My business started out very quickly but I seem to have hit a "lull". I really need to jump start things again but I have not made enough money quite yet to dump a lot into advertising. Any advice?
Posting forums, and articles. However, online marketing of the free kind, while often beneficial, it is time consuming and not necessarily going to flood you with interested prospects unless you are doing a ton of volume in free marketing. Or catch some viral wave. If your business is what is in your signature link. You may want to pursue setting up a capture page with an autoresponder to provide people a more direct incentive to understand what your business is offering and to be able to follow up with interested prospects via an email list.
Freecashman has soem great advice there - the other thing I thought of is cafemom.com.. If you have not been on that website, it is a great site where there are thousands of moms interacting with each other and looking for ways to work from home. When I still promoted mlm things, I got quite a few leads thru there and also by using free places like Directmatches, usfreeads, etc....
mrossell: My business started out very quickly but I seem to have hit a "lull". I really need to jump start things again but I have not made enough money quite yet to dump a lot into advertising. Any advice? You should start using free advertising to get the strings going and for you to know the ins and out of this business.
FreeCashMan: online marketing of the free kind, while often beneficial, it is time consuming and not necessarily going to flood you with interested prospects unless you are doing a ton of volume in free marketing . Personally I do agree that the free kind of advertising is time consuming and yet may not be bring you tons of traffic. However, so long as you are able to drive targeted traffic to your site, the result can be encouraging too.
Just write some articles at Ezinearticles.com and link back to your website using the resource box in the article.
I use usfreeads.com - it's free and is highly recommended, but play by their rules because they are very strict. If you want fast indexing of articles, go to hubpages.com and searchwarp.com - Google will index your articles within hours. articlereleases.com is another article publishing site that adds your article as soon as you submit it. I hope this helps. Best wishes in your venture.
mrossell: My business started out very quickly but I seem to have hit a "lull". I really need to jump start things again but I have not made enough money quite yet to dump a lot into advertising. Any advice? You can use free sites that are proven to rank well in search engines like squidoo, hubpages, blogger.com or scribd.com. You can freely use them as well as getting the opportunity to rank well and get your messages read.
I agree with John Park I use USFreeads as well. It is not really free if you want the best results. You will need to sign up for their premium plan ($9.99 a month) You can post unlimited ads with HTML and set them to never expire. Very user friendly site. As always, you must play by the rules. Target long tailed keywords. Keyword research is key in the title of the AD and use the title as the first line in the bad, (Bold it and Center it and use 14 Size Font in first line and use the same line at the end of the article. Use pictures in your Ads. and of course, still do the articles, squidoo lens, post in forums blogs. Post with Passion and just keep posting. It wont happen overnight but the rewards will come
I agree. Just keep writing as much as you can! I would add Live Journal to the list. Is Tumble still around? The Thirty Day Challengers of 2008 were bumped out for really no reason, unless it was just too much a zillion new members at once. You could start a free page there also. I still love Weebly too! Victoria
Great suggestions everyone. In my humble opinion I feel that its valuable content that ultimately gets you new business. You can never have too much content online. I like to refer to it as a web of content. So ezine articles, hub pages, squidoo, blog posts, web pages, commenting, social networking, and a biggie that was not mentioned here YouTube. Video marketing is huge. I know a lot of people are camera shy or don't feel that they could make a video. Put your fears aside and just do it. You can always go back and edit later. There is a specific process that you should follow with your web of content. It's all about PREselling rather than selling. So you want to link your content to lead your readers to the pot of gold. For instance: An ezine article that links to a squidoo lens that continues the PREselling process which you also make recommendations to solve a problem. Incidentally, you can change the resource box of each article (in some directories) to send your visitors to where you want them to go next. And you should. Hope this helps. James
