How I Advertised My Small Business Without Spending A Dime

Getting publicity for small businesses is a major problem in many developing nations. Free publicity, may be of help when trying to reduce the cost of managing a business. As someone who lives in this part of the world, I know how difficult it really is to get people to patronise a small business. The very first business I did, I did not pay for any form of advertisements. People just came over because of some things I did, which I'll be sharing in this article.

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Discussions with friends

Immediately I started the business, I told most of my close friends about it. They were really surprised, they wondered how I'll get customers. But due to the epileptic power supply here, they were eventually the first buyers of the power banks I sold. My friends kept spreading the good news (that is, how great the power banks and phones were). More than 50% of the products I sold were from referrals - Referrals from friends and friends of friends. The circle just kept on growing.

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Participation in online forums

The most popular forum in Nigeria is Nairaland, I previously had an account on the site before I started the business. But I needed an account which would be strictly for business, so I created a new one. I was able to find customers that were just 30 mins away from my location and needed the products I had for sell on the website. Interacting on the forum really paid off. I didn't only come online to make sales, I also commented on threads made by other users, and contributed to several topics. This got them visiting my pages.

^{Image Credit: Oxglow Trader Blog}

Making Use of Free Classified Websites

Jiji.ng came really handy in this area. Without paying a penny, I was able to set up a free Ad. All that was needed was my location, pictures of my producs and my contact. I got several calls from the website daily, more than 75% of the persons that called were really interested in getting the products. This helped increase my visibility online. There are also classified advertisement websites for hotels, but I didn't really have a business with that.

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Social Media

I'm a big fan of social networking. Ehh you will only find me in a few though. Twitter is home mehn... But the thing is you can't just keep posting about your business there without contributing. I have been building my social media presence for some years. So I tried something new to me, like an experiment, I tried posting about my business several times a day, then I discovered I lost a significant number of followers. So I needed to restructure the way I talk about my business, I decided to post business Ads a maximum of once a day. The restructuring actually helped. This way it wasn't like spamming anymore, since the tweets before and after the promo tweets were some funny tweets. Twitter is a place with many persons with high sense of humour. So I appealed to their sense or humour. Twitter is the only social media I tried, Facebook and LinkedIn looks promising too. Steemit.com is still growing, might be good for local businesses in a short time.

I also attended some seminars, but I didn't really get customers from there. You can try that, maybe it it will work for you. It feels really cool to make sales without spending a dime on Ads.

You can read this too, Choosing the Right Hashtag for a Social Media Campaign

Thanks for coming around :)

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