A Free Way to Market Your Business

If you offer complementary consultations send those who take you up on it an invoice showing your cost and value after your "discount."

If you are like many small business's, you may offer a free or no charge complimentary consultation as a way of getting your foot in the door of prospective customers, to simply educate prospective customers about your business, or as a way of meeting other small business owners you can refer business to and to get out of the home office.

Do NOT forget to send them an invoice with one line showing the actual cost they would have spent on your service if you didn't offer this service for free (this is a good time to review what you talked about in the description field). Make sure to add another line showing the discount which reduces the bill to zero.

You can also suggest that they write a compliment on a social networking site, their web site or Blog, or for your web site. Just remember to make it easy for them to do and to not take more than a minute or two to complete. An example would be to suggest that they write a sentence or two about how their business "fill in the blank" benefited.

That way, your value is in front of prospective customers and they are less likely to take your services for granted. In most bookkeeping programs, you can set up income and discount lines to track this marketing expense (even if the net is zero dollars) and see how effective this type of marketing really is.

A bonus tip! After you make a first sale/service to a new customer send a thank you letter along with the invoice. I have many repeat customers because of that thank you letter.