There are many ways that you can market your business without spending any money. While it might be difficult to do an entire no-cost marketing plan that is effective and efficient, many of these ten ideas will definitely help stretch your marketing dollars. While free, some of these tips do require effort, and you may have to learn new skills, but others are so simple everyone can and should be doing them.

1. Say “thank you” to your customers. This is rather obvious, but many businesses do not have a “formal” process in place for saying thank you or showing appreciation to their customers. Say it verbally if possible, send an email, pick up the phone. Let your customers know you don’t take them for granted.

2. Free online classifieds and link listing. Don’t get carried away with this, but do take advantage of some of the free ad space online. Typically if you search one of the major search engines for “Your industry + add link you can find a few decent sites where you can list your business for free.

3. Article submission. There are many, many online article submission sites. The deal is that you write an article that others can use in their ezines or on their websites and in exchange, they give you “credit” at the end of the article in the form of an “author bio” or credit paragraph. Search for “article submission.” The more closely related the article is to your industry, the better. And, please triple-check grammar, spelling, and logic.

4. Publicity. This one has been around forever. Write press releases, and submit them to the local media and to online press sites.