Back in 2015, I built my first business, a digital marketing agency, on $60 and a metric ton of elbow grease. You see, I was in a pinch: I had a mortgage to pay off and zero F-ing tolerance left for inane job interviews.
Getting a job was never my strong suit (my poker face is the worst you’ve ever seen). While I didn’t succeed in getting a job, I did get quite a few freelance clients and I knew this was my best bet: build an agency out of my freelance work — and do it fast.
For the first year or so, I scraped by as I clawed my way out of obscurity. I had a couple of social media management clients and I posted to their 14 accounts manually, until I could afford to pay for a good scheduling and reporting solution like Sendible.
When I started this newsletter I was in a different position. For instance, I chose ConvertKit not because it’s the cheapest ESP out there (it’s not!) but because it’s the best for my needs.
Still, I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to constantly be on the lookout for freebies, free trial extensions, and opportunities to step into the spotlight without paying a fortune for it.
Perhaps you’re in a better place than I was in 2015. Even so, I’m willing to bet your marketing budget isn’t unlimited.
So, even if you can invest in paid growth, it doesn’t hurt to have some free options on hand, right?
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Let’s dig in!
10 ways to promote yourself on a shoestring budget
1. Guest posting
Guest posting is what built my agency business and pretty much took lead generation off my plate. Here’s how it works:
- You identify publications that your ideal buyer reads
- You find out if they accept guest contributors
- You read the editorial guidelines!
- You pitch them your idea for an article
The result: you get extra visibility, a backlink to your website (this is SEO gold!), and leads/clients.
This is a good list to find publications that accept guest posts. And this is a good primer on how to approach it.
HARO is a great resource to get your name out there with less effort: create a profile and sign up for their daily notifications to receive requests from journalists/media people looking for subject matter experts in your industry.
When you see a request that matches your expertise, just reply and wait to see if you get featured. The success rate is not great but it’s worth a shot.
PSA: guest posting is a long game. It will take months to see your first contributions live and you need great writing chops. The good news is that its results compound: some of my guest contributions brought me leads for years!
PSA2: Vanity outlets like Forbes or The Harvard Business Review are harder to get into. Plus, they’re very broad. Focus on smaller outlets, like local or niche publications, that are read religiously by your ideal client.
2. Guest podcasting
Guest podcasting is the new guest posting and it works pretty much the same way: find a podcast whose audience overlaps with yours and pitch yourself as a guest.
Matchmaker.fm is a good place to find podcasters looking for guests or you can use this subreddit.
Psst, did you notice something interesting? Guest posting and podcasting are the equivalent of being your own PR agency. PR agencies are expensive AF and very few SMEs afford them, so here’s your way to get similar results without a 6-figure budget.
3. Partnerships and collabs
Partnerships and collabs are the easiest way to tap into other people’s audience and to grow yours. Everything goes:
- Joint social media posts.
- Recommend each other’s newsletters. Lettergrowth is a good platform to find partners.
- Create workshops or webinars together.
- Refer each other’s services — excellent for complementary fields like copywriting + web development.
4. Ask for help!
Remember the $60 I mentioned was my big investment in my first business? I used it to pay for a domain name and hosting.
A client of mine at the time offered to design my website for free. I didn’t even have to ask and that’s a great thing because, back then, I sucked at asking for help.
So, if you feel like you could use a boost, ASK! Be better than I was nine years ago!
Trust me, all the successful people you can think of “made it” because someone took a chance on them, gave them a boost, or a piece of advice when they needed it the most. Some of them remember it and acknowledge it.
I don’t consider myself a particularly generous person. Still, in the past month, I found freelancing gigs for three people and answered more than a dozen “how do you think I should approach this?” messages.
All because I remember that a single person who believes in you can change your entire life/career.
Need advice, an intro, a recommendation, a referral? — ask for it! If you’re lucky, the person you’re asking is willing to pay it forward. If not, try again with someone else — there are some decent people left in this world, I promise you!
