Not everyone has thousands of dollars to put into growing an online business. In reality, you can do a lot without spending any money at all. All it really takes is effort and imagination.
Today, I’m going to go over how to grow an online business for free. You can start right now and begin boosting the future of your presence on the Internet.
Here are seven of my tips to grow an online business without money. Although you may want to invest something into these methods at a later date, you can start now for free.
1. Deliver High-Quality Content
Creating high-quality content is important whether it’s a company blog or a product description. It’s all about engaging the audience and giving them what they need: information.
Site Speed
As many as 53% of people on mobile devices give up on a site that takes more than three seconds to load. This means the site as a whole needs to be optimized for speed. If you use platforms like WordPress, you have access to a variety of tools to improve the performance of your website.
Design Layout
More than one-third of visitors will leave a site if the layout is poor. Color choices, graphics and even the overall layout of the site’s functions can cause issues for certain users. You need to deliver a good visual and functional experience for everyone visiting the website.
Avoid Fluffing
Don’t try too hard to achieve a certain word count. This often leads to what’s known as, “fluff.” It’s content within an article that doesn’t seem to have a purpose other than stretching out how many words are on a webpage. It can confuse your readers as well as search engine bots for optimization.
2. Be Mobile-Friendly
Everyone needs to have a mobile-friendly website today. More than 54% of people browsing the Internet are doing so from smartphones and tablets. If your site isn’t responsive or has a mobile variant, you may alienate more than half of your consumers.
Being mobile-friendly includes a variety of adjustments to the website.
- No Flash video: Most mobile devices do not work well with Flash.
- Optimized images: Rendering graphics takes bandwidth and time. Always use the correct sizes for your site.
- Tappable elements: Text links are often too small for thumbs. Use larger buttons that are easy to touch or click.
- Easy navigation: Don’t overfill the navigation menu. If it fills the screen of a smartphone, it often appears overwhelming.
- Easy Functionality: Visitors should be able to easily manage the site from a 3-inch screen.
3. Integrate Social Media
Adding Daily Posts
The number of times you should post content on social media varies for businesses. While some find it successful to do five or more, others do well with just one. The point is you need to be active if you want attention from your target audience.
Images Matter
When posting content to social media, use images or video. Graphics engage users far more than simple text. For instance, posts with images on LinkedIn receive 200% more of an engagement rate than regular text. On Twitter, videos are 6 times more likely to be retweeted than simple photos.
Share Meaningful Content
Don’t simply share random pieces of information. Post content your audience will want to read. This includes sharing any websites you find online, retweeting relevant accounts in Twitter or perhaps even commenting on someone’s post. Keep it all centered around your industry and niche.
Adding Social Buttons
Nearly every website has social sharing buttons on its content. Don’t forget to add it to your store items or service offerings as well. You never know who is looking at your pages, and he or she might share your goods with their own followers.
4. Focus On Your Target Audience
Focus the business on your particular audience. The more you streamline content, products and services, the higher the quality of your visitors. This means you’ll target those who are most likely to spend money with your business.
For example, you wouldn’t want to create guest blog posts on a website that centers around lawn care products if you sell kitchen appliances. Any marketing you do needs to stay relevant to what you offer.
The target audience will influence everything from the type of content you create to the brands of products you stock. This is a key element you’ll need to discover if you want the best chances of success.
One mistake a lot of new businesses make is trying to target “everyone.” This often leads to a haphazard marketing strategy and winds up being overly expensive in the long run. Keep your focus on those who are going to directly benefit from the business.
Later on, when you’re ready to pump money into ads, knowing your audience is going to save you a lot of money. Instead of showing ads to anyone, you can fine-tune them to show only to those people who will most likely make a purchase.
5. Take Advantage of Free Marketing Tools
The Internet is full of free marketing tools from email marketing campaigns to designing perfect social media graphics. While it may take a bit of effort to find tools that work best for you, the end result is a far more streamlined system.
Let’s say you want to publish a post on your Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts for the business. Instead of going to each one of these, which is time-consuming, you can use free tools like Buffer and simultaneously share the post with all three.
In fact, there are a number of social media marketing tools you can start using right now to boost your business. While some may have a monthly subscription fee, many will have free or trial versions you can test out immediately.
If you have a website on WordPress, there are thousands of plugins you can choose from to grow your business in 2020. For example, you can check out HubSpot’s free WordPress Plugin that offers a rich set of tools to boost your sales and marketing performance: CRM, forms, email marketing and more.
If you don’t have your business listed in Google, you’re missing out. Because of how local searches operate on the search engine today, people in your area may never see your business listed in the results page.
One of the first things you should do right now is use Google My Business. It’s a free platform rich with data while making sure your local customers know where your store is located.
The Internet is full of free marketing tools from email marketing campaigns, like HubSpot’s Free Email Marketing, to designing perfect social media graphics. While it may take a bit of effort to find tools that work best for you, the end result is a far more streamlined system.
While you may receive more benefits from certain marketing tools by paying for premium service, sometimes the free versions are all you need. The point is you need to push the limits of these free tools to benefit.
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