Free. There’s nothing like it. Free works when you market to others, and free can work for your marketing. Use these ten free techniques to bootstrap your Web marketing effort. As you make money from your Web investment, you’ll have the funds for paid advertising and other techniques.

Even if you’re one of those lucky ducks with money, you still need to start here. The first six techniques apply to every Web site. The only difference is whether you hire help or do it yourself.

Put Your URL on All Stationery and Packaging

There’s no added cost to include your URL, on absolutely every public piece of paper that leaves your office: business cards, letterhead, invoices, packing slips, presentation folders, marketing collateral, spec sheets, and press releases.

Don’t forget to include your URL on PowerPoint presentations and in the footer of white papers and proposals. Be sure your URL appears in all advertising, whether promotional items, print, radio, billboard, or TV. And of course, include it on all forms of packaging: cartons, labels, lids, bags, wrapping paper, ribbon, tissue, and any other containers.

Include Your URL in Your E-Mail Signature

E-mail programs allow you to create a signature that appears on every e-mail you send. In addition to your name, company name, address, phone number, include your five-to-seven word marketing tag and a link to your Web site. If you use the format http://www.YourDomain.com, the text automatically becomes a link in outgoing mail.

Use Calls to Action in Your Text

Calls to action are imperative verbs (such as buy now, save, register to win) that encourage your visitors to take a specific action on your Web site. The word free, as well as a textual link, is an implicit call to action. Use links and calls to action to help visitors navigate your site and to let them know what you’d like them to do. If you don’t tell them, they won’t know.

Collect Customer Testimonials

Recommendations from customers are golden! Whenever customers spontaneously offer praise, ask for permission to include their recommendations on your site. You don’t have to identify the individuals in detail, but you need something more than “anonymous” as a source. You can collect testimonials from letters you receive, notes in a guestbook, or comments on a blog.

Submit to Top Search Engines

Submit your Web site to the big three, AKA, Google, Yahoo! & Live Search. It doesn’t cost you a penny, and not even very much time. Submit to:

• Google
• Yahoo!
• Live Search

Conduct a Link Campaign

Inbound links from other Web sites not only bring you targeted traffic from other sites but also can improve your ranking in Google’s search results. This is a time-consuming but free method of bringing high-quality visitors to your site.

For the greatest benefits in Google’s search results, ask for links from other sites that have a Google page rank of 4 or higher. If you make a practice of looking for ten links each week, this won’t seem as difficult a task.

If you are good at creating content, you could try a method of gaining vast amounts of inbound links called link baiting. Checkout Mark’s excellent post on this very subject: Link baiting

Tell a Friend

The simplest of all viral marketing techniques, Tell a Friend, lets a Web visitor e-mail a friend or colleague a link to your site with a personal note of recommendation. There are many web scripts available for free. Ask your web developer for more information.

Take Advantage of Free Local Services

Both Google and Yahoo! now offer free local listings tied to their map sites, allowing users to search for businesses within a specific geographical area. While hospitality, tourism, and entertainment sites are obvious beneficiaries of local search, local listings are valuable for every company. Many consumers like to buy locally because they think it will be easier to obtain post-purchase service or because they want to support local businesses.

Submit Your Shopping Site to Froogle

Most shopping sites are actually either pay per click, or pay per listing, search engines sites. Google’s shopping search engine, called Froogle, is free to merchants. You can upload your inventory monthly or establish an RSS feed to update your online feed whenever your inventory changes. While you’re at it, submit your print catalog to Google, also for free.

Deliver a Newsletter through Yahoo! Groups

If testimonials are gold, e-mail addresses are silver! Start collecting e-mail addresses even before your Web site is live. Be sure you ask permission to e-mail an occasional newsletter. If you can’t afford the low-cost, template based, newsletter services such as ConstantContact.com, start small with Yahoo! Groups.

After setting up your group, e-mail an invitation to your list of addresses to sign up. It’s text-based news, but it’s fast and it’s easy and it’s free.

For more tips on web marketing, checkout a recent post named Online Marketing Methods.

This is an excerpt from Seth Godin’s blog:

“I had the good fortune to speak to a large gathering of real estate agents last week. Here’s my best advice (everyone knows an agent or two, so feel free to forward this along).

Plan A: You should quit selling real estate.

I’m serious.

Quit being an agent. Get a job doing something else.

Some of you have been waiting to hear that. My pleasure.”

If you want to read the rest, you will have to pay him a visit here - Seth Godin’s Advice for Real Estate Agents (quit now)

For those of you familiar with Seth Godin, you will certainly know there is more than this to it and for those of you unfamiliar, here is an extremely enlightening video presentation made by Mr. Godin back in 2003 – Fortunately, his marketing advice doesn’t have a “Consume by xx/xx/xx date,” attached, so it’s just as valid now as it was then.

While you are there, he may even try and sell you a book or two. Not a bad investment in my opinion.

Mr. Godin is widely acknowledged as an expert in a field that seems to have more “experts” per square foot than any other – marketing. In an area dominated by spam, Godin is one of the few advocating less, suggesting instead that for an idea to get spread, it needs to be “remarkable.” And I have to respect anyone who reaches for the clippers rather than a bottle of Rogain when their hair starts falling out.

Seth Godin’s wikipedia page is here.