Top 5 Low-Cost Marketing Tactics for Entrepreneurs

Every time I discuss marketing tips for entrepreneurs with a freelancer, with the owner of a very small business, or with a liberal professional, such as a doctor or a psychologist, I realize that marketing is something that has enough “ bad press."

I do not know if it is a cultural issue in Bangladesh or for Bengalis in general, but many assimilate marketing as a manipulation technique, and to go from manipulation to deception, there is often only one step.

I think it is an issue that must be overcome, especially if you have to pay a series of bills at the end of the month, since you are going to need to sell, generate income, and marketing is needed to sell.

If you think that setting up a business and being an entrepreneur or entrepreneur is cheating people, the best thing you can do is shut down and move on to something else, become an employee again, because I think you have a very demeaning perception of your activity.

What is marketing and why does it have such bad press?

For me, marketing is not the art of manipulating but of listening to the market, it is the art of understanding the needs of people in the niche in which you operate and, of course, of transforming these needs into products and services that are going to answer these people. As you can see, the definition of marketing is this and it has nothing to do with cheating.

What is happening with freelancers and people who work alone is that they are usually people who are highly educated about their technique, about the core or the essence of their professional activity, but they have not received training in management, much less in marketing. . The unknown is always scary…something.

They also perceive that if they make a strong investment in marketing and then the results are not what they expected, they are going to eat up absolutely all the working capital of their business.

Marketing for Entrepreneurs - Tactics # 1: Comment on other blogs

If you are a blogger or an entrepreneur, the most basic thing you can do is comment on other blogs, it costs you nothing. Each comment you leave will be a link that allows other readers of this article to reach your blog in a single click and if you are doing it right, that is, if you are trying to add value to this conversation, it is a great way to attract new readers.

It is important that you focus on blogs relevant to your topic because you will see that over time, more than one of the readers of these blogs that you comment on will become your own readers.

If we take an average of 5 minutes per comment and you decide to do it in 6 blogs a day, we have in less than half an hour a day 6 daily opportunities to attract attention in an intelligent way at a frankly ridiculous cost.

Commenting on blogs is a great way to do marketing if you are an entrepreneur.

Marketing for Entrepreneurs - Tactics # 2: Social Media

In this case, try to be very selective and choose the social networks in which you are going to participate, to try to be productive and not waste too much time on these sites that are real “time thieves”.

The idea is that you try to identify opinion leaders in your sector. I am 100% sure that these will have a blog and will be on Twitter, but what

I am going to tell you is not limited only to Twitter, but you can apply it to Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube, and other forums sectoral networks.

Once you have identified these people, try to promote the content of these people to your own audience, try to be present in the conversations, be it on Twitter or on the blog, without trying to stand out too much, but trying to attract attention by adding value. For example, a couple of tweets a day, a few mentions, and comments on the Facebook wall of these opinion leaders. Nothing to write home about: it's about talking.

I think you can also do it for a block of half an hour a day. This is also marketing because what you are doing, in a way, is selectively networking online with people who could eventually help you. It is important to engage with opinion leaders in your niche.

Marketing for entrepreneurs – Tactic nº3: write in other blogs

If for a couple of months you have been putting into practice the two ideas that I have mentioned before, surely you will already be more confident in your own project as a blogger and you will have proposed trying to grow your audience. I am glad that you have this purpose. One of the best ways to do it is by writing in other blogs, as a guest author.

It is about choosing a few blogs in which you have already commented and analyzing the successful contents of this blog.

If you manage to identify a couple of ideas for posts that may be interesting for the public of this blog, all you have to do is first send an email to the blog's author thanking him for the added value that his blog brings to your day-to-day life and explaining that you are also a blogger. (you leave a link that refers to your blog) and begging him to write as a guest author on his blog. Try to keep the email brief and at the same time very correct. Leave him the ideas you have identified and wait for his response.

Repeat the process several times, with several possible blogs and I'm sure you're going to come across one or several blogs whose author is currently overwhelmed with work. If you are a freelancer, it is likely that you are working for clients and are more interested in invoicing than writing a post on your blog, with which you can perceive value in the proposal you have just made.

Marketing for Entrepreneurs - Tactics # 4: Offline Networking

Although we are moving towards an increasingly digital world, do not lose sight of the fact that offline networking is very effective, even if it takes time. From time to time, have a coffee or eat with other bloggers, I think this is not a waste of time.

Try to attend events and if they are free events, all the better. Instead of trying to connect with a lot of people, I prefer to focus on one or two connections at each event and dedicate more time to trying to discover new people and affinities with people.

If you manage to have a group of 5 or 6 bloggers in your niche with whom to maintain offline relationships, I don't know if you will reach the point of being friends, but you can help each other. You can do a round of crossed interviews where each one presents a different author on their blog and at the same time, each of the bloggers tries to promote these interviews, this work translates into more traffic and more subscribers.

As long as the bloggers you interact with offer relevant content for your audience, I understand that it is a very useful tactic for everyone. Also, you don't spend a penny to do it.

Marketing for Entrepreneurs - Tactics # 5: Webinars

The next strategy that I propose to you does have a cost and it is about using a tool called a webinar. Go now! Don't be creepy, so far you haven't spent anything.

This is the online version of the seminars of all life. Those seminars are usually held in hotels and where they are called for an expert to give a talk on a topic and then the organizer of the seminar tries to do a few pre-sales with the attendees.

You can replicate this model online with webinars and, if you are an expert in blogging, you can try to approach another blogger who already has an audience and offer to do a free audit, lives, in webinar format, with the only obligation for this blogger to publish the result of the audit before your audience. This is better than an interview because in the video we see how the author of the blog listens to you, making a recommendation, with which the perception of the value of what you are saying for this public is brutal. This is how Derek Halpern became known, generating a huge audience in a few months.

The cost of the webinar service starts at around €40 and goes up depending on the number of participants you want to have. But if you want to start with something very simple, you can do it with a Skype video conversation in which the two of you are following what you are saying in the blogs.