Advertising on the Cheap

Intern programs exist at virtually all colleges and universities and are one of the best freebie opportunities available to you. Juniors and seniors with lots of book smarts are anxious to get some hands-on experience, and instead of a salary from you, they receive class credit from their learning institutions for their work. Interns are available in almost every degree program, including advertising and design, sales and marketing, computer programming, business development and human resources. As an intern host, you or someone who works for you must have some expertise in the area in which the intern will serve, so the student receives valuable guidance and actually learns something. You'll be asked once or twice during each semester to provide a written progress report to the university that will be central to the grade the student receives.

Rod Stanton, owner of The Art Farm, hosted two marketing majors from Syracuse University in New York, who served as consultants for Stanton's graphic art and design business. "I provide my clients with a highly sophisticated look for brochures and collateral material using fine art, oil paintings and original illustration, and I was frustrated by the fact that not everyone appreciated, or even perceived, the difference between what I offered and everyday graphic design," says Stanton, who runs his business from his home in Syracuse, New York. "These interns acted as consultants to The Art Farm, in that they studied the market and advised me on how to better fit in among my competitors. The experience was wonderful."

Interns can build your business website, put together media plans and place the schedules, write copy, and do market research for you. They can also write and present sales proposals, write press releases, study your competitors, look for opportunities to promote your business in the market, find ways to expand your customer base, and, in general, reduce your daily level of work to a somewhat manageable level.

Working Your Website

Contact the webmasters of complimentary (but not competitive) sites and ask if they'd be willing to exchange banner ads. You can find these sites by performing a search for keywords (try all of the search engines below) that are closely related to your own. The larger sites usually sell banner space and won't be interested in trades, but smaller sites may be.

Your business name probably isn't well known at this point, so don't rely solely on your logo to do the work in your banner ad. Rather, use a catchy or intriguing question or statement that will be more effective in tempting people to click on your banner. For example, "Do you hate your kitchen?" addresses a real predicament and will grab the reader's interest more than the logo of a kitchen remodeling company would.

Another method of generating traffic is to submit your site to search engines. But instead of paying a company for this service, submit your URL yourself for free to individual search engines.

Instead of paying a company to register your site with search engines, submit your URL yourself to individual search engines for free. It's as easy as filling out a basic form that you can access by clicking on the "Add URL," "Add Site" or "Suggest a Site" links usually found near the bottom of each search engine's home page. You can go directly to these home pages to add your site: MetaCrawler, Excite, WebCrawler, Hotbot, Google, Dogpile, AltaVista, Mamma.com and Lycos. And BBL Internet Media includes links to several more search engines.

Re-register every three months or so-search engines won't always pick up your submission on the first or even second time. Also make changes to your site frequently because search engines will perceive an inactive site as "dead" and remove it to make room for others.

Brains Can Be Better Than Money

When Melissa Trombley, owner of The Barking Bakers Inc., was starting out, she wanted to find a unique way to bring her all-natural gourmet dog biscuits to her customers, rather than spending a lot of cash to get customers to come to her. Melissa knew that lots of owners exercised their dogs around Onondaga Lake Park in her upstate New York community. She wanted to distribute product samples for the dogs along with information cards about her business for their owners. She envisioned a vendor wagon that would attract attention to her product in a unique yet professional way, but she didn't have the cash to build it.

So Trombley approached Home Depot and made them an offer: If they would donate the materials she needed to build her vendor wagon, she would display their logo on it. They agreed, she and her husband built the wagon, and it was so unique and successful, a local newspaper did a story on her company, which led to personal TV appearances on the local ABC, NBC and CBS affiliates in Syracuse, New York. Free building materials and free newspaper and TV coverage--all because she came up with a creative way to present her company to the public.

Kathy Kobliski is the author of Advertising Without An Agency, and owner of full-service ad agency, Silent Partner Advertising, in Syracuse, New York.