MBA1432 Paid Marketing Ideas for Under $300 + Free Ride Friday

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Hey there. Today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but you can win it for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thank you for leaving us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that always has every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn a few paid marketing ideas that will cost you under $300. Sometimes you just need a boost. You need a promotion. You need to make sales to hit your goals. And maybe you have a limited marketing budget or maybe your budget ran out. This is why I'm doing today's episode I $300 is a pretty reasonable amount to get some marketing going. We can all kind of figure it out a way to scrap together $300 to give these things a try. These are different initiatives, different ways to promote and get some sales quickly. Some of these ideas you might be surprised by, but they work, so give them a try. I'm actually giving you a few options so you can see which one best suits you and your business. And yes, every single one will cost you less than $300 to to make it happen. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, let's jump into the first marketing strategy that you can utilize that will cost you less than $300. This one is super underutilized, but it's a gold mine. It's actually a really good strategy. To implement this strategy, you're going to go to itunes and you're going to look at all the new podcasts, the new noteworthy podcasts. These are podcasts that just got released. They're in their first eight weeks now. New podcasts are going to get a lot of exposure because they're new and there's a lot of momentum. And again, they're getting displayed on itunes, on new and noteworthy. Now. They're fairly new, so maybe their numbers are not going to be tremendous, meaning their audience numbers. But if you can get in on the ground level, you can sponsor a episode or two or three of a brand new podcast, you're really going to make a solid investment. Why? Because if this show takes off, even if it just does fairly well, you're gonna be one of the first few episodes on that show. And many people, when they love a new podcast, they go back to the first episodes and they start from there. So you're getting evergreen exposure. It's not just when they release the podcast episode, but for the rest of time, when this podcast is around, your ad is going to be front and center. Plus you're supporting a new podcast. The host will be very enthusiastic to have a sponsor. They're probably not even used to being approached and thinking about sponsorship because, hey, they're brand new. They don't even have a metric or a number to say, hey, you're gonna get x amount of listens to this episode. They're just brand new, so they're probably not even selling ads yet. But if you approach them, you go to their about page, you email them and say, hey, I'd love to sponsor a few of your episodes. Make them an offer. A lot of these new podcasts don't have a rate card. They don't know how much to charge yet. So even if you say, hey, I'd love to have a pre roll spot for two episodes or three episodes, My Budget, $300, there's a good chance they're gonna say yes because, hey, nobody's offering them anything right now because they're brand new. But hey, you're gonna get fresh exposure. And podcasts are a great way to market because the host builds an affinity with the audience just like I do. And they recommend products, they talk about products or services, and it chance to get in front of an audience. Now, obviously you want to choose a podcast as a perfect fit for your market. So if your product's in the health and fitness space, look at a health and fitness podcast. If you have a financial app tool, then look at the finance podcast and personal finance podcasts that are out there. This is totally untapped at the moment, but I know a few people that do this and this is a great strategy. They are getting some traffic, they are getting lessons, and the sky's the limit. Like, it's gonna get better and better as the show grows. Your job is to pick the right. The one that you feel like is a show that's going to grow, that's going to be around for a while, that has potential. It's like you're recruiting a young athlete to join your professional team, right? You're recruiting them based on their potential. You're hoping that they're going to take off and be a superstar and you're going to do the same thing when you're choosing your podcast to sponsor. So go ahead, sponsor a new podcast. My advice, make sure your read is clear, concise, the actual sponsor read the commercial that you're going to be inserting. The host will read it, but make sure that the copy is clear and they have a direct call to action, something for the listener to do. Whether it's to start a free trial or sign up for a freebie or a free webinar or whatever it is, make sure you have a unique link that they can go to and a link that the host can say clearly without any confusion. So the shorter the better. You know, you'll notice that most of our sponsors, their links are like the name of the sponsor.com MBA nice and easy. Okay, let's move on to the next strategy. Under $300, this is what I call the email bonus strategy. Again, you want to get in front of an audience that would be interested in your products and services, somebody else's audience. You want to leverage that audience. And you can reach out to people like popular bloggers in this space. And you can do a quick search on Google to find out who is blogging about the topics in your space. You might be subscribed to some of these blogs. And what do you want to do is you want to approach this person that runs the blog, runs the. Runs the website, and asks them, can you do a sponsored email? Now, I call it the email bonus, because this is like a signing bonus. It's like a bonus on top of the affiliate commission. So you want to have some sort of affiliate commission for every sale or an affiliate program so they can sign up and they use their affiliate link so they get some sort of kickback or some sort of commission on every sale that they refer. But you want to kind of sweeten the pie a little bit because, hey, you don't know them too well and you want to kind of motivate them to do it and say, how about I give you $300 regardless of the performance of this, I want you to send out to your email list to your audience in your own voice. You can even give some suggested email copy and use your affiliate link. Many of these bloggers have hundreds of thousands of people on their email list. And hey, if your product's a good fit for them, if the product is good for their audience, they'll be more than happy to do it, especially if you're giving them a bonus and they're gonna get an affiliate link or I should say an affiliate commission, right, with their affiliate link. So the bonus is kind of just a sweet in the pie. And no one really does this, so you're really kind of giving them