Whether you have a limited budget (and most of us do) or not-so-limited (lucky you), you should focus a lot of your marketing strategies on content creation. You want to be seen as a thought leader in your field, you want your website to show up on Google searches, and you want to increase the trust a potential customer will place on you and your company.

As this is a big topic, I’m going to spread it across 2 separate posts over today and tomorrow. Each post is designed to give you an abundance of ideas and marketing strategies for how to reach that magical 100K visitor target.

So, here we go with Part 1:

Here are some quick marketing strategies:

• Partner with similar companies and individuals and create benefits for them to email their users with details of your website.
• Reach out to offline Meetup groups who generally have 200-1,000 person mailing lists
• Befriend owners of Facebook pages and see if you can do contests for an in-kind trade
• Go to the /subreddit (Page on Reddit) related to your business and leave comments
• Search 5-10 keywords related to you on Google and leave comments on those related pages.
• Give away free content (this is very effective)
• Go write guest posts for any site that are related to your business. Use Technorati or ask your existing customers which sites they like to go to
• Email the existing users you have asking for them to refer other people. This sounds obvious but hardly ANYONE does it. It helps if your product doesn’t suck.
• Leave video responses on popular-related YouTube Videos
• Manually reach out and connect with your first 1000 leads. More likely they are MORE important than the 99,000 next people you’ll get
• Raise your prices so you don’t need to find so many people
• Manually reach out to the Twitter / Facebook followers of your competitors
• Look at new channels that have less competition (rules) like snapchat, pinterest, instagram to drive traffic
• Evaluate doing mobile related marketing since it’s more affordable (less competition)
• Get your site featured on DailyWorth.com, Thrillist, DailyCandy, Groupon or some site that promotes others.

Now we can get into more specific detail.

Start by developing a content marketing plan.

These are some great pointers from Emmetadigita on content marketing:

Content Marketing will involve buyer personas, understanding your sales cycle, and how to reach potential buyers through the sales cycle. Ways to achieve that include:

• blog posts
• articles
• press releases
• videos
• eBooks and more

These are hands down the most cost-effective marketing strategies to start spreading the word about your business. For some great stuff on content marketing, check out the book:

Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (New Rules Social Media Series)

Each industry has its own marketing opportunities.

Depending on whether you are B2B or B2C (and within those, which specific segment), you will have to find what is the best content for your target market. OK, let’s say you start creating great content. That’s good stuff, but how do you increase your reach? How do you get more people to see what you are doing?

Here are some marketing strategies to get you started:

Blogs: Find out who are the top blogs in your industry and the blogs your customers follow (your buyer personas will tell you that), and comment on them, guest post, and ask them to do guest posts on your blog.

Press: Find out who are the reporters, editor, and journalists that report on your industry. Whether print magazines or online publications, it doesn’t matter. Find out what they write about, and start a conversation. There’s a whole more to establishing relationship with the press (not enough room here), but this is a great and an often overlooked way to get some free press. Journalists need sources and stories and you can help them.

Groups: Participate in discussion forums (as said before in this thread), whether on LinkedIn or other websites.

LinkedIn: Create your own LinkedIn group and invite people. Is there a specific topic in your industry that may not have a LinkedIn group already created? You’ll be surprised.

Trade Shows: If your particular business can take advantage of trade shows, try to present at one of them. Don’t buy an expensive booth, just submit a presentation abstract for an educational session. It’s tough to get in depending on the trade show, but if you can put together a quality session that is vendor-independent, you have a chance.

Customers: Leverage your existing customer base as one of your marketing strategies. I’m assuming you have at least a handful of very happy customers (even if they’re ‘beta’ customers). Write a success story about them, do a 3 minutes video of them talking about their challenges and why they used your product/service. Send out a press release, and get the word out.

Trade Associations: First, identify the trade associations in your particular industry. Once you’ve done that, there are a few things you can do: – Participate in their monthly meetings – Provide them with educational content (for their newsletter, website, etc.) – Host a joint webinar

Partnerships: Try and partner up with other companies and individuals to do joint-marketing promotions and campaigns. This is a great way to save money and leverage resources. Sure, you’ll have to share the leads, but you have the potential to reach a wider audience this way (just make sure the partnership makes sense).

Volunteer: Participate in community activities in your area.

Create tools of self-expression which are really easy to use: No matter what your platform does, users should be able to create something there which they would want to spread. A user may not want to spread the word about your platform but would definitely want to spread the word about what she created on it. E.g. Youtube grows every time a video goes viral because users personally invest in marketing it. Kickstarter and Change.org allow users to spread their cause to the whole world. Users are vested in marketing it. Forget gamification, forget viral design… there is no bigger incentive for users than the ability to spread their creations, beliefs, and causes in a manner that wasn’t possible before.

Target a micro-market: Facebook’s early users were at Harvard, Yelp’s early  users were the tech-savvy crowd of San Francisco, Quora and LinkedIn’s early users were the VCs and startups of Silicon Valley. Find a micro-market which contains your early adopters

So there we have it for today folks, some great ideas and marketing strategies to increase your visitor base all for free – and tomorrow I have some even more effective ways to get more visitors to your website. Some of them you will be very surprised by! Stop by again tomorrow and let’s carry on with this topic on free marketing strategies.