Marketing your business doesn’t have to cost a fortune. In fact, there are many low-cost marketing tactics you can use that will bring in customers. Here are some of the time-tested methods.

Postcards in Local Businesses

If you own a car wash, put a 50 percent off flyer in all the small businesses in the area.  Hairdressers, restaurants, laundromats, etc. would all love to save their customers some money. If you have a good value proposition for their customers, most businesses won’t turn away a good deal. In fact, if you just walk in and ask if you can leave a few free coupons as a gift for their customers, they will gladly allow you to do so.

Pizza Box Advertising

Another very inexpensive way is to market on pizza boxes. You can offer to pay for part of the boxes, maybe 50 percent of the pizzeria’s boxes, in exchange for a message on top of the box. Just make sure you approach local pizzerias and not national chains, as their boxes are all regulated. This kind of marketing will get you very targeted and local exposure.

Place Flyers on Cars in the Area

Flyer all the cars in your area with a special offer. By doing so, you will get exposure to people who you know are in your area. Better yet, you will get access to people working in the area. If you marketed to people near your business, you may not necessarily reach the people who spend their days there. By flyering their cars, however, you will get that exposure.

Door Hangers in a One Mile Radius

Printing door hangers is relatively inexpensive. All you need to do is drive around and hang them from doors. You can also hire someone you trust to do it for you. Make sure to just flyer a half mile to one-mile radius. Yes, you could flyer further, but at that point your return on time spent starts to go down drastically.

Try Remnant Advertising

Finally, if you could get traditional ads at 25 percent off the price, would you give it a try? If so, try talking to local newspapers about remnant advertising.

Remnant ad space is the ad space that a newspaper has left over after they have failed to sell all their ad space. As they get close to press time, they are going to want to fill that space with anything they can, even at a vast discount.

Contact the advertising space representatives for your local newspapers and let them know you are interested in remnant space. Call up every couple weeks and remind them you are interested. In that way, anytime they have leftover ad space, they will contact you.

There are many low-cost ways you can market your business. Lack of advertising dollars shouldn’t stop you from getting your business out to market.

Cloud computing has allowed millions of users and thousands of businesses to do things they could never have done just five years ago. Let’s take a look at what cloud computing is and its benefits and drawbacks:

A Brief Explanation of Cloud Computing

The term “cloud computing” basically refers to any service that shares computing power. Without knowing it, just about everyone online uses cloud computing. Gmail and Hotmail are examples of cloud computing, email that is hosted on someone else’s computer, rather than your own. A much more complex example of cloud computing would be Amazon’s S3 servers, a complex network of servers for high traffic websites that don’t want their own server infrastructure.

The Benefits of Cloud Computing

The benefits of cloud computing are immense. The two main benefits are cost and speed. For a new start-up company to launch a website with an email list today, all it would cost them is $10 a month in hosting and $20 a month in autoresponder costs. That’s the power of cloud computing. Without cloud computing, they would have to set up their own server, with their own dedicated T1 or T2 line, which would easily run in the thousands of dollars to set up and hundreds a month in maintenance.

Speed is another factor. Instead of having to spend months setting up your own systems, just renting someone else’s systems allows you to get up and running immediately. The term “renting” is a great analogy for cloud computing. Instead of buying the equipment and software, you are essentially renting it for much less per month. The cloud company makes money by renting to many thousands of users, and each user saves money by not having to set up their own systems from scratch.

The Drawbacks of Cloud Computing

There are several drawbacks to cloud computing, primarily for larger businesses or growing businesses. The main drawbacks are security, scalability and speed.

Security is a big issue. If all your data is stored on someone else’s servers, all it takes is one bad employee on their side for you to lose all your data. While the occurrence of cloud data being leaked isn’t common, it has happened in the past. There are steps you can take to guard yourself against leaks, but the fact still remains that your data resides on someone else’s system.

Scalability is another issue. While it might make sense to use shared hosting or a VPS server while you are getting just a few thousand visitors a month, it doesn’t make sense once you’re getting tens of thousands or a million or more hits per month. Many cloud computing systems just don’t scale. Friendster, the precursor to MySpace and Facebook, failed for that exact reason: They couldn’t scale their hosting and the service went down far too often. Shared hosting, even dedicated servers, don’t scale very well. If you have a very high traffic website, you are going to need your own infrastructure. The same applies to large email lists. You can’t use third party autoresponders; you need your own mail servers.

Finally, speed is another factor. There’s always increased latency (lag) in using a cloud service rather than a self-hosted service. That isn’t a huge concern for a small business but for a large business that slight increase in lag could mean millions of dollars lost.

Those are the fundamental pros and cons of cloud computing. There are many other reasons why you might choose to use your own systems or to outsource your systems to a third party. In the end, it is a trade-off of set-up speed and cost, versus security, scalability and increased latency.

Google’s patent search system makes obtaining patent data fast and easy, and is free. In the past, obtaining patent data from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was a painstaking and potentially expensive process. By scanning the over seven million patent documents filed with the USPTO, Google has made the process much easier. Here are the benefits of being able to search for patents:

Determine If Your Idea Has Been Patented

If you have a brilliant business or product idea, one of the first things you should do is make sure that no one else has already come up with and patented the idea. All you need to do is come up with a few keyword ideas to search for the patent. If your search doesn’t turn up any patents, then you have a good chance at being first to the market.

