As marketers in the internet and mobile era, often we asked ourselves questions such as “Is there the best free traffic sources that we can use right from the start when marketing a new website?” The answer can be a simple yes or a simple no. It depends. When you first start off your new business (mostly probably from your home or your garage if you even have one), the usual scenario is that you do not have much of a marketing budget. Buying advertising at the initial stage is not possible and is suicidal. It leaves you with the options where you can get free exposure, or free channels to get visitors or customers to your company website.
Online opportunities
There are always many different opportunities to obtain new customers or get exposure through online, or usually we would call it internet marketing.
- You can regularly create videos and do video marketing by opening up a YouTube channel. The idea is to create video content that you may be able to share to other people, and/or the content should be in your niche.
- You can find Facebook groups that are in your industry or niche, and join them. Then you will have to engage with the existing members in the groups. Play nice first. Do not simply sell to people in the groups, because depending on the rules of the groups you may get kicked out by the administrators or owners of the groups.
- Make good use of Reddit. Do not underestimate the power or culture on Reddit. Do not spam any sub-reddits because Redditors simply do not want irrelevant content sticking up in their communities. Keep it clean. Again, engage with people first.
- When you service or product is for younger aged people, go for Instagram.
- Believe it or not, you should use Whatsapp. Many people may think Whatsapp is simply only a tool for communication (i.e. instant messaging), but it is not. When you can intelligently use groups, you will make an impact to reach the right people with the right conversations.
- There are certainly many more online sources that you can get traffic (or visitors/customers) to your site.
Offline opportunities
Do not underestimate the opportunities that you can get from your local community. When you are lucky to know a few people, and at the same time they know pretty well what you can do and offer, you may be lucky to get invited to speak at their events or conferences on a specific topic. Speaking publicly or speaking in some events will certainly let you get more visibility for your local marketing effort regardless of the products or services you are eventually going to be pushing to your audience.
