The Cost of Free Marketing
By Anna Johnson on February 9th, 2009Many of us start online businesses with little or virtually no capital. As such, we’re naturally attracted to ‘free’ marketing methods. Unfortunately, what we don’t pay for in money… we sometimes pay in time and/or lost opportunity. So, the question is: which actually costs us more?
There’s no easy answer to the question of whether you should opt for a paid or free marketing vehicle. It will depend on your circumstances, skills, resources, etc.
But the worst thing you can do is assume that ‘free’ is always better than ‘paid.’
I see a lot of Internet marketers spending loads of time on activities that deliver incremental results at best. A few years later and they’re still doing the same things… when they could have put some decent money into marketing, found out what worked and what didn’t, and ramped up their businesses much earlier.
That does NOT mean paid is always better than free of course. It all depends. After all, some activities are akin to planting seeds. Very laborious at first… with a lot of waiting before anything happens… but eventually the seeds grow into plants which can then be harvested.
The key is to be aware of the pros and cons – or the payoffs and costs – of various different marketing activities and then decide which deliver the biggest overall returns.
I thoroughly recommend you take the time to work this out… but I will suggest a shortcut. That shortcut is to see what the most successful players in your market have done to achieve THEIR success.
Now, you might discover that the most successful marketers in your niche started off with a lot of capital and ‘bought’ their way in. If you don’t have a similar level of resources, you might then look at others within your niche that have become successful whilst starting with relatively little.
Of course, even though this is a ‘shortcut’ it still requires you to do work of some kind: research into your competition. However, that in itself will be terribly revealing. It’s really only second to prospect/customer research in terms of providing you with invaluable information.
Once you’ve found out what other Internet marketers – those who started off in a similar situation to you – did to build their businesses, you can them use them as models.
And, ideally, you’ll adapt such models based on your own set of skills, knowledge, resources and other assets, in order to devise an optimal marketing strategy – paid, free or both.
