6. Let Your Audience Do the Talking. Find yourself brand ambassadors who embody everything your brand stands for. Create a program/job description that allows them to share your product or services and pay them in trade since they are already your customers. There is no better endorsement than from those who already love what you are doing and use the product or service you are already offering.
— Lindsay Pinchuk, Bump Club and Beyond
7. Lend Your Advice. The people of the internet are always ready and willing to hear some new and unique advice from business leaders that have worked hard for what they have today. Giving out genuine advice through social media, interviews, advice columns, written articles and more allows hundreds, even thousands of people to see your name, your company and your company URL. People are always willing to listen!
— Miles Jennings, Recruiter.com
8. Partner with Companies Who Need Your Product. Consider offering your product for a discount to partners who agree to promote it to their large membership bases. For example, if you offer a product for gym members, you can offer it to a respectable gym for a huge discount (for marketing it to their members) in return for giving them an opportunity to use your product to promote membership to their gym.
9. Share Risks. Pursue a relationship with marketing/PR experts who are willing to accept a risk/reward payment structure. For example, perhaps you agree to pay them a lower hourly/project rate but they get a percentage of sales (or other reward metric) for a fixed period of time. Both parties have incentive to get results and the budget goes further on the front end.
10. Get Nominated for Awards. If your business is doing something wonderful and being creative in ways to engage your audience, share it! Tell your story to the business community, such as your local chamber of commerce, and seek out nominations for various awards. This helped our new business gain instant credibility, and we were able to market our achievements, which helped to validate us as experts in the community.
11. Master Social Media. Understand that your business is more than a website. In that respect, you must use social media effectively, especially when bootstrapping. Social media has a low cost of entry, but people who do social media well are significantly separated from those who don’t.
— Mike Seiman, CPXi