Advertising your blog / site with no budget

[Jon]

It is such a tricky thing and obviously I can only talk about my experience with trying to shill The Money Shed wherever I can.

It's important to note that this site is a hobby, not a business. It brings in no income yet without me constantly trying to bring in new members the site is next to useless as the content on here 99% of the time comes from its members.

Because this is a hobby I always want advertising that is free / next to free or if I have to spend a bit of money is bang on in terms of exposing the site to the demographic I want.

Obviously promoting via social media is free but after that where do you go? Building relationships with other people who run similar sites/blogs is important but it's also important not to step on their toes as you will need them A LOT when you start building a brand.

Is offline promoting worth it? Posters/flyers etc. Or is that asking too much for people see a website on a poster and remember it by the time they get home?

 

[toffee2014]

Offline promoting is good for me as I tend to run in to moms looking to lose a few pounds and they are always looking for advice. I need to get some business cards though. I've designed my own but need to send it to a printing company.

All depends what you blog about too. If your blogging about 'blogging' then get yourself on twitter and look out for blogging events to attend. Go where your audience are more likely to be.

 

[Jon]

The Blog is The Money Shed blog (blog.themoneyshed.co.uk

can't see how I can advertise that off-net but am all ears if you have any ideas.

 

[FerrisBueller]

Back when I used to have forums, sometimes if I'd been reading a good blog post somewhere on a site with a semi-related subject to my forum, I'd leave a comment. And as quite a lot of sites have a field for you to leave a link to your own site, I'd stick the URL in there. Obviously the amount of people that see it depends on how popular the blog is, but even if not many people see it, having backlinks improves your search engine rankings.

I'd say only do this if there's a specific box to put your link in. You could put it in your comment but it's harder to do that without it looking spammy.

 

[SE_Josh]

It depends what the niche is but offline promoting can work if you come up with some good and fun ideas, here's one I used in the past:

I run a Reality TV blog and we went to an event with a large crowd - The X Factor auditions.

While there we took photos of auditionees and the people queuing who asked and told them they'd be on our blog. We handed out mini business cards (which we got printed for free with an online offer) and our photo gallery for that event was one of the best posts of the month.

There was also the social media effect online, as we had people tweeting/Facebooking their pictures and spreading the link around.

Now naturally I cannot measure how many of those people ever visited the website again after seeing themselves, but it at least got the site some exposure and to a very specific target audience.

Another strong tip I would suggest is to simply link out to other websites. I actually found this forum and am posting now because someone had linked to one of my blogs and it showed up in my referrals!