15 Tips to Grow Your Business Online (Without a Lot of Money)

When we started WPBeginner in 2009, we had a tight budget and limited resources. We built it as a simple WordPress blog, using free tools and a lot of creativity to make things work.

Over the years, we’ve grown WPBeginner into a thriving platform and launched several successful products, such as WPForms, MonsterInsights, OptinMonster, and SeedProd. This journey taught us that you don’t need a big budget to grow your business online.

There are plenty of free and affordable strategies for attracting visitors, converting leads, and building a recognizable brand. We’ve personally tested many of these methods and know how effective they can be.

In this article, we’ll share practical tips to help you grow your business without spending a lot of money. Whether you’re just starting out or looking to maximize a small budget, these ideas can help you achieve your goals.

Our goal is to help you compete with the big guys without spending a fortune. Since we will be covering multiple tips, here are quick links you can use to jump ahead to any section:

1. Choose the Right Platform for Your Website

The biggest mistake you can make as a small business is choosing the wrong platform to build your website. A wrong platform will not only cost you more money but will also limit your business’s growth potential.

We recommend using WordPress. It is the most popular website builder on the market, and it powers over 43% of all websites (including both small and large businesses).

Why do we recommend WordPress?

• WordPress is free, open-source, and trusted by millions.
• It’s flexible and works for any type of website.
• Thousands of plugins and themes make customization easy.

We use WordPress for all our websites, including our eCommerce sites. For more details, see our complete WordPress review.

When we say WordPress, we are talking about WordPress.org and not WordPress.com. They are two different platforms. See our article on the difference between WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org for more details.

To start a self-hosted WordPress website, you’ll need a domain name and a web hosting account. Yes, they’re different. Want to learn more? See our beginner’s guide explaining the difference between domain name vs web hosting.

Different hosting companies offer different plans suitable for small to large websites. This ultimately affects the cost of your website.

If you are just getting started, then we recommend using Bluehost. They are one of the largest hosting companies in the world and an officially recommended WordPress hosting provider.

Luckily, they are offering WPBeginner users a free domain name and discounts on hosting. Basically, you’ll be able to get started for $1.99 per month.

As your business grows, you will likely need more hosting resources. Hopefully, by that time, you’ll be making enough money to justify an upgrade.

Once you have a little more money to spend, you can choose a managed WordPress hosting provider like SiteGround.

2. Choose a Functional Website With a Simple Design

Many beginners believe that their customers will not take their business seriously if they don’t have a professionally designed website.

Getting a professional to custom design your website is expensive, and it’s not needed when you’re just starting out.

You can easily start with a ready-made free or premium WordPress theme for a fraction of the price.

See our expert pick of the best WordPress themes for some inspiration:

• Best WordPress business themes
• Best WooCommerce WordPress themes
• Best free WordPress themes

If none of the above themes suit your needs, then you can also use SeedProd. It is the best page builder for WordPress.

The best part is that SeedProd allows you to create a completely custom WordPress theme from scratch without writing any code.

We use SeedProd to create landing pages and custom login pages, and some of our business websites are made with SeedProd. For more details, see our full SeedProd review.

You can also use Thrive Architect. It is a versatile WordPress page builder that works with your existing theme. We use Thrive Architect to design custom landing pages. See our Thrive Architect review for a deep dive into its features.

Paid Alternative: You can sign up for our Professional Web Design Service. It’s an affordable option where our team of professionals will design your website at a fraction of the cost charged by premium design agencies.

3. Make It Easier for Users to Contact You

If you want your website to attract more customers, you need to provide an easy way for visitors to contact you.

The simplest way to do that is by using a contact form on your website.

By default, WordPress doesn’t come with a contact form. Luckily, there are WordPress contact form plugins that can help you easily add a contact form to your site.

We recommend using WPForms Lite. It is the free version of the popular WPForms plugin that’s trusted by over 6 million websites.

Once your business has grown, you can upgrade to WPForms Pro to create more advanced forms like surveys, polls, payment forms, and more.

We use WPForms on all our websites to create contact forms, login forms, surveys and polls, and more. Take a look at our detailed analysis in the full WPForms review.

4. Start Building an Email List From Day 1

Most people who leave your website will never come back again. This means that if you don’t get their email address, then you will have no way to communicate with them in the future.