5. SEO
SEO takes time to work but, much like guest posting, it compounds. If you don’t have the time to write dozens of articles or the experience to optimize them, start slow, with a modicum of optimization.
- Publish long-form articles on LinkedIn — they rank VERY well.
- Use a free keyword research tool to find long-tail keywords for everything you publish on your blog.
- Do light optimization: add a meta description to all your pages/articles, add relevant image titles and descriptions, and make sure your pages are indexed by Google (Google Search Console helps here!)
I publish all my newsletter issues here with minimal SEO tweaks and, even so, organic search is my third traffic source.
6. Run free or paid webinars/masterclasses
Free or low-ticket events are lead generation on steroids. They make it super easy to add people to your email list or to sell them a higher-ticket offer directly.
The only downside is that you need a sizeable AND relevant audience for them to be effective. Running a live webinar with three attendees is not exactly a lead generation or reputation-enhancement dream.
7. Host a Q&A with your audience
You can do this on LinkedIn, in an audio event, on a chat platform like Slack, at the end of your webinar, and on.
Q&As are excellent promotional tools for two reasons:
- They establish you as an expert, the person who has As to their Qs.
- You get to learn your ideal client’s actual struggles, which later on you can convert into content, products, or features for your existing products.
Once again, you’ll need a fairly large audience to leverage Q&As fully.
8. Create a giveaway
Giveaways, raffles, and contests can be hit and miss. They will help you build an audience fast, especially on social media, but most of those people will be there just for the giveaway and not for what you’re selling.
Still, if you need a quick boost, they are affordable and fairly easy to organize. To make them worthwhile, choose prizes that are directly tied to what you’re doing:
- Free products (yours, not a Macbook that will attract people indiscriminately)
- A free consultation with you
- An extended free trial of your solution (say, a year)
- A shout-out in your newsletter/on your social media profile (like my referral program does — scroll to the bottom of the email to see it).
9. Join local or online networking events
Meeting new people increases your luck surface area. You can get clients, leads, partners, or simply learn what’s trending in your industry.
From free and paid communities to conferences, you have your pick at events and formats. I especially recommend these if you’re a solo founder, which can get pretty lonely pretty fast.
Get out there and get out of your own head!
10. Invest in customer retention more than in customer acquisition
This is one of the biggest mistakes I see across industries, irrespective of the company size. Founders invest more energy and money in attracting new customers rather than retaining existing ones.
It’s up to 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Plus, increasing your retention rate by only 5% can boost your profit by 25-95%!
So, before you spend time and money on getting new buyers, ask yourself:
- Is your value ladder on point?
- Can you upsell existing customers or cross-sell them something?
- Is there a tier in your value ladder that very few customers have gotten to?
- How satisfied are your buyers? → you can’t retain unhappy customers!
✋ Limitations
Yes, you can promote your business on a shoestring budget. But, as you grow, so should your budget.
My first business taught me how to be frugal and get by on next to nothing. I’m grateful for that because I’m still very selective with what I invest in and thoroughly vet any opportunity before throwing money at it.
But I’d be lying if I said I wanted to go back to crappy tools and elbow grease overload.
After all, you pay with what you have more of and value less: time or money.
Most of the tactics above are quite time-consuming. If you don’t have the time to invest in them, remember that, for each of them, there’s a paid option:
- Guest posting/guest podcasting → advertorials and paying to be a guest.
- SEO → Google ads
- Ask for help → offer a commission for recommendations
- Online/offline events → pay to be a speaker.
…and so on.
Choose wisely!
Lastly, be patient and consistent. These things take time — most businesses need 18-24 months just to break even or see an inkling of profitability.
You’ve got this!
🎙️My podcasts, interviews, and more
I joined Eric Melchor on the B2B Marketers Can Laugh show and we talked about humanizing B2B communication, blurring the lines between B2B and B2C, and more. We also laughed A LOT. Listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple.
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