ll be the first place they go when they’re ready to buy.

Paid Search

Paid searches are worth spending some money on, providing you know what you’re getting into.  Paid searches are the adverts that display at the top and down the side of relevant search results in Google.  Do plenty of research first to make sure you are getting the very best return on investment.  If you do this, you won’t have to spend too much money to see an improvement in profits.

News Releases

There are plenty of business news sites that display up to date information about products and services.  Why not try crafting a press release about your product or service and sending it to one of these sites?  They’re hungry for content and it’s a great way to tap into extra traffic and drive even more back to your site in doing so.