Marketing your business doesn’t have to cost a fortune. In fact, there are many low-cost marketing tactics you can use that will bring in customers. Here are some of the time-tested methods.

Postcards in Local Businesses

If you own a car wash, put a 50 percent off flyer in all the small businesses in the area.  Hairdressers, restaurants, laundromats, etc. would all love to save their customers some money. If you have a good value proposition for their customers, most businesses won’t turn away a good deal. In fact, if you just walk in and ask if you can leave a few free coupons as a gift for their customers, they will gladly allow you to do so.

Pizza Box Advertising

Another very inexpensive way is to market on pizza boxes. You can offer to pay for part of the boxes, maybe 50 percent of the pizzeria’s boxes, in exchange for a message on top of the box. Just make sure you approach local pizzerias and not national chains, as their boxes are all regulated. This kind of marketing will get you very targeted and local exposure.

Place Flyers on Cars in the Area

Flyer all the cars in your area with a special offer. By doing so, you will get exposure to people who you know are in your area. Better yet, you will get access to people working in the area. If you marketed to people near your business, you may not necessarily reach the people who spend their days there. By flyering their cars, however, you will get that exposure.

Door Hangers in a One Mile Radius

Printing door hangers is relatively inexpensive. All you need to do is drive around and hang them from doors. You can also hire someone you trust to do it for you. Make sure to just flyer a half mile to one-mile radius. Yes, you could flyer further, but at that point your return on time spent starts to go down drastically.

Try Remnant Advertising

Finally, if you could get traditional ads at 25 percent off the price, would you give it a try? If so, try talking to local newspapers about remnant advertising.

Remnant ad space is the ad space that a newspaper has left over after they have failed to sell all their ad space. As they get close to press time, they are going to want to fill that space with anything they can, even at a vast discount.

Contact the advertising space representatives for your local newspapers and let them know you are interested in remnant space. Call up every couple weeks and remind them you are interested. In that way, anytime they have leftover ad space, they will contact you.

There are many low-cost ways you can market your business. Lack of advertising dollars shouldn’t stop you from getting your business out to market.

One controversial topic among Search Engine Optimization (SEO) enthusiasts is the static link versus dynamic link discussion. Each has their benefits and drawbacks. Some websites, such as Amazon.com, work very well with dynamic links. Other sites wouldn’t do well at all with a dynamic link structure and would fare much better with a static link structure. What’s the difference and who should use a static link structure and who should use a dynamic one?

Static and Dynamic Links: A Definition

A static link is basically a hardcoded link. For example,

http://www.site.com/page3.html is a static link.

A dynamic link on the other hand is a web page and a link generated by computer code. The page URL usually contains a string of code in and of itself. For example, a dynamic link might look like:

http://www.site.com/?pid=310837498/lem_dit=809342098?gm=398ab

The code is used by various parts of the software to identify specific products, users and pages. It is not designed to be readable, but is instead designed to be useful for software.

How Do Dynamic Links Affect SEO?

In the past, search engines couldn’t index dynamic links at all. Today, search engines are more than capable of identifying dynamic links and indexing them, though it does take the engines longer to index dynamic links than static links. According to Google’s SEO team, their system can read dynamic links by filtering out symbols such as = or ? Their team has also stated that webmasters should not try to make dynamic links look like static links. Instead, Google has a sophisticated enough system to be able to read and index dynamic links. Trying to disguise dynamic links as static pages will do more harm than good. It’s generally accepted that dynamic links are rated lower than static pages. How much lower is a hot topic of debate. The general consensus is that it’s rated lower and slower, but not by a wide margin.

Who Should Use Dynamic Links?

If you’re running a simple website without a large database of products, users or pages, then you should probably just use a static link structure. You will get ranked faster and better and it is also easier to manage. On the other hand, if you’re running a complex software structure that generates its own links and uses in-URL tracking, then you should probably use dynamic link structures. Don’t sacrifice usability and ease of use for link structure/SEO.

In short, the main benefit of using static link structures is that they are ranked higher in the search engines. On the other hand, dynamic link structures give programmers a lot of flexibility in how they design their links and user experience. If you have a website that can be built only with dynamic links, don’t let the SEO factor interfere with it. Don’t worry as Google can still read and index your links.

People from all age groups and walks of life are posting and interacting on Facebook. It is a great place to help build your business brand, increase awareness and drive traffic, yet many business owners just don’t know how to use Facebook effectively.

Just like in face-to-face interactions, you get only one chance to make a good first impression on Facebook. Here are some tips to help you.

Your Public Profile

One of the rules of Facebook is that you shouldn’t use your personal profile to market a business, as that is what Facebook Fan Pages are for; however, many people still use their public profile to market their business. The problem with this tactic is not that you are breaking Facebook rules, but rather that many people combine their personal and their business interactions.

They post personal information on the same wall that they publish business information. This doesn’t give your followers a consistent voice or brand and is confusing. And you probably don’t want a potential customer’s first impression to be something personal that you posted.

Too Much Information

Separating purposes for your Facebook profile is the first way to make a good impression. Create a separate business profile and a separate personal profile for interacting with friends and family.

