How to get customers without spending any money

This can mean social media platforms or any community based websites. People post about their issues on many different places such as Facebook groups, Quora and niche forums. Use these to your full advantage and find people or existing traffic that you could possibly target, provide the relevant product/service to and solve their existing issue.

Leverage Communities and existing traffic

This can mean social media platforms or any community-based websites. People post about their issues on many different places such as Facebook groups, Quora and niche forums. Use these to your full advantage and find people or existing traffic that you could possibly target, provide the relevant product/service to and solve their existing issue.

Incentivise your users to share (Word of mouth)

Word of mouth is powerful, information can travel from one person to another very fast. If you have a promotion or a discount in place, make sure that people know about it. Get your friends and family to tell their friends or work colleagues about your product/service. Slowly but surely, many people will start to hear about you and your company and possibly convert into paying customers.

Affiliate programs

The use of affiliate programs is great, it’s a way to help you build your customer base. Your ad can be posted onto different sites or even any influencer’s social media platforms, where a customer then clicks and converts and your affiliate gets commission and you get a sale.

Blogger and Youtuber outreach

Reach out to bloggers/YouTubers and offer a free product in exchange for a review. You will be able to get more honest reviews from people you don’t know but it can also be treated as some sort of testimonial. Most of us want to prove to everybody straight away that our product/service is as good as we say, so getting reviews from bloggers and YouTubers can help give you a good word.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to help your brand grow in a relatively short period of time. It complements your content marketing and blogging efforts. Whittle down and shortlist a few of your best blogs and get them published onto guest blogging sites that revolve around the same niche as yours. This is so their readers will be your target audience.

Reach out to your existing network

It’s a good start reaching out to your current network of friends, family and colleagues as it’s always worth seeing if they need to use your product/service first or if anybody they know could benefit from your business.

Get your family and friends to share

Your friends and family will, in most cases, be the first people to promote your brand. They’ll do all that they can to help get your name out there, so use this to your advantage. Start with them in mind and reach out to see if they are in need of your product/service as well.

Sell in person

You don’t have to be salesy or have a long pitch ready every time you sell in person. Just going to networking events, local meetup groups or industry events can help sell your business. Your presence alone is one thing but actually building relationships with people and connecting with new people at these events will help.

You could even go door to door to try and sell your product/service, but again, you don’t have to be too salesy. It’s correct to be in the sales frame of mind, but also don’t forget to be human!

If you provide a service, work for free

The thought of working for free isn’t really that appealing, right? You don’t have to work for free and get nothing in exchange. If you are a new start-up business, you’ll be trying to gather as many testimonials as possible and make new connections. So, make sure that you provide services to those who can either refer business to you or have a large network of your ideal target client.