How to Market a Business with No Money

Learning how to market a business with no money or little money is easier than you think. Of course having money and creating proper ads makes more sense as this will save you a lot of time, but if you are just starting a company then using this one technique can make you enough money to get by and create a float for other marketing methods.

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The best method there is to get business tomorrow and for very little or even no money is picking up the phone and cold calling potential clients. Use your brain a little bit on this one and try to figure out who needs your services and would use you over and over again. If you own a cleaning company then postcards are probably the best way to go, but if you have no money then you will need to call on potential clients. Are you going to call 100 homeowners to get 1 or 2 new clients? Sounds tough to me. Instead why not call on 100 kitchen companies or 100 renovation companies? This way if you get 1 or 2 you might find yourself working everyday all of a sudden. Let’s say you have 2 renovation companies that each renovate 50 houses per year. You may have to do these houses for a very low price, but this could be well worth it. In one year you will have cleaned 100 houses. Now how many of those 100 houses have you kept as ongoing clients? Maybe you kept 1% as a weekly client, and another 2% as monthly clients, and maybe 5% as an annual client. Over the course of the year you now cleaned 100 houses through the contractors, 1 house 50 times, 2 houses 26 times, and 5 houses once. That is a total of 207 jobs. Of course the math does not work out like this, as that one client you get on a weekly basis might not have met you until the end of the year, but this should be a good indication of your second year. Now after five years you are up to 100 houses per year from the contractors, 5 weekly cleans, 10 biweekly cleans, and 25 annual cleans, for a total of 645 cleans that year. At 4 hours per clean that is 2580 hours or over 50 hours per week. Not bad for only spending an afternoon calling and spending no money. Couple this with some advertising once you are making money and you will be growing faster than you can imagine.

Ok, at this point you might be saying that you do not own or want to start a cleaning business. That is fine, this was just an example. There are many other businesses that can use a similar method. Open your mind and think of how you can use this with your own business.

Other ways you can do this, but not quite as fast or effective is to go to networking clubs. These will cost you some money, but very little as compared with traditional advertising. Once you are in a networking club make sure you promote yourself. Have business cards with you and get to know everyone that you can. The reason these take a little while to get going is often nobody will give you many referrals until they have trusted you. Once they trust and like you they will talk about you with all of their clients.

Good Luck,