No business can run and grow without a marketing budget. The more your marketing budget will be, the maximum number of people you can reach. This is one of the reasons why many startups didn’t manage to stay in the market for a longer period of time.
Low budget is not a problem but investing that marketing budget at the right place is very important. This is where most businesses make mistakes. In this article I will discuss how startups can manage to stay online and grow within that limited budget.
Here are few of the areas where you have to invest at an initial stage. This investment is usually worthy because without it, growth is almost nearer to impossible.
– Domain Name
No serious business (not even a blog) can live on a free domain. So, you have to go with an initial investment of buying a domain name for your business. Although it’s a $9.99 of an investment but how to choose a domain name for your business is the key.
It is a common misconception that having a keyword in the domain name will help you with SEO but Google and other search engines either do not consider it as a ranking signal or the weight is very low. Before buying a domain name, here are the 12 rules of buying a right domain name that will help you with purchase.
– A Good Looking Website
The concept of an online business is incomplete without an elegant looking website. Once you have your desired domain name in hand, it’s time to design a website that features your products and services online.
Planning to develop a website, you have several options available that includes hiring a website developer or to go with CMS systems available online. Here we are talking about a tight budget so in this case my advice is to go with either WordPress or IM Creator as they are cost effective and don’t require much technical skills.
Note: Remember, in today’s world website is incomplete without a blog so when choosing a website make sure it also contain a blog that allow you to talk to your audience without much efforts. This is one hell of an interesting resource that talks about blogging’s best practices.
– Technical Lookup tool
Today having a website is not enough but you should have a website that is appropriate for the targeted audience as well as for search engines. A tool that gives you a quick lookup of all the technical details and what you should do in the website to make it better for the web and a user is important.
There are multiple tools that can help you with that, which includes Moz.com, Raven Tools and a few more. Out of all the tools I believe Search Enabler is the most cost effective tool and do exactly what one needs.
– Keyword Research Tool
This, I believe is the most important investment to make when you are in an online world. If you find the right keywords from which audience are finding businesses of your kind, WIN!
Previously there was a Google Adword tool that helps with that but now there are no free tools I know that does the same. So somehow one has to invest on SEMRush. It is a little higher on cost side but will give you an exact idea of how you should go with content marketing and link building.
Once you are done with technical fixes in the website and you also have the targeted keywords in hand the next thing you should be doing is to create content for your website and promote it to the right places that gives you traffic and links.
– Link building Tool
Write this phrase in Google and you will literally find tons of tools that can help you with this.But I have to find a tool that can do most of the jobs for you in a limited amount of money.
After going through dozens of tools, I believe the link prospector of Citation lab is the tool that is a perfect fit for any size of business. Tool is cost effective ($2 per credit) and helps you collect all the possible areas where you can get a link i.e Guest Blogging, Directories, Donations and more.
There can be tons of other areas and loads of other tools that can help you with different stuff but, above are the 5 areas where I believe a business of any size should invest and make the most out of all the online channels.
