It takes a few months for any new business to settle down and bring in some sales. Of course, this period is the hardest part of launching a small business because you have to put in a lot of money for all the marketing and promotional campaigns to get noticeable results.

Well, you don’t always have to spend money to get solid results. Want to know how? Here are seven easy ways you can grow your business without spending any money.

Take Advantage Of Social Media

This may seem like obvious or outdated advice since you’ve already set up your brand pages on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But, if you’re like most small businesses, you must be struggling to generate leads through your social media campaigns.

It’s time to take your social media campaign to the next level. Follow these steps to run successful social media campaigns:

• Join the new and hip networks: SnapChat, Reddit, Quora, ScoopIt.
• Be more human: Talk to people and answer their questions.
• Schedule a ton of posts: Use tools like Buffer and Hootsuite.
• Create landing pages on your website to drive your social media traffic.
• Run cool giveaway contests.

Start A Blog

Obviously, starting a blog is the best ways to send free traffic to your website and generate more leads. Yet, only 33% of B2B companies currently use blogs.

Are you among the other 67% ?

Then it’s time you start a blog. It will only cost you a small amount of your time to start a blog and create some valuable articles to attract people. Once you have enough articles on your blog, you will start receiving new visitors to your website.

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Make sure you take the necessary steps to turn those visitors into leads (eg: collect emails).

Optimize Your Landing Pages

Creating dozens of landing pages is not enough to improve your chances of generating leads, you need to optimize them well enough to capture the attention of your visitors.

You can do this easily with the help of A/B Testing tools available online. There are plenty of tools you can use to get this done.

ABTesting.net is a website that gives you access to a great set of optimization tools for free. Or you can get started with a premium tool like Instapage with its 45-day free trial for more advanced features.

Build a Community

We’re not talking about your fan page on Facebook or Twitter. Building a great community with a loyal following will take lot more effort, but it will be worth it because your followers will always be interested in what you share and they will always click on the links you promote.

You can build your own community within your website or host it as an app like Starbucks’ My Starbucks Idea or use a community-based social network such as Google+ Communities to connect with more people, like how Feedly does.

Start an Affiliate or Reward Program

If there’s a way to get blogs and people to promote your products for free, that’s through an affiliate program. All you have to do is pay your partners a small percentage of the sale they refer to you and they will do all the heavy work to promote your products.

Or, you can use a reward program to get your existing users to bring in more customers. For example, Dropbox uses a similar program that rewards users with 500mb of free storage whenever they invite a friend to join the service.

Spy On Your Competitors

Is your competitor making more sales online than you do? Then they must be doing something right. Put on your James Bond suit and do some spy work to learn about their secret strategies.

You can use these tools to spy on your competitors:

• SEMrush (Free)
• Monitor Backlinks (Free trial)
• WooRank (Free)
• Simply Measured Social Media Tools (Free)
• iSpionage (Free trial)

Get Feedback From Your Customers

Host polls and surveys on both your website and your social media channels to get feedback from your customers. Ask them about their likes and dislikes.

Listen to what they have to say about your products and your competitors and then improve your services to meet their requirements.

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