What if you don't have the money for online marketing?

Hi, Everyone,

Today I want to share some quick thoughts about a question I got concerning getting started in online marketing.

If you haven't seen the video yet, head over to my blog to check it out.

I was just hanging out here at my desk, working away during lunch, when I got a question about marketing online. Specifically, the question was about the transition from a brick-and-mortar store to an online business. The person wondered, "What do I do if I don't have enough money to market myself online?"

And the honest truth is in business, whether it's online or in person, if you're going to get yourself out there and market yourself (and your services and your products) to the outside world, you're going to have to do one of two things (or some combination of these two, depending upon your strategy):

You are going to have to spend money or you are going to have to spend time.

When it comes to spending money, this is often on advertising or for specialized help like an agency to do that advertising for you. This can also be in the form of your employees or your team as well -- anyone you are paying to publish, or advertise, or whatever means you are using to get yourself out there and create awareness and put your offers before potential customers. 

Or you're spending your own time. If you don't have the money, you need to spend your own time doing your own publishing on the internet, building your own website, building your own social pages, shooting videos like this, etc. Or you are doing a combination of things: you're doing a lot of your own publishing and you're spending some money on marketing, too. 

So two things: time or money. Marketing is going to cost you one or the other.

Circling back to the question, if you don't have the money, you need to start funneling your time into doing your own online marketing. And you try to figure out what works by doing a lot of it. That's how you test. You do a bunch of something and see how it works and see what you're comfortable with. (Check out the other videos on my blog for tips about what to do that I've learned from lots of experience.)

But honestly, even if you're uncomfortable with something and it's working, why would you stop? I would just keep going. If it's working, especially if you're able to close deals or sell product or sell services, keep at it until you can figure out how to get somebody else to do it, or figure out a way to automate it. You have to figure out what works for the market -- what the market wants. Once you get the hang of it, hopefully you'll start to see the revenue that will allow you to hand off your marketing to someone else.

Okay. So just a little insight. I hope that helps you guys and that you're having a great day.

Talk to you again soon.

-Chris

P.S. As you probably know, I run a company where we handle digital marketing for companies in the sew and vac retail space. If you're at a point where you'd like to explore handing off some of your online marketing burden to someone else, let's talk. We'll start with a free consultation where I'll help you think through your present strategy and how my team might be able to help.