I know one SEO company that offers SEO services for $5,000 per month. They do a fantastic job, but you gotta pay $5,000 each and every month.
Most small business owners don’t have that kind of money to spend on marketing. I know I don’t. That’s why I’m a DIY marketer for my small business with the help of some great tools.
Also, this $150 per month does not include paid advertising such as PPC (Adwords and Facebook Ads) and banner ad placement. No, this $150 per month is all about building online exposure for your small business organically using a few paid tools and many free tools.
Step 1: Start a Blog
Seriously, a small business that develops a quality blog can generate some serious revenue. You can build your blog as part of your business site or separate from your site. Doesn’t matter.
It’s far more important that you get blogging. You need to write and/or make great videos. It will cost you time, but in the long run you can build up your online exposure big time.
I recommend you get your own domain and not host on a free hosting website such as Blogger or WordPress.com. You can get hosting for less than $10 per month. I use HostGator – read my experience with HostGator here.
I also recommend using WordPress.ORG. It’s easy and free. If you get hosting with HostGator, you can install WordPress with a few clicks. You can start with a free theme (there are tens of thousands to choose from) or buy a premium theme with a few more bells and whistles. I set out my favorite theme providers here.
Step 2: Promote your Blog and business website
My favorite method of promotion is organic search engine rankings. I love free traffic to my site. I get free traffic by focusing on organic SEO. Organic SEO boils down to 3 main components:
- Content that is properly optimized
- Backlinks to your site
- Social Media (I’m not too big into this, but it can be extremely powerful).
I focus on content and backlinks.
Content
Generating content is easy, but time-consuming. I write, write, and then write some more. Guess how much this costs? Nada. Zip. Nothing. Well not really, because it costs me time. But it’s time well spent because my published articles on my business blog generate me business indefinitely.
You can hire writers, but be prepared to pay $20 to $50 per article. You get what you pay for. Don’t publish garbage on your business blog.
Video Content
If you have a Webcam or screen capture software such as Camtasia, you can make videos. Make your videos great loaded with excellent content. I don’t make too many videos yet, but it’s something I’m moving toward.
Backlinks
This is where I spend money totaling $150 per month. I take building backlinks seriously. It works wonders and is necessary. I rely on two services:
- Unique Article Wizard (UAW): $70/month
- ActuallyRank: $69/month
UAW distributes my articles to hundreds of websites and article directories. In each article I place 2 links back to my site. It’s easy and fast.
ActuallyRank is a service that gives you access to thousands of blogs every month with dofollow blogs. It’s an absolute goldmine of backlinking opportunities.
The main steps of my marketing process are as follows:
1. I publish an article on my blog. I make sure it’s a great article.
2. I wait for my article to be indexed in Google. I check this out by typing “search:www.articleURL.com” without the quotation marks in the Google search field. If my article appears, it’s indexed. If not, I wait a day or two.
3. I publish my article at EzineArticles (EZA). EZA is the only article directory I manually publish to. They’re finicky and I like formatting my articles carefully. I get a decent amount of visitors from EZA, so it’s worth the effort. EZA if free.
4. I take my EZA article and submit to UAW for mass distribution. I generally link from my articles to several different URLs on my website to get nice link distribution. These links aren’t the best in the world, but I’ve had some very nice bumps in the search engines for articles I link to from UAW. That’s why I continue paying for the service.
5. I build backlinks via blog commenting on blogs provided by the ActuallyRank service. ActuallyRank provides me 2,000 blogs (400 of which are high PR) that have dofollow commenting. Now, some of those 2,000 don’t offer dofollow, but enough of them do that it makes the service worth 10 times the price. The high PR links are pure gold. Many businesses pay up to hundreds of dollars every month for a high PR link. I get hundreds every month for $69. I discuss ActuallyRank in far more detail here.
Note: I don’t republish ALL of my blog posts on EZA and UAW. Sometimes I publish a shorter version. Otherwise I choose only some of my blog posts to republish. In other words, I publish far more posts on my business blog than I republish elsewhere. In some rare instances, I’ll write a unique article for EZA and UAW.
Step 3: Social Media
Admittedly, I don’t do much social media. I prefer writing and building backlinks. I’m nearsighted about this, but it’s just my tendancy for now.
That said, I acknowledge that social media can be insanely powerful, and the best part is it costs nothing. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are free except for your time.
Cost per month:
- Website Hosting: $10
- UAW for article distribution: $70
- ActuallyRank for high PR backlinks: $69
- TOTAL COST PER MONTH: $149
This is a system you can quickly implement that doesn’t cost you much in time or money, and can get phenomenal results.
A few extra steps you can take if inclined (I do these steps as well):
- Bookmark your best blog posts. You can do it manually at SocialMarker or automate it with Bookmarking Demon (I use Bookmarking Demon and it works pretty well).
- Comment on blogs in the CommentLuv Network. Most of these blogs offer dofollow links and you can search for blogs in your industry.
- Add an e-newsletter sign up form with e-mail autoresponder to start building a list of subscribers (prospective customers).
That’s it. That’s the bulk of my online marketing efforts for my offline business. I’ve distilled this process down to as few steps as possible. Better yet, it costs me very little every month and I end up with a large blog that sells my business and very nice backlink diversity.
The end result for me is now several websites/blogs promoting my business and more business than I had ever hoped for.
Once you get a high-traffic blog well under way, you can expand your efforts into starting a forum, Facebook Ads (you can do this anytime, but it costs more money), start a YouTube channel (free),
Related posts:
- Free Traffic Generation Using Article Marketing for Your Small Business
- 6 Hour Lawyer Marketing Plan: Powerful Attorney Marketing Blueprint
- ActuallyRank Review by a Real User: Find DoFollow Blogs Every Month
- Is Article Marketing Finished? My 3 Predictions
- Link Building Strategies for Small Business Website SEO – Part I
