Web Promotion Questions and Answers

Question:

Do I need a big budget for promoting a site or can hard work make up for a small budget?  Could I market a site on just $100, and if so, how?

Answer:

Hard work is a cash substitute every time.

Or you can reverse that for an equal truth, hard cash can buy you someone else's hard work.

$100 is not going to go very far. The best use of such a tiny budget would be to buy your partner/spouse a gift with the $100 and be prepared to spend a few thousand dollars worth of your time and effort in marketing.

Even if you don't already have a domain and host you can do virtually everything for free somewhere or other until you can make enough money to upgrade. But it will be slow, because you will have to put in all the hours of work that a budget could have bought you in far less time.

There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all marketing solution. Every site has (or should have) its own unique character, market, and situation, that will present unique needs and challenges.  Even breaking it down to the basic business model shows wildly divergent needs.

An information site, for example, has to have plenty of good quality content. It doesn't always need shopping carts or merchant accounts because the main 'product' is the information itself and the profit needs to come from advertising and affiliate links in the main.

In this case site design is a critical matter because you need those spiders to thoroughly crawl the entire site. Size matters, and internal navigation will determine whether that size is a help or a hinderance to your SE positions.

For eCommerce sites selling physical products, the business plan is critical. Your site can (and probably will be) far smaller that an information site, it needs to handle orders very smoothly, and customer satisfaction is itself part of your viral marketing.

The reason that the business plan is so vital is that you need to be able to make guarantees, and you need to keep to them. Your delivery methods and times are as much a part of your service as your site will ever be.

No two businesses are alike, and so no two marketing campaigns should be the same either. Selling one product or building a brand are very different things and need very different approaches.

The initial investment is not really a factor in the success of marketing a site. All marketing takes hard work applied with a little flair and a lot of thought. The only difference your starting capital makes is that having money lets you opt to pay someone else to do that hard work and thinking for you, and thus to deliver in a far shorter time-frame. If you can afford to wait for that success until you can provide all that work yourself, then it can be done.

Of course, spending the money is almost always a better option, because you should have better things to do with your time. You should focus your time on where it is most profitable to your business, and hire experts to do what would take you longer.