Startup Guides > Great Digital Marketing For Bootstrapped Entrepreneurs

Looking for marketing, advertising, promotion, and outreach options? One of the best channels for bootstrapped entrepreneurs is digital marketing. Here's how to do online marketing right.

One of the hardest roads traveled is that of the bootstrapped entrepreneur. When you're first starting out, you need to figure out a way to market your company on a shoestring budget. This generally means that you need to focus your efforts towards time-intensive activities that do not require much cash.

One of the best channels for bootstrapped entrepreneurs is digital marketing based on the scale and number of ways one could promote themselves (through the Internet) without spending a lot of money.

If you decide to pursue digital marketing, check out the tips below to help you get started:


1. Own Your Media

When you're bootstrapping, it's vital that some of your efforts go towards building your brand. The beauty is that you can develop content yourself and own your media.

Content marketing doesn't require a large budget, but it can have a huge impact on your organization. It can help you become a thought leader, as well as increase traffic to your site through search engine optimization.

The key is to analyze your competitors and determine how you can differentiate your content from theirs. Once you determine your niche, there are many different ways to create content such as a blog, videos, presentations, infographics, and e-mail newsletters. If you do have a little money to spend, you can partner with independent content creators who can help you produce quality content at a low cost.

2. Syndicate Your Content

Developing compelling content is only half the battle. The next step is to determine how you're going to syndicate your content.

Social media is a great way to syndicate your content. When you're ready to syndicate your content, social media marketing and distribution sites like 40Billion can be very helpful because they specialize in the promotion of small businesses, broadcasting and promoting content to its large network of several million users across the most popular social networking sites - including Twitter, LinkedIn, 40Billion, and even Facebook. Innovative services such as promoted company listings were created for small entrepreneurs to tap into a growing, active network online without spending thousands on pay-per-click ads or traditional advertising.

Syndication may require a great deal of work, but with creativity and great content you may be able to develop a large following.

3. Become a Expert in Search

Spend a lot of time learning SEO, especially if you are a smaller company that has more man hours than actual dollars to spend. The quality of traffic is high, and it's a channel in which companies just getting started can still compete with the larger organizations.

If there are words that you cannot rank for organically, you also should consider a paid search campaign. You can start with an extremely small budget, and it is a great way to get traffic to your site immediately. Paid search campaigns will allow you to:

- Only pay for clicks (visitors) to your site;

- Determine your return on investment for every keyword;

- Start with a small budget, learn, and if it's going well, increase from there;

- Make changes instantly.

The one challenge is that you need to have the patience to do it right. It won't be a huge success and generate money immediately. It may take a few months to optimize.

4. Form an Affiliate Network

It is crucial when a company is just getting started to determine ways to spend marketing dollars on a variable basis. With affiliate marketing, you will only pay your advertisers if they deliver a customer or lead. It will take time to identify advertisers that are willing to pay you only on a performance basis, but there are some sites that can help you.

Both Commission Junction and the Google Affiliate Network have created a marketplace to help you find these partners or affiliates. These sites not only help you identify these advertisers or affiliates, but also help you manage the relationships. You can upload your creative, provide your commission offers, communicate with your affiliates, as well as determine the performance of each affiliate.

5. Just Get Started Now

The bottom line is that there are many channels to drive traffic to your site. Don't get overwhelmed trying to do everything at once. Pick one channel, whether it's social media or SEO, hone your skills, and then move onto the next channel.

There are myriad resources to help you build your knowledge base, so don't make excuses. Get started today!

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