Five Cool Ways to Promote Your Side Hustle for $10 or Less
Starting a side hustle is the easy part as long as you have a profitable idea and the drive to do the work. The hard part is when you’re trying to promote the business to attract new customers. Without new customers, your little money maker will stay exactly that… little.
Since most side hustles are bootstrapped and don’t have much of a budget to run on, it’s always worth your while to check out some of the inexpensive methods for promotion. It’s this need to promote on a budget that brings us to our topic.
The following are different ways you can go about promoting your side hustle for about $10 or less:
Facebook Promoted Posts – If you’re operating a fan page for your side hustle then you might have noticed Facebook asking you if you’d like to promote the post. For about $5 – $10 you can turn a regular post into one that’s promoted (it’s actually very easy). You can set it so that it only targets your followers, friends of followers, or those interested in your type of business. For this small investment you can have your post seen by thousands of individuals; even a single lead or two can end up being a nice money maker for the investment.
Custom Swag – Swag (no not that type of swag) is the little gizmos, trinkets, and other neat items businesses give away during conventions (like keychains, mousepads, and such). These little items are great for getting your name out there because if they’re useful then not many people throw them away. One way to go about doing this on a budget is to buy custom flash drives in bulk, making sure to include your name, logo, and contact details. You can begin handing these out to all types of people (especially great if you do it around a business event). When you buy in bulk these drives cost pennies on the dollar.
Online Contests – For $10 you can use developer marketplaces (like CodeCanyon or others) to purchase a plugin/script for your website or invest in a service that allows you to run online contests with ease. Once you determine what you’ll offer (tip: set the prize as your service) you can get the ball rolling by promoting it on social channels, on your site, through word-of-mouth, blogging, and all other types of promotional methods. Even if there are just a few dozen entries it still gives you access to their emails (based on the plugin, script, or service) which you can use to cold call/email later on to pitch the biz.
Pay Someone – There are tons of different freelance marketplaces and platforms that people are using to provide services to those in need of promotion. Three examples include Fiverr, oDesk, and Freelancer.com. Each of these websites you can find people versed in promotion, advertising, and marketing. Browse through and you’ll be sure to find someone offering their services for $10 or less that can do things such as include you in a sponsored tweet, write a guest blog post for you, or help you list the business across different business submission sites. The opportunity to grow your business through this method is only stopped by a lack of creativity.
Hold a Workshop – Use that $10 to create and print out a few basic flyers from your local library and start distributing these all around the neighborhood, college campuses, and places where your type of customers may frequent. The aim is to create a small workshop where you can teach others about what you know and by doing so you may land a client or two because you are able to show your expertise in person. Even if it doesn’t lead to a client it’s likely that these individuals attending will go off and tell others about their experience which can lead to word-of-mouth referrals for the business.
You see? Five (certainly) cool ways to promote a business without breaking the bank. There are hundreds of other great methods out there, too. Which of these do you think would work for your business?