The most cost-effective way to do this is by building an email list. We have found it to be the easiest way to reach out to our users and bring them back to our websites.

Email marketing is the most reliable way to communicate with your website visitors.

You can get started with Constant Contact. They are the top-rated email marketing service provider on our list. For details, see our tutorial on creating an email newsletter the right way.

WPBeginner users get a free trial for those just starting out and 20% off if they upgrade to their paid plan.

Building an email list allows you to directly communicate with your audience. Tools like OptinMonster can help you grow your email list with high-converting opt-in forms and targeted campaigns.

We use OptinMonster on WPBeginner and all our businesses. It has proven itself a remarkable tool for growing our email list, generating leads, and converting visitors. Take a look at our OptinMonster review for a complete list of features.

5. Get More Organic Traffic From Search Engines

Search engines like Google are the primary source of traffic for most websites on the internet. There are a lot of things you can do to optimize your website for search engines by learning basic SEO.

SEO or search engine optimization is a set of guidelines and techniques that make your website more search engine-friendly.

It is not too technical, and you will be able to do it on your own by using All in One SEO for WordPress. It is the most comprehensive WordPress SEO toolkit on the market.

All in One SEO comes with an easy setup wizard. After you answer a few questions, it will set the optimal SEO settings for your business.

We use All in One SEO on all our websites and the SEO gains we have made are remarkable. See our case study of why we switched to All in One SEO or see our detailed analysis in the full All in One SEO review.

For more details, see our complete step-by-step WordPress SEO guide for beginners. We will walk you through the process of making your website as SEO-friendly as possible.

To get traffic from search engines, you’ll need content, which brings us to the next step in this guide.

6. Plan a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is a strategy for creating useful and relevant content to attract and build an audience. It allows you to get more targeted traffic from search engines without spending a fortune.

The easiest way to add useful content to your website is by adding a blog. WordPress allows you to add a separate blog page to your website and sort your content into categories and tags.

You need to plan your content strategy by finding the keywords your users may seek. This is where you can take advantage of WPBeginner’s free keyword generator tool.

Simply enter your main topics or keywords and click the ‘Analyze’ button. Keyword Generator Tool will then generate hundreds of related keyword ideas for you.

For more details on this topic, take a look at our guide on how to do keyword research for your blog.

Do you need ideas on how to use those keywords in your content strategy? Here is a massive list of blog post ideas that you can use on your blog.

Content marketing is a highly effective and proven strategy to market your business on a small budget. To learn more about it, see this guide on how to create an effective content marketing strategy for your business.

7. Make Data-Based Decisions With Google Analytics

Many beginners use their best guesses to plan their growth strategy. You don’t need to do that when you can use actual data to make those decisions.

This is where Google Analytics comes in. It allows you to see how many visitors are coming to your site, where they are coming from, and what they do while there.

See our guide on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress for step-by-step instructions.

Google Analytics comes with a lot of information. Even though it is neatly organized and beautifully presented, it could still be a bit overwhelming for new users.

To make the most out of it, install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. It is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress and allows you to easily view your most important traffic reports inside the WordPress dashboard.

If you run an online store, then MonsterInsights can also help you track WooCommerce customers using Google Analytics.

You can also download the free version of MonsterInsights. It works great, but you won’t have access to some of its most advanced features.

8. Leverage Social Media to Drive Traffic

Social media platforms have highly engaged audiences. Facebook alone has over 2.9 billion monthly active users, which is more than one-third of the world’s population. Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms also have highly engaged users.

With so many users, social media platforms bring great opportunities for business. You can start by creating your business’s social media profiles and automatically sharing your blog posts.

Next, you will want to make it easier for your users to share your content on social media. For that, you will need a social media plugin for WordPress. A plugin like Novashare allows you to add social sharing buttons to your WordPress site.

There are tons of other ways to engage with audiences on social media. The key is to keep your profiles active, grow your following, and bring traffic back to your website.

• Automatically schedule social media content using a tool like ClickSocial.
• Create a Facebook group for your customers or industry.
• Create a LinkedIn group for your industry.
• Learn how to retarget users on Facebook with ads.
• Focus on social networks that are important for your industry. For example, if you run a fashion blog or restaurant, then you may find Instagram more helpful than LinkedIn.
• Don’t just bring traffic to your website; use social media to build your email list.

