Skinflint Internet Marketing

Time was that marketing was expensive.

Skinflints, tightwads, misers—use your favorite monicker—now have a way to successfully market their wares without requiring huge budgets. In the past, consumer marketers needed to spend large amounts of advertising, or come up with more and more interesting public relations stories. B2B marketers had it even tougher, because their small markets often meant that advertising and PR were both foreclosed. Their marketing consisted of trade shows and "collateral."

So, you had your choice between expensive marketing or no marketing, for the most part.

The Internet opens up big opportunities for the skinflints among us. It gives you a chance to do marketing for free—it will cost you time, yes, but very little money.

• Creating a Web Site. Folks will tell you the "right" way to create a Web site, but often this is a very time-consuming and expensive way, too. How can you get a Web site for free? That's what skinflint marketers want to know.
• Market Research. Focus groups and surveys aren't cheap, so learn to do market research the skinflint way.
• Search Marketing. Think you can't afford to be listed in Google? Think again. Search marketing does not have to be expensive, if you know what to do.
• Advertising. By its nature, advertising seems expensive. But Internet advertising can be different—some of it is free.
• Web Metrics. You can't tell what the value of anything is if you don't even know how to measure what your customers do. Find out how to measure activity and to improve your Web site by the numbers.

Internet marketing does not have to bust your budget. If you use the free tips in these skinflint guides, you may run out of time, but you'll never run out of money.

Want more tips to raise your Internet marketing success? Check out Search Engine Marketing, Inc., which contains a complete step-by-step program for successful search marketing for your business. For more ways to improve your overall Internet marketing, take a look at Do It Wrong Quickly, an indispensible guide to the new ways of marketing on the cheap.