How to Promote Your Business Online for Free: 26 Ways

If you’re in a tight advertising budget and you don’t want to spend bucks to promote your business offline and online, here are 26 ways you can try to get the attention of people on the Internet for free.

1. Create an interesting blog with useful content or blog posts about your business or brand using free blogging platforms, such as WordPress.com, Blogger.com and Tumblr.com. If you want to be more brandable, get a custom domain name for a little investment of money. Also consider investing more on your blog by following these ways to make your blog stand out from the crowd.

2. Do search engine optimization (SEO) to rank your blog posts in the search engine results pages (SERPs) of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines online. Check out these SEO tips.

3. Create a Facebook Page for your business. Share your blog posts and other promotional content to your Facebook audience. Be helpful and don’t spam.

4. Share your content to your friends on your personal Facebook profile or timeline. Balance your business and personal updates.

5. Join Facebook groups related to your business or interest. Share your useful content, blog post, and business announcements. You can also create your own group and invite members who will be interested to your business and other related matters.

6. Create a Google+ account and a page for your business. Promote your blog posts and share your business updates to your circles and followers.

7. Create a Twitter account and profile for your business. Tweet your blog posts and other business updates to your followers.

8. Promote your business on your personal Twitter profile. Again, balance your business and personal tweets.

9. Create a Youtube account and channel for your business. Create promotional videos and share them to your Youtube subscribers.

10. List your local business location on Google Places and let online searchers find, share, rate, review and recommend your business.

11. Claim your business venue on FourSquare so that customers with local updates can check in on it.

12. Create a LinkedIn account and add your business or company. Promote your business on LinkedIn by sharing your business or blog updates to your connections.

13. Create a Pinterest account and share interesting photos or graphics about your brand or products.

14. Place email subscription button on your blog. Encourage your visitors to subscribe their email to receive your business updates. Use your email list for email marketing. Avoid spamming!

15. Write a guest post for other influential blogs that are related to your niche and are receiving traffic coming from your targeted audience. Put in your bio your business, website or services to promote them to your readers. Interact with your commentators.

16. Leave useful and engaging comments on other blogs related to yours. Put your business blog link in the URL field.

17. Join social bookmarking sites, like StumbleUpon, Reddit and Digg. Share and promote your business blog posts, news and stories on them.

18. Create viral content, like memes and photos with inspiring messages. Share them everywhere online (Facebook, Twitter, Google, et cetera).

19. Share the interesting videos you make for Youtube to other video sharing sites, including Facebook and other top social networking sites that are able to share videos.

20. Join online communities or forums where your target market or audience are joining and actively participating. Be active and help the community. Promote your business according to the forum rules.

21. Submit your business or blog to free yellow pages or business directories online.

22. Ask your family relatives and friends to promote your business online, through their own personal and professional social pages, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

23. Ask your employees and people in the non-marketing department to also promote your business online.

24. Give testimonials as a customer or client to your suppliers on their website – connect your testimonial to your company or business blog.

25. Befriend and be connected with bloggers and Internet marketers. Be helpful and be kind to them. Don’t expect that they will promote your business online in return. It will naturally come along.

26. Finally, maintain quality and excellence in your business so that your products and services will naturally promote themselves online.

Remember that although the ways above will not cost you money, they will cost you your precious time, like in researching and making experiments to making them more effective. Therefore, you also have to consider delegating some of those tasks and invest some money on human resources. You should always keep the balance between spending time and spending money, and see to it that you choose which one will give you better return or result.

There are many other free techniques and tactics to promote a small or medium business online. We just need to continue learning and be updated with the latest innovations that are happening in the Internet world.

So how about you? How do you promote your business online for free? Feel free to share your ways by making a comment below.