Free Marketing - Leveraging

Completely Free Marketing Tactics that Really Work... As Long as YOU Work, They'll Work!

What Makes a Good Free Marketing Tactic?

How Does Free Marketing Differ from Paid?

Elements of Successful Marketing Materials

The Stuff that DOESN'T Work

The Essential Assessment

The Pros and Cons of Do it Yourself Marketing

Good Tactics

Article Marketing
Directory Listings
Signature Lines
Event Participation
Link Trades
Ad Swaps
Bartering
Cross Promotion
Cooperation
Search Engine Listing
SEO
Viral Marketing
Opt-In Lists
Link Optimization
Print Downloads
Forum Participation
Blog Participation
Networking
Target Your Customer
Niching Your Business
Press Releases
Guest Appearances
Leveraging
Volunteering

Downloads

Leveraging

Businesses tend to build momentum over time, where marketing gets easier and less costly. One of the reasons this happens is because the greater your customer base, the more you can leverage it to your benefit.

Leveraging is nothing more than using success in one area to make success in another area more likely.

When I built my first website, it took a year or more to get any kind of response. Partly because I was green and did not know how to properly market it, but also because I was starting from a base of nothing.

Once that website was established, I could use it not only for what I had originally intended, but I could use it to promote anything new that I wanted to start.

This is leveraging at its simplest. Using an existing advantage to create an additional benefit.

On a local (offline) basis, I began with offering computer services. Later, I started a local newsletter format newspaper (there is no news service here). That newspaper was built on the foundation that my computer business formed. Then the newspaper became a marketing tool for the computer business, and for additional endeavors.

I now own over 30 separate websites, and am able to leverage them to benefit my entire business in all sorts of ways. I can also use them to help other businesses get a foot in the door, through link exchanges or low cost ads.

There are many ways in which you can leverage once you get started. Some of those ways include:

1. Cross linking websites. This is a very simple way of using the pagerank and established search engine listings of one site to jump-start a new site.

2. Cross promoting your businesses. Even if you have totally unrelated offerings, you'll still have crossover customers or viewers. You can use marketing campaigns in one line to benefit another.

3. If you cross link your sites, then you can use Pay Per Click on one site, and it can often increase the traffic to other sites as well.

4. Joint Ventures. Once you have a customer base, you have something to leverage against someone else's customer base. You can join with other business owners to help one another. Look under Collaborations on this site for details.

5. Combine two separate displays in an offline event, by sharing a booth for multiple business lines. You need to keep them at opposite ends of the booth if you do this, but it can save you the cost of two booths or separate events.

6. Create a doorway site to market multiple websites with a single promotional URL. This helps you consolidate your advertising, and it can bring in crossover customers.

7. Create a double sided business card. Put a different business on each side. This can also bring in crossover customers.

8. Participate in viral marketing projects. For many, if you make multiple contributions, you can promote multiple URLs. For very little extra time, you can promote a single viral marketing item through several of your sites, and promote multiple business lines.

The catch to it is, that you have to build a little bit of a base from which to leverage, before you can use it in these ways. It takes about a year of hard work to get to the point where you have enough of a base to use it to any real advantage. But once you have it, it will grow consistently, and sometimes exponentially.

When you have more than one line of business, look at your marketing methods, and consider how marketing one item might be used to benefit others. Sometimes you can greatly reduce your overall marketing costs just by setting things up so that one marketing method spills over into another business line.

Get the right types of marketing, combined with the right cross promoting tactics, and your business will develop an awesome marketing power.

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Disclaimer: We provide this site for informational purposes only, we are not legal or financial professionals. We make no guarantees of success of any kind. Success is dependent upon factors which we have no control over, including individual effort and undertstanding, national and local occurences, and other elements which cannot be predicted. Use this site at your own risk!

Updated August 20, 2007