Marketing Your Internet Business On A Shoestring Budget

Here we discuss tips and practical suggestions about how to run an Internet marketing campaign on a shoestring budget.

You want to make a fortune on the Internet, but you only have a limited amount of cash each month to do it with. So what action should you take?

As I mentioned in my previous article, the first thing you need to do is set up a shoestring Internet marketing budget. And the second thing you need to do is stick to it.

Now let's imagine that after you have invested in your domain name, website and auto-responder (the three essential expenses of any online business) all you can afford for your shoestring marketing budget is $30 a month, or just a dollar a day.

It's not a lot to play with, is it?

However, there are still quite a few things you can do with thirty dollars a month. Here are some suggestions.

1. Upgrade your membership on three traffic exchange sites.

Traffic exchanges are an excellent resource for marketing your website on the shoestring. Find some good traffic exchanges where it costs ten dollars or less to upgrade to pro membership and where you will get a few hundred page view credits, banner and text ad credits and an improved surf ratio. With an upgraded membership for free traffic exchanges, you will be able to generate several thousand views of your web pages and banner ads every month.

2. Join InfoGoRound.com for $24.95 and get your money back each month you post an article on their database. On a limited budget, you need to find ways to leverage the few dollars you have to play with. InfoGoRound is a PLR publisher with a special twist. By joining InfoGoRound you get access to hundreds of good quality PLR articles that you can modify and place on your site.

The twist is this. The PLR articles are contributed by members and checked by InfoGoRound staff. Each month that one of your articles is accepted, you get 100% of your money back. It takes about two months to see your money, and it is deposited in your PayPal account.

What this means for the shoestring marketer is that if you post an article every month, you will effectively enjoy free membership. So now you have access to hundreds of PLR articles which you can modify and place on your blog or website - and you still get to use your thirty dollars a month.

3. Write five unique articles a month and distribute them on hundreds of article publishers for $2 a pop with iSnare.com, for a total outlay of just $10

4. You can submit your website to site directories manually, but it is time consuming and there are better ways to use your time, such as writing unique content for your website and blog. So you might consider using a directory submission service to submit your site. It can be done even on a limited marketing budget. For example, you can have your site submitted to 35 directories for $5, or 100 directories for $14 with a service such as DirectoryMaximizer.com.

As you can see, there are many things that you can do to market your website on a shoestring budget. Of course, you won't be able to do everything in a single month. You will have to decide what will work best for you each month.

Once you begin to see results and start making sales, you might want to reinvest your profits and expand your marketing budget. The point is that you should only expand your budget as your income rises to cover new outgoings.

Article Marketer has a free and paid submission service for unlimited article submissions and SubmitYourArticle costs $37 a month to submit 8 articles, but has an Article Leverage System included which enables you to submit a few alternative titles and sentences and then multiple versions of your article are distributed to the article directories.

These are just a few ideas to get you off to a good start with your shoestring Internet marketing budget. There are many other low-cost marketing possibilities out there if you are willing to do the research and due diligence necessary to find what works for you on a shoestring marketing budget.

Visit my Internet Marketing Guide for more free to low cost ways to market your business on the internet.

The Importance Of Setting Yourself An Internet Marketing Budget

The first thing to do when preparing to market your website is set a monthly Internet marketing budget. No matter how limited your funds are a budget will help you plan an effective Internet marketing campaign.

So you've got your domain name and you have set up your website and you're ready to sell. Trouble is, you don't have any traffic coming to your website and you don't have a lot of money to splash out on an Internet marketing budget.

So what is the best way to start marketing your website on a shoestring?

The first thing to do before you spend a single dollar is to work out exactly how far your shoestring will stretch. In plain English, the first thing to do is set a monthly Internet marketing budget and stick to it.

No matter how limited your funds are, if you know exactly how much you have to play with each month you can plan and effective campaign and begin to build momentum for your online business.

The worst thing you can do is market your website on an ad hoc basis without setting a clear limit to your spending. Without setting a bar on your spending, you may find yourself tempted to buy into the latest "sure fire" traffic building offer that comes your way.

Unfortunately, this is what a lot of inexperienced Internet marketers do. They do not set a budget, they try various marketing methods, they get frustrated at their lack of progress, and then they see as sales page with a headline that says something like...

"Explode Your Web Site Traffic Today!"

They read on and, excited at the prospect of getting 100,000 visitors to their website for just twenty-five dollars, they whip out their credit card... but now the card is out, they are excited by the one-time offer of a gold upgrade for just $15 a month and, what the heck, they go for that too.

A few months later most of these people are still made no progress marketing their website, the 100,000 visitors have swiftly come and swiftly gone, sales stand at zero, their credit card is maxed out, and as far as they are concerned, Internet marketing is nothing more than a scam.

Believe me, it doesn't have to be like this. With a little planning and discipline you can avoid the kind of mistakes that get so many newbie Internet marketers into trouble.

Setting a marketing budget is the very first step to take.

It will impose a discipline upon you and it will protect you from the kind of folly that I have just outlined. If you have a budget limit in place, you will have a kind of checking mechanism to make you pause whenever you are tempted to buy a too-good-to-be-true marketing offer.

No matter how small your budget is, you will be able to run a marketing campaign with it, as I will show you in my next article on the subject.

Bear in mind that some of the most effective methods of marketing a website are free and many successful Internet marketers have built success around free marketing methods. I'm talking about methods such as article writing, blogging, posting comments on blogs, participating in forums, social networking, bookmarking, posting links on website directories, exchanging links with other website owners, free membership of traffic exchanges search engine optimizing your website and so on.

From this perspective, if you are marketing on a shoestring, your Internet marketing budget should be there to augment these core promotional efforts and not for splashing out precious marketing dollars on dubious promises of massive traffic that never converts into sales.