15 Tips to Grow Your Business Online (without A Lot of Money)

Looking to grow your business online without a lot of money? If you are just starting a business, then you cannot afford to waste money. In this article, we will share practical tips on how to grow your business on a small budget. Our goal is to help you compete with the big guys without spending a fortune.

1. Choose The Right Platform for Your Website
   The biggest mistake you can make as a small business is choosing the wrong platform to build your website. A wrong platform will not only cost you more money, but it will also limit your business’ growth potential. So choose right platform.

2. Choose a Functional Website with Simple Design
   Many beginners believe that their customers will not take their business seriously if they don’t have their website professionally designed.
   Getting a professional to custom design your website is expensive, and it’s not needed when you’re just starting out.

3. Make it Easier for Users to Contact You
   If you want your website to bring you more customers, then you need to add an easy way for visitors to contact you.
   The easiest way to do that is by using a contact form on your website.

4. Start Building an Email List from Day 1
   Most people who leave your website will never come back again. This means that if you don’t get their email address, then you will have no way to communicate with them in the future.
   The most cost-effective way to do this is by building an email list.
   Email marketing is the most reliable way to communicate with your website visitors.

5. Get More Organic Traffic From Search Engines
   SEO or search engine optimization is a set of guidelines and techniques that make your website more search engine friendly. It is not too technical and you will be able to do it on your own.

6. Plan a Content Marketing Strategy
   Content marketing is a strategy to create useful and relevant content to attract and build an audience. This allows you to get more targetted traffic from search engines without spending a fortune.

7. Make Data-Based Decisions with Google Analytics
   Many beginners use their best guesses to plan their growth strategy. You don’t need to do that when you can use actual data to make those decisions.
   This is where Google Analytics comes in. It allows you to see how many visitors are coming to your site, where they are coming from, and what they do while there.

8. Leverage Social Media to Drive Traffic
   Social media platforms have highly engaged audiences. Facebook alone has 1.47 Billion daily active users, that’s around 18% of all people in the world. Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms also have highly engaged users.
   With so many users, social media platforms bring great opportunities for business. You can start by creating your business’s social media profiles and automatically sharing your blog posts.

9. Be an Active Participant in Online Communities
   Online communities include forums and question-answer websites. These are the places people go to post their questions, socialize, find content, and explore. Top communities on the internet include Reddit, Stack Exchange, Quora, TripAdvisor, and more.
   These communities provide you with access to people interested in topics associated with your industry. You can join them for free and invest your time in building authority.

10. Convert Abandoning Website Visitors into Customers
    Each visitor who leaves your website is a potential customer that you are losing. To grow your business, you need to focus on converting those visitors into paying customers.

11. Start an Affiliate Partner Program
    If you sell products online, then you can use affiliate marketing to partner up with skilled affiliate marketers. You will pay a sales commission to these marketers for promoting your products and bringing you sales.

12. Utilize Pay-Per-Click Advertising
    Contrary to popular belief, you can run Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns on a small budget. With programs like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, you can set your own pricing, target keywords, audience, and more.

13. Use Social Proof to Win Customers
    Marketers use this phenomenon by showing their customers that other people already trust a product or business. This is done by sharing their statistics, or subscriber counts, customer testimonials, and more.

14. Effectively Use FOMO to Boost Sales and Conversions
    FOMO or ‘fear of missing out’ is a psychological term used to describe anxiety about missing out on something exciting and trendy.
    As a business, you can take advantage of this human behavior and use it to boost sales and conversions. Basically, you need to build anxiety by adding scarcity to your offers. Here is a great example from Booking.com using scarcity to build anxiety.

15. Improve Your Website’s Speed and Performance
    This means that you need to optimize your website to make sure that it is fast and performs well even under high traffic.
    We hope this article helped you learn how to grow your business on a shoestring budget.