It is the myth that in order to build a business you need loads of money and it's simply not true, many entrepreneurs have a success story of how they built their businesses with absolutely no money.
Free tools and different platforms would definitely help you start your business with no money in marketing. You can approach your targeted customers and influence your website audience free from all cost. Although at a certain period of time you would need paid advertisement to build your brand and attract more relevant traffic to your website that is the next step for the business. Following are a few points which would help you in starting your business for free:
1. Get Online, Join Relevant Groups and Build a Relationship
Focus on building your own audience first no matter what your business is. If you can build your audience then you can build a successful business. And the best thing is that you don't need any money to be able to build an enormous audience.
So, the first way to do that is through gang online and joining relevant groups. You can do this on Facebook where you would find many amazing groups related to your business and instantly start networking. Just like a crazy person goes and builds incredible relationships with the people.
Go and connect with people, let them know what your message is, what you're about, what you have to offer in an authentic way and do it not because you want to sell, do it because you want to build a relationship with your targeted audience. I have a good friend of mine Joanna Goodwin, she started her business of B2B Email Database when she didn’t even have her website. She went on Facebook and she joined relevant groups and she started to build incredible relationships with people she discovered. What she was really great at and passionate about was her business. Then she put out a survey to find out more about what people wanted and at the end of the survey she offered people a free Database Sample and that is how her business got rolling.
The key point here is to start building relationships that start connecting and start building your audience which is the first thing to do.
2. Social Media Presence
Start building your presence on social media platforms. The way social media has grown in the last decade is incredible and ridiculously overwhelming. Just pick any social media platform and decide to become amazing on it, whether that is Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or whatever suits best for your business.
If you are not able to decide which social media platform to choose then just go with one and see how it works out. This is not rocket science that people get so hung up on, keep it simple and just focus on becoming amazing and building your following on one platform. Suppose you have a baby product business like little Jones and you decided to focus on building followers on Instagram. All you have to do is to set up an Instagram profile and showcase your interesting business product which you think your followers would love to see and share it with their loved ones. You can also focus on featuring your product on other Instagram profiles which would give you more visibility.
Just focused on posting out consistently every single day with really great images that are aligned with the brand. When you have built your brand image, followers and when you think you are getting sufficient traffic to your website then you can start your sales pitch.
It won’t cost you anything, so build your followers on social media and you will start reaching out to people. That is how you drive traffic to your offer at the point. You have something to share with them or something to sell them and that should be the focus when you build your audience.
The key thing is that you have to do this stuff consistently, you can't just do a little bit one day and then not to do it the next day. Be consistent at it. It's not always going to be easy, days will come when you see no one is looking at your stuff. What should you do? You feel like giving up all your work because you feel like no one's paying attention to what you are doing. But you have to push through and keep going until you reach your target. Once you have your targeted audience, you can survey them and you can find out what they want.
3. Start Networking Offline
The third thing that you can do which again is absolutely cheap and really easy for all of us is to go networking offline. Get out of the house, work-space and go meet people in real life. Start networking like a crazy person for your business, meet people and tell them what you're all about and have meaningful conversations. You can build powerful connections with the words that you speak, sound like an entrepreneur and stay focused on why you are doing it and you never know where those relationships will lead. They will help you to really build an incredible business so get out there and network like crazy.
4. Ridiculously Consistent
The final step is to be ridiculously consistent with all this stuff, it is so easy to start a social media following or to start networking. When you feel like no one's paying attention to your post or listening to you or hearing your message and it feels like giving up, you can't. Don't give up until you succeed in what you have started. Stay consistent at it and just keep going with it, try something different which you think your targeted audience would love to see. Focus on adding more relevant and business focused content so that your audience think your post is relevant and interesting.
It's going to be the foundation of building a successful business because once you've got that business-related audiences who love what you're about and who love your message and admire your thoughts then you can survey them and go deep deeper and create an incredible offer for them and sell to them.
Conclusion
If till now you haven’t thought about any business idea, or are worrying about the investment and funds for marketing then the above few points can help you reach your targeted audience in less than no time without any investment. So, let your mind be flooded with business ideas and start your business right away.
Ryan Smith is the Senior Marketing Manager at Optin Contacts Inc. He oversees Optin Contact’s online marketing strategy and implementation. Ryan has launched 8 successful marketing campaigns including a 12-month project for Optin Contacts Inc. that doubled monthly revenue, and a social media campaign that grew the company blog’s monthly traffic by 245%.”
