Download - Digital Marketing On A Shoestring For Startups

DIGITAL MARKETING ON A SHOESTRING FOR STARTUPS

A slide deck with 10 low-budget ideas to

get your digital startup going

SHOBHA PONNAPPA

COPYRIGHT © SHOBHAPONNAPPA.COM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

SMART DIGITAL MARKETING FOR ENTREPRENEURS

http://shobhaponnappa.com/


SHOBHA PONNAPPA

“Do-it-yourself” and “Jack-of-all-trades” should be your twin mantras! Fortunately, for startups, the digital world is kind to those on a shoestring budget. You can get your business and brand going with just a domain name and space on a server to house your site.

Then get Wordpress installed, find a free template for your site look and feel, and lo and behold, you have a website or a blog. Sign up on some social media channels … and the rest is all up to your resourcefulness and ingenuity.

Most of all, folks, you have to get one equation into your mind:LOW BUDGET = MORE HARD WORK!

If you want to save costs, you have to learn a lot of skills to become a “jack-of-all-trades” and get into “do-it-yourself” mode! Ready? Let’s go …




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

Save costs on customer research by researching your own buying habits!

Just trace back fully on the last two online purchases you made and look at the sequence of steps you followed. Note these down meticulously and if your customers are a near replica of you, this is your “customer journey”!

1SMART DIGITAL MARKETING FOR ENTREPRENEURS



SHOBHA PONNAPPA

Teach yourself how to write naturally. Writing is going to be your #1 DIY skill!

Content Marketing is nine-tenths of the Digital Marketing game, and dependency on external blog writers will empty your coffers real fast. Writing isn’t tough. Just write as you speak – naturally – and soon you’ll be an ace.




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

Teach yourself elementary photo-editing … just enough to resize images!

You don’t have to be a Photoshop artist, you just need to be able to resize most free images you can source. Images are a large part of Content Marketing so gradually learning to handle them with aplomb helps a lot.




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

Get a free mobile-responsive Wordpress theme for your site to fit your needs.

Take some time to find a good-looking theme that more or less fits your needs without requiring too much tweaking by technical hands. Make doubly sure it’s a mobile-responsive. Then get going with content-creation. Stop theme-fiddling.




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

You don’t need much coding knowledge if you learn to use all those free plugins!

With Wordpress as your content system, you have just endless choice of free plugins for all the features to add to your site. Look for the free plugins that will get the job done and for extra help, ask for free on technical forums.




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

Time management will be your most needed skill after content writing!

Startups invariably just have one or two people on board doing both marketing tasks and admin tasks. Managing your time and maintaining personal discipline is key to your success and expense-cutting. Learn it all. Do it all!




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

Read a lot, try out a lot of tools, but stop short of buying anything. Be a scrooge!

It’s important to be always on a learning curve. Read a lot of how-to articles, adopt and adapt free strategy templates, and try out tools using free trial periods. Learn by actual experience with all these tools and techniques.




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

It costs nothing to expand your friends’ network for word-of-mouth advertising!

Put up a great profile on the social media channels and add to your network of friends and connections every day as a must-do task. Also track how often you write, share or engage with these people (your ambassadors!)




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

Maintain relationships with the big guns of the digital world. Email or tweet them!

You can ask them a small query, congratulate them on their latest book, comment on their tweets, or comment on their posts. Stay in touch with the people who matter. Big contacts don’t cost anything but sincerity from you!




SHOBHA PONNAPPA

Use freelancers judiciously, and only if you must, for the mundane admin work!

If your content-creation time is getting absorbed by admin tasks, then you should get freelancers for the admin work. Nothing should stop your personal content-creation discipline. Hire help … but for the right reasons!



SHOBHA PONNAPPA



SHOBHA PONNAPPAhttp: shobhaponnappa.com

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