Look for Patents to Lease

If you need a certain piece of technology, but don’t want to spend the money in developing it yourself, one cost-effective alternative would be to lease the technology instead. Google Patent Search helps you determine who owns the right to certain technologies. As long as you can find the patent, you can also find who holds the rights to the patent, along with their contact information, and can then contact them directly to strike a patent leasing deal.

Research into a Specific Inventor

If an inventor you know has created several products that have caught your attention and you want to see what else they have invented, you can find all the patents by that inventor using Google Patent Search. Just click the “Advanced Patent Search” link next to the general search box and enter in the inventor’s name.

Find Inspiration for Product Designs

If you need some inspiration for a product you are designing, or are puzzled on a specific engineering challenge, you can look through past patent designs to see how previous designers tackled those issues. Past patents can be ripe grounds for finding inspiration and solutions. However, be careful as any idea that you want to patent or use commercially needs to be sufficiently different from any past patent so that it can be considered its own entirely different product. Never take complete ideas from someone else’s patent. Only use it as inspiration to come up with your own unique designs. If you absolutely need to use a design in someone else’s patent, consider leasing just that part of the technology.

These are some of the uses for Google’s Patent Search. With over seven million patents at your fingertips, you can now easily find just about any kind of information you need in relation to patents. From inventors to patent numbers to specific technologies, all the information is freely available.

Websites with a lot of duplicate content get penalized by search engines. After all, their goal is to find unique content, not content that is the same throughout the internet, or even the same throughout your website. Many webmasters will unknowingly have a lot of duplicate content on their website, often because of simple technical mistakes. Here is how to avoid duplicate content.

Where Does Duplicate Content Come From?

Perhaps the most common source of duplicate content is from archive-type pages. For example, if you run a blog, the main content is in your posts. But you also have your category pages and your archive pages. Each of your category pages has a 200-word snippet from the article as a teaser for viewers to see.

Unfortunately, that means a single page of your category pages has as much as 1500 words of duplicate content, copied straight from your articles. The same is true of your archive pages. And any given blog may have dozens of pages of category and archive pages. Less common sources of duplicate content include hiring unscrupulous outsourcers who copy and paste other people’s work, along with webmasters who republish other people’s articles with the original author’s permission (legal, but not good from a search engine optimization [SEO] perspective.) So how do you prevent duplicate content?

Learn to Use Your Meta Robots or Robots.txt

Your meta robots tag allows you to specify on a certain page whether you want the page indexed or not. If your page contains duplicate content, just tell the search engines not to index it. Robots.txt resides on your top level directory and tells the search engines which pages it can and can’t index. Basically, meta works on a single page and robots.txt directs the whole site. Learn to use both if you often need to block search engines out of certain pages. Learning to use meta robots and robots.txt is especially important if you are using HTML or PHP to build your site, rather than WordPress.

Using WordPress Plug-Ins

If you are using WordPress, a lot of the duplicate content issues can be remedied through plug-ins. Most of the SEO plug-ins will handle the major duplicate content issues for you. Make sure you get one that allows you to “noindex” your category and archive pages, as well as automatically make all your links canonical.

Scan All Content with Copyscape

If you regularly outsource content, get in the habit of scanning your content with Copyscape. Copyscape will scan the internet for copies of your content and report back to you if they have found any matches, along with how close the match was. Though you will seldom run into an issue with outsourcers copying content outright, if it does happen it could ruin your entire website; therefore, it doesn’t hurt to be careful.

Duplicate content is preventable. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to noindex the right pages and scan your content with Copyscape. Get in the habit of performing these two procedures and you will protect your rankings in the long run.

Webinars are one of the best marketing tools available to entrepreneurs. They are powerful instructing and communication devices and are easy to use, yet can have a powerful impact on your connection with your audience.

Let People Meet the Real You

It is one thing for people to read your writing in text form, yet quite another to see your face on video or to hear your voice on audio. One advantage of webinars is that they are unedited. Unlike a video product, where you can spend as much time as you want preparing it perfectly, the webinar will never look as smooth, but believe it or not, that is actually good. People get to know the real you, with no editing, through your voice and possibly visually, depending on how you set up the webinar.

The Benefit of Multimedia Presentations

Webinars take advantage of various media simultaneously. You have audio coming in from your microphone, and you may have video coming in from your webcam, but you also probably have a slide presentation or mind map presentation to lead your audience through. This helps add structure and flow to the lesson. In addition, you may have websites or live demos to show. You may have pre-recorded clips that are all a part of your presentation. Unlike text or podcasts, webinars gives you a whole range of different kinds of media to take advantage of.

Build Trust with Two-Way Conversations

Instead of just “teaching at” your audience, with a webinar you can also see in real time what kind of reactions your audience is having to your materials. In some set-ups, this takes the form of questions that participants can send in. You pick and choose the best questions and answer them right then and there.

In other set-ups, there will be a chat room visible to both participants and the organizer. You can pick topics and questions right out of the chat room and address them live. A lot of connection is built when the audience can see you addressing their concerns in real time. They know you are really listening. Adding a two-way conversation to your toolbox can help improve your connection to your audience.

High Sales Potential

Finally, webinars are powerful sales tools. At the end of an informative, exciting and connected webinar, your listeners are going to be exceptionally receptive to a sales offer. Make them a great offer and you will see a rush of sales come in instantly.

As you can tell, webinars are great for building trust and credibility, which benefits your brand in the long run. In addition, they can also help you bring in more sales immediately. They take a little bit of time to set up the first time around, but once you have done your first webinar, it is very easy to repeat the process.