One of the main marketing issues facing those new to the business of design is finding money for promotional activities. For that matter, seasoned veterans often have the same problem. But, marketing and promoting your business doesn’t require a bucket ‘o bucks. What it does require is some savvy and some time. The stuff I do with my marketing consulting clients is pretty much the same stuff I do for myself. Maybe I’m just frugal (it sounds better than “cheap”) but if I’ve spent more than 100 bucks in the past couple of years on marketing, it’s a lot.

So, what do I do? Glad you asked. For one thing, I publish my blog Inside the Marketing Mind (Which is horribly out-of-date. Long story, but I’ll get on it). There are several options for managing your blog. WordPress and Blogger are free. Typepad and MovableType are fee-based options. WordPress has a bit of a higher learning curve than Blogger, but it’s become the standard in the Blogosphere. As a matter of fact BoDo is created with WordPress.

If you don’t have a blog, I highly recommend that you start one. But, don’t have one that goes on and on about how your day was and what you’ll be doing over the weekend. Develop a topic that will be useful to your audience. Share tasty tidbits of information, relevant links and such. Position your blog to be a valuable resource for your audience. Then, promote the heck out of it.

You can start to promote your blog with a link in your e-mail signature (“sig”). You have one, right? Also have a link in your forum / discussion group sig. You have one of those too, yes? Be sure to include your sig in each and every email you send and forum post you make. Your emails may be forwarded, because they’re jam-packed with all that useful stuff, and then you’ll get a bit of that viral thingy going. Forum posts are often indexed by search engines, so your blog link helps to increase your link popularity.

When you launch your blog, be sure to shoot out a broadcast email to the folks in your address book and include a line asking them to forward it to others who might find it useful. This simple task can jump start your traffic. Also, get your blog listed on Technorati and other blog search engines.

Another tactic that takes more time than moolah is writing articles, reports and tip sheets. If you play your cards right, writing articles can also become an additional revenue stream. How handy is that? Whip up a list of topics and do some research. Create an outline for each and then draft your article.

It’s important to understand that your articles don’t need to be some brilliant new revelation. If you have one, great, but many people read articles as a reinforcement of what they already know.

Poke around the web for sites where you can submit them. Many sites are content starved and will be pleased as punch to publish your witty ditty. Consider submitting to article distribution sites like ArticleCity, eZine Articles and, of course, Creative Latitude. Pick up a copy of Writers Market, target some print publications and send off your prime prose.

Press releases are another good way to generate some buzz, but a lot of folks seem to have a hard time coming up with something newsworthy. Here are 10 ideas to jump start your efforts:

1. New product or service
2. New staff
3. Awards
4. Featured in a magazine
5. Published a tip sheet or special report
6. New location
7. Upcoming speaking engagement
8. Putting on a seminar or workshop
9. An interesting case study
10. Research or survey results

Optimizing your web site for the search engines is also pretty dang important in this day and age. Be sure to have keyword-rich page titles for a start. Search engines tend to look at page titles like the headline of a news story. As such, they expect to see some relevant keyword in there.

Next, make sure your content carries a reasonable amount of keyword density. Not enough and the search engines will think your site doesn’t offers anything useful. On the contrary, too much and they’ll see it as keyword spamming. That can get your site banned. That would be bad.

Foster link exchanges with complimentary sites and get your site listed on industry directories. The trick here is getting incoming links from quality sites. For instance, a link from amazon.com is a whole lot better than a link from joe-blow.com.

This is where your articles will also come in handy. Most sites that publish your articles will include a link to your site. So, the more you’re published, the more links pointing to your site and your popularity goes up. Yup, the web’s become a popularity contest.

Do these few things consistently and the next thing you know you’ll be scheduling work weeks in advance. Well, maybe not the next thing. Give your activities enough time to work.

Until the next
Marketing Minute
all the best,
nt