If you want to bring a lot of customers to your small business without spending a lot of money on marketing, you can do so by creating buzz. Instead of using money to create awareness, you use word-of-mouth to generate awareness. Here are a few ways to create buzz for your small business:

Feature a Prominent Name

If you can get a big name on an interview, you can generate a lot of buzz. Go to national networking events in your industry to meet well-known individuals and determine if they would be willing to be interviewed.

One great example of this is the Learning Annex. Before landing Donald Trump as a guest speaker, they were earning less than $1 million a year. The Learning Annex’s founder made a large wager when he offered Trump $1 million dollars to speak. They packed more than 10,000 into the audience when they had never had more than 2,000 before, and today, they have many millions every year.

Participate on a Radio Show

Come up with a controversial topic or stance and market yourself to radio show hosts. Post an ad in the Radio Television Interview Report (RTIR), the main place where show hosts go to look for experts.

Call up local stations and offer to be interviewed about whatever topic you want. The spicier you can make whatever it is you are seeking publicity for, the better. Try to come up with an exciting angle.

Host a Party or Event

In Silicon Valley, there is a small start-up business whose founder knows just about every big name in the valley. This man isn’t a millionaire, yet he knows many of the millionaires in the area because twice a year, he throws a big boat party.

He invites all the biggest names in Silicon Valley, and they come because they know the other big names will be there. By being the organizer, he generates a lot of buzz for his company and generates a lot of connections.

How can you do something similar in your industry that will get people talking? Google does it by having big name bands playing for their staff. Of course, you can also do it without spending a lot of money by just getting creative.

These are just a few ways you can create buzz around your small business. Generating buzz takes a bit of creativity, but it also takes the willingness to act and put yourself out there. Come up with a few different ideas and take action on the most audacious ones. Those are often the most likely to succeed.

HubPages is a content distribution website where anyone can sign up, create content and publish it. The goal of the website is to have its users create extremely valuable content that is accessible to everyone on the Internet.

Publishing your content on HubPages is often better than publishing it on your own domain because HubPages has an extremely high page rank and is very well regarded by Google. In other words, content published on HubPages is much more likely to rank in Google than content published on your own website.

Interact with Your Readers

Try to establish yourself as an expert in whatever market you are trying to target.

One of the biggest benefits of HubPages is its active community element. If you produce good content, people are going to come to your HubPage and comment and ask questions. Respond to those questions. Don’t just put up pieces of content and let them sit there.

Build relationships with your readers. Those relationships can often turn into other business opportunities — clients, guest blogging opportunities, joint venture partnerships, and so on.

Aim to Raise Your Profile Score

Your profile score is determined by HubPages and is essentially a ranking of how high HubPages thinks the quality of your content is. If you have a profile score of 75 or higher, all your links in all of your HubPages will become DoFollow links.

Before you get to 75, any links from your HubPages with a score of 40 or below will have NoFollow links. In other words, your links won’t count in the eyes of Google unless your content actually gets scored highly.

To get your profile score above 75, produce a lot of original, high-quality content. As more and more people find your content useful, your content will get a higher and higher ranking. Do it consistently and in a short amount of time you will have a HubPage score above of 75.

Use Social Media

HubPages makes it very easy to use social media to promote your content. Each piece of content will by default have Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook and Twitter buttons.

Use your own social media accounts to promote your content. If you are active on Reddit and have a high karma account, then post it from your own account to help give your HubPages a boost. In time, you won’t need to do this as your readers will do it for you, but in the beginning, this can really help give your HubPages a leg up.

Promoting your small business using HubPages is a matter of building a strong audience on HubPages by interacting with your readers, as well as by getting search engine traffic. Make sure you are getting credit for your HubPages work by getting your profile score to 75 or higher.

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.

Though it has been around for a few years, Facebook marketing is still a relatively new playing field for marketers. It has phenomenal power for building a user base and a reputation, but also has many pitfalls. Let’s explore some of the most important Do’s and Don’ts of Facebook marketing.

1. Postings

DO: Post regularly. Post useful content, post personality-infused messages, and stay connected with your user base.

