Small Business Online Marketing – 3 Ideas You Could Do For Free

Marketing your small business is rough. You already know that though or else you wouldn’t be here. The truth is, the internet is filled with nonstop advertisements and the lack of trust has really taken a toll on people. So what do you do if you don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a marketing agency but want to promote your business online? Today I am going to give you 3 ideas you can do to market your business online for free so without wasting anymore time, let’s get right into it.

Let Your Customers Find You

I work in Web Design and Digital Marketing but as a hobby I have a Vr YouTube channel. The channel crossed a million views about a month ago and it’s always weird for me to visualize numbers that big. I mean, a million people could fill Yankee Stadium more than 21 times. And that’s still considered a small channel. My point is, if from the beginning I had advertised a product, that could have brought in thousands of sales. When you search for “influencer marketing conversion rates”, most sources, like this one from Forbes claim they are as high as 2.7%.

I know creating a YouTube channel can be overwhelming, or even feel embarrassing, but it’s an incredible way to market your business. You could spend a day or two making a video and then for years have it get consist views and bring you in new customers.

You might be asking yourself, “how do I know what video to even make”. Thankfully, YouTube now has an incredible tool that will help with that. In the research tab of the YouTube Studio, you can now search for content gaps. Content gaps occur when people on YouTube are searching for a video but not getting good results. It’s actually how I got the idea for this video.

My target audience are small business owners, so I searched the keyword “small business” under content gaps and was able to see a lot of people are searching for small business marketing techniques, meaning if I made a video related to small business marketing techniques, it had a good chance of being successful.

This works for all industries. For example, say you sell jewelry. All you do is search the keyword “jewelry” and you could see there is a high search volume with a lack of content regarding “jewelry sales” so if someone with a jewelry based eCommerce store made a video about the best jewelry sales going on right now they could include their own shop in the list and potentially gain a massive amount of traffic and new customers.

Word of Mouth But Digital

For whatever reason if that didn’t convince you to start a YouTube channel you can still take advantage of all YouTube has to offer. I am talking about starting an affiliate program. I’m sure you’ve heard of that before, but my tip isn’t on just starting an affiliate program, it’s how you get affiliates that actually will convert and make sales for your business. If you’re not aware, affiliate programs are where people signup to promote your product or service in exchange for a commission on whatever sales that are made through their link.

I know setting up an affiliate program might sound complex but there are tons of free plugins and apps that completely automate the process. Chances are you are using something like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or some other content management system and each one of those will have multiple options to configure an affiliate program. We personally use a plugin called SliceWP and it work’s great.

Once you have your affiliate program setup then go to YouTube and search for channels that have the same audience as your niche. If you go to a YouTubers “about” section about 95% of the time they will have an email listed. You can reach out to a bunch content creators pretty easily and inquire if they would be interested in joining your affiliate program. I would highly recommend prioritizing smaller channels since larger ones will want some money upfront and at that point it might not be worth the investment.

I would highly recommend creating a template to send to all the YouTubers so you don’t waste time typing up a thousand different emails. I would recommend keeping it short and sweet, it shouldn’t be over 2 paragraphs.

Bottom Feeding Keywords

Every word or phrase in the world has it’s own keyword difficulty score. Keyword difficulty is how hard it is to rank for a certain keyword, and it’s based on a scale of 0 to 100 with 0 being the easiest and 100 being the most difficult. The keyword “Amazon” for example, has a keyword difficulty of 100. This means it is pretty much impossible to rank for, even if you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars each month for years. However, even in saturated industries, there are keywords you could go after that are easy to rank for and still get a decent amount of traffic. You just have to find them!

For this example we’ll use a very saturated market, CBD. Using Ahrefs Free Keyword Tool I am able to search for CBD related keywords. In the results I can see the keyword “CBD Honey Sticks” has a keyword difficulty score of 8, which is considered very easy to rank for. Now I could go to my website, optimize it for that keyword and potentially gain the 29,000 average searches it has. Same goes for questions, which Ahrefs Free Keyword Search Tool will show you as well. If you find a question people are searching for with a low keyword difficulty and write a blog post about that, there is a good chance you would show up whenever someone searched that and then you could promote your own products within that blog post.

SEO in general is a great way to gain free traffic to your website, although it can be a massive pain to setup. If you want to learn how to do your own small business SEO for free, I wrote an article on that you can see here.