a special incentive to work with you. So again, they're emailing their email list about your product. They're going to be using their affiliate link of your product to get an affiliate commission. But on top of that, you're going to give them a bonus of $300. The next strategy, 300 bucks. And we talked about this in a previous episode, but that is to sponsor a local event, a meetup with $300. You can easily get some pizzas and some drinks and sponsor a local meetup of maybe 30, 40, 50 people. You can even throw the meetup yourself. You can partner with a space to do it and get the space for free. Say, for example, you're an online yoga instructor. You can go to your local Lululemon, for example, speak to the store manager and Say, hey, I'd love to throw a three hour meetup and do some yoga, a yoga class in Lululemon. Let's corner off a part of the store and we'll serve smoothies, yogurt or something. But the point here is, is that Lululemon benefits because you're driving people to their store and they're going to pick up some of their merchandise. They're giving, you're giving free classes and of course you're going to promote your online classes after that. You love this class, why don't you join my online classes? This is just an example, but you could do this in a co working space. You can partner up with them. They're always looking for events to throw for their members. They're dying for great content. So if you're going to throw a meetup with a great workshop and some food and some party, this is like music to their ears. You can collaborate with an organization. Like we've done a meetup with Product Hunt. We sponsored the meetup in Sydney and we bought the pizzas and the drinks and all that kind of stuff and we did a little webinar workshop. We spent around $300. But hey, we got a handful of customers out of that meetup that are spending more than that every year. So it's definitely an roi. You're contributing to the community, you're getting word of mouth, you're getting brand recognition. There's so many benefits. The next idea I absolutely love and I've done this over and over in different ways and it really works. Sometimes you need to have a special incentive for your customers to buy during a sale, during a launch, during a promotion. So say for example, you are opening up a new course and you want to sell this course and you want to say, hey, I want you to buy this course by the end of the month. And if you buy this at the end of the month, you get X as a bonus and you can limit it. For the first 10 people that buy, they will get this bonus. What's this bonus? Well, you can buy a bonus, right? Buy bonuses for them. So let's say for example, it's 10 people, that's $300. So I'm gonna spend $30 on each person. And what is this bonus? Let's figure out a bonus that works best with my product, my service, or something fun. If you have a digital product, I really think a physical product as a bonus is a great compliment. Whether it's a T shirt or a mug or, or some sort of physical book. You can go ahead and buy those things and easily send it to your customers. One easy thing that we do to make this procedure very easy is we tell our customers, when you buy email, customer support, let us know. And then we send them a Google form basically that they fill out with their mailing address and their size for their T shirt and all that stuff. And then we send them the bonus via. That way you can even buy them something that might work well with your product or your service, whether it's a software. Buy them their first month. You can buy them, you know, a gift card. Literally a gift card. I've seen people that had an Amazon gift card as a bonus, and that's incentive enough. Another idea is to have a contest and say everybody who buys before the end of the month is gonna enter a contest and they're gonna win a prize worth $300. So this could be a tablet or maybe a PlayStation. I don't know. How much is a PlayStation? Under 300 bucks? I think so, yeah. And the point here is that people have the incentive to, hey, hey, I'm gonna buy. Maybe I can enter the draw and win. And this is super simple. And if you wanna run contests online, there's a great tool called Kingsumo, and it's a very easy app to use to run a contest and do a random draw. I even seen people say if their program is $300 or product is $300, for example, say that everybody who buys before the end of the month will do a random draw and somebody will get the program for free. So basically they get their product refunded, their price refunded, their payment refunded, I should say. And this kind of pushes people to say, I might win and get this for free. And if they don't win, they're like, hey, I still love this product. It's good to go. As you can see, there's a lot of creative ways you can spend only 300 bucks to market your business.

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Sxm to wrap up today's lesson, I want to encourage you to try some of these marketing strategies. Put aside $300 to experiment with one or a few of these. Now if you say to yourself, I don't really have $300 lying around, well, try to commit that every time you make a sale, you're going to take a portion of that sale, 50% of that sale, and put it to your marketing budget until you get to $300. Marketing is about experimentation. It's about seeing what works and then doubling and tripling down. But if you don't try things, you'll never know. I hope these strategies have helped you today, but today's episode's not over yet because it's free ride Friday. Let me see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is. Stephanie McCracken. Stephanie McCracken says five stars. A favorite. Such a great collection of topics, all the lessons you need to thrive. Thanks Stephanie for that great review. You are a free eyed Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the free ride to EZcourse, our 30 day course over at EZcourse Co a $500 value. Yours for free for leaving us an itunes rating and review. If you want to win, leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for leaving us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When I started spending money on marketing, I was very hesitant because I didn't want to waste money. And this is why I encourage you to go with, you know, a simple amount, a small amount where you can afford to lose if it doesn't pan out. Worst case scenario, you get some brand awareness, you get some exposure. Everybody starts somewhere and maybe for you it's $100, $200, $300 like we mentioned today and eventually you'll start to learn what works for you and your business and your audience. And that will become $3,000. And then $30,000. Then $300,000. Yeah. There are businesses, small businesses out there that spend $300,000 on marketing every month because they make a million dollars every month off that marketing. If the ROI is there, it's worth the money. It's worth the investment. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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