If you own a small business and you are looking for different ways to market your business, there are a number of very inexpensive online marketing platforms that you can use to promote your business on a shoestring budget. The following are five great ways to market your business and get it out there for consumers to see.

Craigslist

Craigslist is an online classified ad website where people can post any number of things for free. From services you offer to housing and products and other services, Craigslist is a great resource for marketing. If you have a service based-business like painting or photography, Craigslist can provide a great way to get your business in front of thousands of people at no cost.  All you need to do is set up a free account, create a compelling ad and post online.  The site will even save your ad so you can repost if it expires.  Make sure to add targeted phrases in your ad copy like “I am one the best painters in San Diego you will find” – this sentence includes the phrase “painters in San Diego” so your ad will come in a search if someone types that in.

Email Marketing

One way to get out to a lot of people is by creating an email list and database (or list) of people you have worked with, friends and associates and anyone else that you meet where you can promote your product or services. There are a number of very inexpensive email marketing companies such as emailbrain.com or constantcontact.com where you can create email templates and manage your email list of people in contacts. The best part is that people can unsubscribe automatically if they are not happy with receiving emails which frees you up to continue to grow the list while it manages itself.  Once you have created a template and load up a list of contacts and email addresses, you can create different messages and schedule them to go out during different days and times.  So, you can set it and forget it.

Facebook

One of the most important aspects of marketing for small business is getting your own Facebook Fan page. This is a separate page in addition to your personal page that is solely for your business. Once you have a Facebook page up for your business, you can direct people  you know to like your page and build your audience. If someone “likes” your page, then every time you post an update to your business page, those people see the update in their newsfeed. You can create a post and pay to promote those posts to a geographical area and target demographic for your business reaches. When you promote the posts and content and more people like your page you can grow your audience and continue to be able to market your product and services to a captive audience.

Business Directories

Another way to market your business is by making sure that you missed your call company in all of the major business directories like Yelp com yellow pages.com and Google Places. All of the directories allow you to create a free profile and update your business listing information for free. You need to take advantage of this because the more business directory you are in on the internet the higher your placement in google search results will be.

Business Networking

Another way to grow your business is to attend the networking events with other people that are in industry similar to yours. So if you are a painter you should attend networking events with Realtors that can use your services or refer you to new clients or existing clients. Almost every city has a Chamber of Commerce and you can contact them to reach out and see and get a calendar of events.

Create a Video

Depending on what your business dies you can create a video of your customers and out of your business and post on YouTube. YouTube is the second most search website on the entire internet and if you create a video and add a targeted keywords to that video the video may come up and search results and help drive our business to you and almost no cost.

These are just a few of the ideas that can help you increase your visibility and generate more marketing buys for your business. Obviously everything that you do depends on how the best way to reach your target market and where they are.