There’s no doubt about it, when free marketing leads to a big sale its time for the happy dance! You’ve researched your market, produced content that has connected with your target audience. Best of all you’ve made enough of an impression on someone for them to buy your product. That really is immensely satisfying on a number of levels. But the question is how reliably can you rinse and repeat a great result from free marketing?
The great advantage of Internet free marketing is that once your content is out there it keeps working for you. A blog post or a video can be picked up weeks, months or even years after you produced it. The big problem is though that there is just so much content being produced on a daily basis. No matter how well you optimise how skilled you are at keyword research, how great your content is, without consistent traffic your results can be very hit or miss.
Free Marketing And Paid Ads
The alternative, paid advertising, can definitely be more consistent but it can be very costly. It’s a learning curve that costs money every step of the way. To get better at paid advertising you need to gather data. Unfortunately the only way to get that data is by paying for it. So what’s the answer?
Do both. The key to the free marketing is consistency. If you regularly post content on Youtube, Facebook, Instagram etc you have evergreen content. When that produces results channel some of that 100% profit into paid advertising. You’ll find that the two can actually work together. From my own experience people seeing your paid ads may not take action directly but might seek you out elsewhere. They’ll check you out on social media, look for your website and buy from you there. If you are tracking your paid advertising properly you can also retarget your ad’s audience all over the Internet.
There are loads of tools available to boost your free marketing efforts, some are free others involve a subscription. My own free marketing revolves mainly around Youtube and Blogging. Here are a few of the tools I find very useful.
Free Marketing Boosters
Tube Buddy
This is an extension, which sits on your Youtube Channel and on your browser if you use Chrome. TB is available in both free and paid versions. It speeds up your workflow hugely by creating templates and offering keyword suggestions. It also analyses your videos and channel helping to optimize both.
IFTTT
Short for – If This Then That – IFTTT is an automated syndication platform for pretty much every type of content. You pick from a buffet of platforms onto which you want to post your content (provided you have accounts on those platforms) Example: IF I post a new video on Youtube THEN also post it on my Facebook Page, Linked in account etc.
YT Gorilla
This is a paid app, which helps you analyse Youtube videos for keyword suggestions and other useful info. You can also grab multiple video urls for placement advertising
Yoast SEO
This is an incredibly good WordPress blogging plugin. Again this is available free with optional paid upgrades. Yoast scans your blog content for SEO and readability, giving you a live checklist to follow as you go.
Let The Numbers Do The Talking
Whatever mix of free marketing and paid advertising you use will depend a lot on your products. If you sell high-ticket products or services paid advertising will be more affordable even after the inevitable initial pain. Then again you can offset that with an occasional free sale. Erring on the side of free marketing is probably better for low ticket, low profit products since the ROI from paid ads would be poor.
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