Our guest blogger this week is Luke Brynley-Jones. Luke runs Our Social Times, the UK social media marketing consultancy. In the past 10 years he has founded and assisted numerous startups and he recently helped Doug Richard set up School for Startups.

Having worked on many new businesses, I know just how difficult it is to attract customers with a tiny or non-existent marketing budget. Even if you have a budget there are so many opportunities to blow it without getting results (newspaper adverts, event sponsorship and fancy brochures spring to mind), if you’re a marketing novice your chances of success are slim to nil.

The good news, however, is that something has changed. The rise of social networking means that the Internet now offers so many free and low-cost marketing options, if your customers are online (and few people aren’t) you genuinely don’t need a marketing budget any more. Just to prove the point, here are my top ten zero-budget online marketing tips:

1. Start Blogging

Any business that doesn’t blog is wasting the biggest free marketing opportunity available today. Search engines love fresh, topical information, which is why blog posts are twice as likely to appear on the first page of Google than static web-pages. Use Feedburner to enable readers to subscribe to your blog via email and RSS and promote your latest posts on Twitter and LinkedIn (see below).

2. Give Tweets a Chance

Twitter’s fluffy name and reputation belie an increasingly influential role in marketing. Using Tweepsearch you can find and ‘follow’ people in your industry, or your town. You can then build up the list of people following you by posting regular, useful snippets of news and comment. I recently sold 200 tickets to a conference using Twitter (Tweetdeck to be precise) to direct people to my blog. There’s no fluff on that!

 3. Build Your LinkedIn Network

LinkedIn is the world’s leading business networking site. By building up your connections and sharing your latest news and blog posts regularly, you can generate leads and referrals. Add your blog RSS feed to your Twitter Profile and connect your LinkedIn status with your Twitter account – to channel your news seamlessly to your contacts.

 4. Create a LinkedIn Group

Any LinkedIn member can create and host a LinkedIn Group. In addition to providing a useful forum for discussion and sharing news, Group Managers (uniquely) can email all of the group members. Create a niche group on LinkedIn, trying not to duplicate an existing group, and invite a few well-connected people to join. A friend of mine did this and now manages a group of 70,000 environmentalists – an incredibly powerful resource for his business.

 5. Start a Facebook Group

If your business is consumer facing (as opposed to B2B), you need to be on Facebook. Facebook Groups perform much the same role as LinkedIn Groups, including giving Administrators the right to email group members (Fan Pages don’t offer this feature). By posting regular news, photos or videos to your Group, you can build a receptive audience for offers and promotions.

 6. Understand SEO

Anyone wanting to succeed in business today should have a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s not rocket science and it could have a profound effect on the number of online leads you generate. Get a cheap copy of SEO for Dummies or barter a free hour with an SEO Consultant. It will be the best money you never spend!

 7. Partner with Existing Groups

Over the last 10 years networking groups have proliferated both online and offline. There are millions of groups on Meetup.com, LinkedIn, Ning, and Facebook, so there are bound to be a couple that match your customer profile. The people who manage these groups are usually extremely keen to build up the membership, so if you can offer them an opportunity (e.g. a free ad on your site) in return for an intro email to the group, chances are they’ll do it.

 8. Join Online Conversations

There are millions of conversations happening online – on blogs, Twitter and social networks – and many of these are open, i.e. anyone can join in. Using free tools like Google Alerts, SocialMention, TweetDeck and Google Reader, you can monitor what people in your industry are saying and, when you have something interesting to contribute, join in. Each comment you make will link back to your site (big tick for SEO) and help spread the word about how brilliant you and your business are.

 9. Twitter for PR

The other great thing about Twitter is that journalists love it. Even if you’re in an industry where Twitter isn’t popular (but then again, even bankers Tweet) you can bet your boots that the journalists covering the industry will be. Seek them out and Tweet your news to them. Journalists might be lazy, but even they will read a Press Release that’s only 140 characters long!

 10. Host an Event

It’s a fact of business that an invitation works better than a sales enquiry, so why not invite your top 100 potential customers to a free networking event? These days you can set up, manage and promote an event for free using an online service like EventBrite or Amiando. Lots of bars and clubs will give you a complimentary function room if you can guarantee a minimum spend on drinks, so all you need to do is fill the room.

Do let us know if you have any more free marketing tips. Use the comment box below: