Budget-Friendly Online Marketing Strategy for Seniors
As a senior citizen, you’ll find your finances in one of three situations – thriving in retirement, making ends meet, or desperate for more income. Regardless of what your current situation is, and the reason for you wanting to launch a new career as an online entrepreneur, you’ll be happy to know there are many ways you can save money as you embark on this journey.
Some people simply don’t strategize this aspect of business-building, and it’s a shame because they often get preyed upon by unethical marketers who pressure them into spending way more than they can afford or need to spend.
You want to be a proactive business leader who looks out for the financial health of your new brand, and that means cutting back on impulse buys and instead, carefully analyzing where you’re money’s going.
Learn as Much as You Can for Free or at a Discount
If you’re new to being an online entrepreneur, you may feel overwhelmed and want to buy up any courses that promise to show you the ropes. This is natural, and it’s wise to educate yourself about things before trying to implement a strategy and floundering.
But many seniors do nothing but buy courses. They buy every shiny new product that comes their way and never implement any of them. Or, they get started, but see something else that looks fun or profitable, and they abandon their efforts and chase the new idea instead.
Learn for Free
The first thing you need to do is learn as much as you can for free. Want to know how to build a blog? There are YouTube videos on that. Need to see what list building is about?
Google it or search for it on YouTube! Successful marketers have thorough blog posts and videos that will help you learn the fundamental aspects of running a business online.
You’ll find many people to learn from. You’ll want to see what many of them have to say. You might find that you like one person’s advice or strategy better than someone else’s.
But if you only stick to one person, you’ll never know what other opportunities or strategies exist. You might study something for free like affiliate marketing, and pick and choose tidbits of advice from a dozen or more experts and piece together your own strategy!
Does this mean you should never buy a product teaching you something? Of course not! You’ll want to use your time learning the free fundamentals to see who you enjoy learning from the most.
It’s almost guaranteed that these experts who put out free content will also have paid courses where they teach you even more behind-the-scenes ways to level up and earn more online.
You won’t need that to get started. That comes later when you have consumed the free information and are ready for the next step. You’ll have to turn a blind eye during this initial learning phase to the hyped-up and often too-good-to-be-true offers that promise you the moon if you just fork over enough cash for their “secrets.”
Get Training at the Lowest Price You Can
You also can spend a little to learn a lot in the beginning. When products are launched, they’re usually at their cheapest rate. When you get on a marketer’s list who you trust and they tell you that something just launched, look at how the product is priced.
Sometimes, a product or course will launch at $17 or $27, and then bump up to $47 or $97 a few days later. So if you find something you really want to learn, and it’s at a launch price discount, grab it.
Just make sure you give it plenty of thought up front. Ask yourself if this is something you can learn and apply now – not five years down the road when you eventually get around to it.
Don’t be afraid to ask a vendor, if you find something you do want to buy, if they have a coupon code you can use to get a discount. They can usually create one for you and sometimes you can get the launch pricing discount even after it’s bumped up.
You can even ask affiliates if they have a coupon code for something you want. They can usually contact the vendor on your behalf and get a coupon code for their subscribers that will help you save money.
Choose a Business Model with Few Upfront Costs
Depending on what skills you have, you may or may not need to outsource certain aspects of your business. For example, you may want to launch an info product of your own, but you can’t create an eCover that looks professional enough to represent your brand.
Maybe you want to sell private label rights, but although you can write the content, you don’t have the funds to buy a tool like Amember or another platform tool that allows your affiliates to earn a commission when they refer customers to your website.
Affiliate Blogging
Some business models require a lot less of an upfront investment as well as less knowledge when it comes to technically challenging issues. For example, affiliate blogging is a very inexpensive way to get started.
All you need to do is buy a domain and hosting, then install WordPress with the click of a mouse and the entering of some basic administrative information. But if you want to launch a PLR store using Amember, you might struggle to complete the installation and have to hire someone to help you.
While you want to choose something that doesn’t cost a lot upfront, you also want to make sure it has the kind of profit potential that you’re looking for as well as the timeframe for the income you’re hoping to achieve.
A good example of this is that it might take longer for you to launch a blog, get indexed by search engines, and be found by potential buyers than it would for you to whip up a pack of private label rights content, contact some affiliates and get the money from your launch in a few days.
Look for Free Tools Instead of Subscriptions
The overhead that you, as a senior online entrepreneur, will be paying differs from what it would be offline. While you’re not paying rent for office space, or paychecks for employees, you do have some moments when you need a tool or a way to reach out to your target audience.
In these times, you have options to pay or seek out a free or low-cost tool or method. Until you find your footing online and have some revenue coming in, you don’t want to spend a lot on top-tier tools and strategies.
Free Images You Can Legally Use
You’ll need images for your content, including blog posts, eCovers or product images, social networking posts, and more. You’ll find stock photo sites like DepositPhotos or iStockPhotos.
But those pictures can cost a small fortune and add up quickly, even if they’re purchased on a sale. You can go to a free stock image site like Pixabay and find free images with a license that allows you to use them for your business purposes.
Lower Cost Video Software
Need to record your screen and edit the presentation, but don’t have a couple of hundred dollars to spend on Camtasia, which is the tool of choice for most successful marketers?
No problem! Look for the freeware version called CamStudio instead. This does just about everything the other tool does, but it won’t cost you a cent. This way, you can compete with other marketers in your niche without being shut out due to a budget problem.
Graphics Creation
What if you want to make an eCover or a slide presentation and you don’t have PowerPoint or PhotoShop? You can still create eBooks and slide presentations using the free account that Canva gives you.
Now some sites, like Canva, do have different tiers of availability. For example, Canva allows you to make free eCovers and presentations, among other things, but they have a paid version that is more comprehensive.
In the beginning, you don’t need the paid version! In fact, you may find that you never need the paid version. Canva has ways for you to pay $1 or more for certain things you may want, like a specific icon or element in their system.
So instead of forking over a lot more each month, you can simply pay as you go a dollar here or there, and get exactly what you need without having to spend more. If at any time you feel the need to subscribe, you can, assuming it’s within your budget.
Social Media Sites
Social Networking Sites are another place where you can use them for free versus having to pay for advertising to reach your target audience. Later, you can reinvest your profits into paid ads if you need to, but you may not need to.
Initially, you can just create a page and group and start building that online. You can also use hashtags to get found on other sites or apps like Instagram and Twitter. There are free, strategic ways to get your method across without having to pay to play.
Shop Smart to Get the Most for Your Money
Purchases are the biggest mistake most senior marketers (and just about everyone else for that matter) make when they start getting into online marketing as a career. We already discussed how to look for free information and then, upon finding someone you want to learn from, invest in their paid line of products carefully over time.
Look for Coupons Online
But there are all kinds of things you’ll want to buy when you get started. You need to know how to “shop smart” from the very beginning. Let’s start with a domain. If you go to a domain registrar and just look for a URL, it will likely give you a price point of about $12.
But if you look on Google for the name of the site you’re buying from plus the word coupon, you can find great deals! GoDaddy has $0.99 domains if you use a coupon that’s easy to find at any time.
Paying Yearly Can Save You Money
Hosting can be purchased at a big discount the longer you buy into it. So if you start out month-to-month, it might cost you $9.95 a month. But if you buy it quarterly or annually, you can get it so that it averages out to $6.95 or $4.95 per month.
Sometimes you’ll encounter a situation where you think you have to buy individual tools or courses that are very specific or do one thing each. But if you shop around, you might find an “all-in-one” tool or course that has everything you need, saving you a lot of money.
For example, instead of buying one course for blogging, another for affiliate marketing, and one for list building, you can find a soup-to-nuts marketing course that teaches it all, keeping more money in your pocket.
Check the Vendors Reputation
Before you buy anything from anyone, do your research on the person or company. You want to know if someone has a great tool launching, but they’re notorious for abandoning it on updates and leaving customers in a lurch.
Research the real reviews of consumers, not what’s listed on the sales page. Those are often made up or provided by friends of the marketer, so you can’t really go off of those to form your decision.
You might even reach out to the vendor to see how responsive they are. Ask a question about the product and see if you think your needs would be met if you became a paying customer of this person.
Become an Affiliate to Get Advanced Free Access
You’re starting an online business. Maybe you’re choosing to go into the anti-aging niche, or the cooking niche. It has nothing to do with marketing, but it never hurts to create a blog where you’re showcasing your marketing journey so others can learn from you and watch it unfold.
This is just another way for you to add affiliate income to your coffers. When you make a blog post sharing with other newbies what you did to succeed, they will learn from you and become less intimidated by the process.
You’re not claiming to be an expert – just sharing your journey. Whenever you buy a course, you want to do a public review of it. You have to be careful not to give away the information that the vendor is teaching.
That not only sabotages the vendor’s sales but your commissions, too. Over time, as your reviews begin gaining traction, you can reach out to a vendor who has an upcoming launch and request to be an affiliate and ask if they have review access.
Some won’t give this, but many will. In fact, just getting on the affiliate lists of many vendors and promoting their products will get you advanced review access. This means you can learn from and implement the information, without having to pay for it.
Just be ethical about it and don’t use the strategy as a freebie-seeking way to get your hands on a course at no cost. The vendor will catch on if you never make any sales and could blacklist you from being a customer or affiliate.