DON’T: Don’t spam. Don’t send just commercial messages; don’t always try to sell. Facebook is best suited for building connections. It is not very effective as a direct sales tool.

2. Type of Page

DO: Pick the right type of page. Facebook has personal profiles, fan pages, group pages and community pages. Read about each one and decide which is right for you. Each has different features and restrictions and the choice can’t be changed later, so do your due diligence before you start.

DON’T: Do not run your business off a personal Facebook account. For one you are limited on the number of friends. If you make a mistake that violates the terms of service, you also risk getting your personal account suspended.

3. Budget

DO: Start with a small budget. You don’t need to spend money to use Facebook marketing effectively. Create viral campaigns, use pages effectively and let your users do the work for you.

DON’T: Don’t spend a lot of money on Facebook Pay-Per-Click up front. Facebook has so much traffic that you could literally spend $1,000 in 60 seconds on its PPC platform. When you are just starting out, test small; as little as $20 a day until you can prove that your campaigns are making money.

4. Photos

DO: Have professional photos taken. If you’re running a business on Facebook, you need to have photos that make you look great.

DON’T: Don’t post photos that are too casual. Suggestive photos, nightlife photos, etc. should all be avoided.

5. Being Personal

DO: Respond personally to user comments and messages. Yes, it takes a lot of work, but the idea is to connect with people. That’s where the power of Facebook lies. Take the time to talk to your users. It will make a huge difference.

DON’T: Don’t just be an impersonal brand. Though big brands do advertise on Facebook, the real power of the platform comes in connecting with real people.

6. Information

DO: Fill out as much information as you can. In your bio pages and your info pages, your contact information, etc. should all be completed in detail.

DON’T: Don’t let the pages get old. Marketers often complete their information once and don’t change it, even if the information changes. Make sure you check your information and update it regularly, about once a month.

These are some of the most common Do’s and Don’ts of Facebook marketing. Remember that building a fan base on Facebook does take time, but once you get going, it can spread virally very quickly.

There are many Twitter tools available to you as an entrepreneur to promote yourself and your business. From tracking your influence to market research, from mobile phones to alternate interfaces, it is all available and, best of all, many of these tools are free. Here are five free tools you can use to help build your online business:

TwitterMail – Use Email to Post Tweets

TwitterMail is especially useful for people who have phones that can send email, but don’t have an application for Twitter. Basically, TwitterMail allows you to send an email to post to your Twitter account. You can specify when it will be posted. This can also be a very useful tool for posting to Twitter from an HTML form, a PHP script or any other email generated on your server. It is much simpler than learning the Twitter API.

Twitscoop – An Alternative Twitter Interface, with a Unique Cloud

Twitscoop allows you to send tweets, receive tweets and manage friend requests without ever having to leave the page. Unlike Twitter, where you are constantly loading and reloading, Twitscoop saves you time by never needing to reload. In other words, it’s a faster alternative Twitter interface. In addition, Twitscoop also features a unique Twitter cloud that can help you keep track of all the most talked-about topics in the Twittersphere.

Retweet Rank – How Many Retweets Are You Getting?

When you send out a tweet, how many people in turn tweet that out to their friends? How does your “retweet power” measure against other Twitter users? Retweet Rank can tell you. You don’t need an account; all you need to do is go to their website and type in your username.

Twitter Grader – How Influential Are You?

Want to know how you stack up against other Twitter users overall? Twitter Grader can show you. In addition to stacking you up against other Twitter users, it will also offer brief suggestions for improving your Twitter account.

Qwitter – Know Who Unfollowed You

Ever wondered who clicked the Unfollow button? Ever wonder how many unfollows you are getting? Just because your follower count is going up doesn’t mean people aren’t unfollowing; you could also be getting more new followers. Qwitter will send you a daily email showing you exactly who unfollowed you. This can be enormously useful both from a personal perspective (knowing if someone influential is losing interest), as well as from a statistical perspective (finding out your average follower retention rate).

These are a few free yet useful tools available to online entrepreneurs. It won’t cost you anything to give them a try and can save you hours in the future.