If you don’t have much experience in the online marketing field, it can be difficult to know where you should focus your time and effort. There are multiple ways to spend your marketing dollar these days: with a hefty PPC campaign, a more organic SEO strategy, email marketing and even advertising. With so many options, business owners can be conflicted on which route to take.

However, for those of us (more like most of us) who are on a tight budget, hiring a marketing company is simply out of the question. Thankfully there are a number of easy to do marketing strategies whose only cost is a little of your time.

Social Media Campaign Management

Do you know someone who doesn’t have a Facebook account? Neither do I. Facebook nor Twitter accounts only take a minute to create and are very user friendly. Now, I wouldn’t advise for a large corporation to be doing their on social media campaign – but for the budget savvy businessman it’s a no brainer. Unless you have a huge product rollout that you feel you need help on, managing your own campaign is actually quite simple, and sites like Mashable have great social media management tips.

All you need to do is create the account, upload profile pictures and any relating pictures, fill out your profile as best as possible and begin updating the world about your business. Sticking to a posting schedule can help give you a guide on when and what to post (so for example, if you were a product company, posting one picture of a product a day would be plenty). Looking at what your direct competitors are doing for their social campaigns can give you an idea of where to start.

Be sure to reply to any user comments – but address any negative feedback or concerns offline. A simple, “thank you for your questions. Can you give us your email so we can discuss the matter with you further?” will suffice.

Blog Writing

Blogs have more of a purpose than most business owners think. Blogs not only update the users on new products or services, but they actually go out and notify the search engine that your site is being updated regularly. This is important because Google’s algorithm checks sites for regular updates. By having it “ping” the search engine, it’s letting them know sooner that you’re always working on your site to improve it for the better. It also helps with relevancy. The more you write about a topic (not to the point of redundancy, it still needs to be useful to the readers as well) the more you become an authority on the topic in the search engines eyes.

The best part about blogging for yourself is you are already the expert in your field. You already know everything there is to know about your business and all that pertains to it, so all you need to do is write down some topic ideas and create a blogging schedule. By finding and sticking to a blogging schedule, you will keep your content fresh and regularly updated. This will also give you more material to publish on your social media channels!

Guest Posting

If you’re planning on doing a large number of guest posts, it may be wiser to hire a guest blog posting agency. However, if you’re only needing a few posts to gain some more readers and start getting your name out there, this is something you can definitely do yourself.

It’s the same concept as blogging, with a few minor differences. For starters, you’ll need to get in contact with bloggers in the same industry and see who would be willing to publish your content and what they’d like you to write about. Make sure your post fits within any guidelines they provide. Include a backlink to your site either within the body of the content or in the author bio at the bottom. Make sure whatever you link to, it sounds as natural as possible when read.