9. Be an Active Participant in Online Communities

Online communities include forums and question-answer websites. These are the places people go to post their questions, socialize, find content, and explore. Top communities on the internet include Reddit, Stack Exchange, Quora, TripAdvisor, and more.

These communities provide you with access to people interested in topics associated with your industry. You can join them for free and invest your time in building authority.

First, you need to find out which communities are more relevant to your business and where your potential customers may go looking for answers or content. For example, if you run a travel website, then you may find TripAdvisor more helpful than other communities.

Don’t spam these forums with links to your website in each post. Build authority by genuinely participating with helpful content, and mention your business or website when it is appropriate.

10. Convert Abandoning Website Visitors Into Customers

Did you know that more than 70% of people who visit your website will never find it again? It is not your fault. It’s just that the internet is so huge, and there are so many websites out there.

Each visitor who leaves your website is a potential customer that you are losing. To grow your business, you need to focus on converting those visitors into paying customers.

This is where OptinMonster comes in. It is the best conversion optimization software in the market, which allows you to convert casual website visitors into loyal customers.

How does it do that?

It comes with a drag-and-drop campaign builder where you can create different types of campaigns to collect user emails, display special offers, show exit-intent popups, countdown timers, smart popups, slide-in optins, and more.

For more details, see this beginner’s guide on conversion rate optimization.

11. Start an Affiliate Partner Program

Affiliate marketing is a referral arrangement in which an online retailer (advertiser) pays a commission to a referrer when users purchase a product using their referral link.

If you sell products online, then you can use affiliate marketing to partner up with skilled affiliate marketers. You will pay a sales commission to these marketers for promoting your products and bringing you sales.

You will need an affiliate management system to track referral activity and payout your affiliate partners. Here is our list of the best affiliate management and tracking software that you can use.

You can also promote other people’s products or services to make extra money from your content. See our affiliate marketing guide for tips and tools you’ll need to get started.

12. Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Contrary to popular belief, you can run Pay-Per-Click advertising campaigns on a small budget. With programs like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you can set your own pricing, target keywords, audience, and more.

In fact, Google Ads even offers free advertising credits to new advertisers. Bluehost, a trusted WordPress hosting company, also offers free Google AdWords credits with their hosting plans.

You can use these credits to experiment with PPC advertising and get some paid traffic to your website for free.

13. Use Social Proof to Win Customers

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people follow the actions of others because they believe those actions are the correct behavior.

Marketers use this phenomenon by showing their customers that other people already trust a product or business. This is done by sharing their statistics, subscriber counts, customer testimonials, and more.

Here is a list of clever ways to use social proof on your website to increase conversions.

14. Effectively Use FOMO to Boost Sales and Conversions

FOMO, or ‘fear of missing out,’ is a psychological term used to describe anxiety about missing out on something exciting and trendy.

As a business, you can take advantage of this human behavior and boost sales and conversions. Basically, you need to build anxiety by adding scarcity to your offers. Here is a great example from Booking.com of using scarcity to build anxiety.

For detailed instructions, see our article on how to use how to use FOMO on your WordPress site.

15. Improve Your Website’s Speed and Performance

Studies show that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.

As a website owner, this means that you have very little time to show users what you have to offer and convince them to stay on your website.

Another study found that a 1 second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

This means that you need to optimize your website to make sure that it is fast and performs well even under high traffic.

Follow the instructions in our step-by-step guide to improve WordPress speed and performance for beginners. This guide includes all the tips we use on our very high-traffic websites for reliable speed and performance.

Bonus Tip: Use Professional Services to Grow Your Business

Growing your business online doesn’t have to be expensive. With the right strategies and tools, you can achieve great results without a huge budget.

People looking for more personalized help should consider using WPBeginner Pro Services, which offers expert assistance tailored to specific needs.

For an affordable price, you get help from professional experts with years of experience. We can help you with everything from designing your website to optimizing its SEO and performance.

We hope this article helped you learn how to grow your business on a shoestring budget. You may also want to see our expert pick of the most useful tools to manage and grow your website and the best live chat software for small businesses.

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