On your business profile, make sure to keep it strictly business. Anything and everything you post online is there to stay. Post something personal or share too much information and you could offend people, turn people off, and lose potential customers. Make sure you are not sharing too much personal information with your business followers.

Instead, focus on providing the type of information your readers and prospects will find valuable. The more value you provide them, the better impression they will have of you. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t share personal information; however, it needs to be related to your business.

For example, “I just tried out a new cookie recipe. Received rave reviews from the PTA. Pictures and details are on my blog.” This is a great personal post for someone who owns a cooking website or blog. It is personal, but it also provides information and drives traffic to their website.

Stay Positive

Unfortunately, many people use Facebook as their personal complaint board. They complain about clients, about other marketers, and about situations. This isn’t a great way to make a first impression, nor is it a good way to keep followers interested. If you must vent, don’t vent online. Stay positive and you will always make a good first impression.

Facebook is an exceptional business building tool. Create a plan for using Facebook that includes a personal voice, brand, and content strategy. Before posting anything, ask yourself how it benefits your audience.

Two of the most important factors for any growing online business are Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media marketing. But is one more important than the other and should you put more time and energy into one and not the other? Which can make a bigger difference on your bottom line? Let’s explore some of these questions.

SEO Is More Important for Raw Traffic

SEO will get you more traffic up front than social media will. Though social media is gaining more and more traction every day, it still doesn’t come close to what a number one ranking can do for your website in terms of raw traffic. On the other hand, top search rankings are hard to achieve; they can often take months, even years. They take a lot of time investment and often a lot of monetary investment as well. SEO is a longer-term strategy than social media. You might get more traffic overall than social media, but it takes more effort and has a randomness factor as well. You don’t know if it will work.

Social Media is More Important for Reputation

On the other hand, social media is free. It is easy to manage and doesn’t take months before you see results; however, you won’t see the same kind of traffic that you would get from a number one ranking search listing. Social media has a lot of side benefits that go beyond the raw traffic statistics. Prominent social media figures build a strong reputation in a space, which often increases their conversion rates because of their reputation. Likewise, they are more likely to get invited to speaking engagements, where many profitable business deals can be made. The key to good social media marketing is to consistently provide something your users want. If that’s a weekly how-to video, then make sure you provide that video every week, without fail.

The Real Answer: The Two Are Merging

Most SEO experts agree that search engines are taking many social media factors into account when ranking pages. In other words, instead of just looking at backlinks and PageRank, the search engines now look at your Facebook likes and reposts as well in order to help determine rankings. When it comes down to it, the secret to successful SEO and social media are really the same. Consistently provide good content, which is what people tend to pass on and what the search engines are looking for. One may be more or less effective for specific businesses, but if you focus ninety percent of your efforts on creating a great user experience and ten percent on marketing techniques, you will have a great chance of succeeding with both.

One is more important than the other in the sense that one may work better than the other for your business in the short term, but may not be in the sense that in the long run, they are more or less the same.

How fast your webpages load has a big impact on both your viewer’s experience and your search engine rankings. People tend to view fast loading websites as more professional, and search engines give faster loading websites more “points” than slow loading sites. Here are a few tips to optimize your site to load faster:

Use Gzip Compression

Gzip compression allows you to compress HTTP data on your server and send it to the user’s browser, which will then decompress the data and display it on their side. This can make quite a big difference. If you take a 17k HTML file and Gzip it, you’ll get a 6.8k file back. Sending the compressed file will take less than half the time of the uncompressed file. Not every browser supports Gzip compression. Some browsers, such as Internet Explorer 4, can’t handle compressed JavaScript code. That said, if you enable HTTP compression just for browsers with Gzip capability, you will drastically speed up your load time for a lot of your visitors.

Use Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to store all the stylistic elements of your website in one file. That file needs to be downloaded only once, no matter how many pages on your site any given viewer sees. For example, let’s say someone comes to your blog ten times a month and looks at an average of two pages each time; therefore, they are loading a page from your site twenty times a month. If your fonts and page styling were stored in the page, they would have to load that every time. If you put it all in a .css file, however, they would only need to load that once. This will optimize your page load times, as well as save you bandwidth.

Use Page Caching

Caching allows you to turn PHP (or other web app code) into HTML files for faster loading. Let’s say you run a WordPress website. Typically, when someone comes to your site, this is what happens. First, they send a REQUEST for a file to your server. Your server then goes to its PHP engine to execute your index.php file, which will put together your index file based on all the different code in your WordPress set-up. Once the page is put together, it’ll serve up the HTML to your end user. The browser turns the HTML into the webpage that the end user sees. This whole process is quite processor intensive and is slow from a technical perspective.

What caching does instead is convert all your files into HTML so that it can be served up to users in HTML form without having to go through the page construction process every single time. A smart caching engine will be able to serve up HTML files only when that’s what they would see anyway. If what the user would see with the PHP version is different, the caching engine will go through the PHP engine instead of serving up an HTML file.

These are three extremely effective ways of speeding up your webpage load times. Enable Gzip compression, use external CSS files, and install some kind of page caching. These three combined can drastically decrease your average load time.