Sure, eye tracking studies designed specifically for your web site could cost you tens of thousands of dollars. So, until you're ready to spend that kind of money, you might want to take advantage of data garnered from studies of other websites.

Most eye tracking studies yield certain consistent results that can be applied across the board.

As small business owners, we often struggle to find new ways to market our businesses and grow our customer bases. We're caught between a rock and a hard place - the time and expense involved in traditional advertising, and the limited marketing budgets we have to work with.

I would like to showcase an extremely powerful and practically free marketing tool that we all have at our disposal.

Hopefully, you're aware of the value of giving something away for free in order to grow your customer base. When using this tactic, it's good to know the lifetime value of your clients so you can determine how much, monetarily, you can afford to give away for free.

More than likely, that the lifetime value would be higher if you knew each customer would refer other new customers to you.

Entrepreneurs often find it difficult to grow their small businesses. They struggle with the effort and expense involved in traditional marketing methods, and the limited budgets they have to work with. However, there are four extremely powerful and practically free marketing tools that we all have at our disposal, but we often over look.

Let's take a look at one of the easiest techniques for growing a small business on a shoestring budget:

Take Advantage Of Customer Testimonials

The next best thing to customer referrals is customer testimonials.

Small business owners often struggle to grow their customer base. They're caught between the time and expense involved in traditional advertising, and limited marketing budgets. However, there are four extremely powerful and practically free marketing tools that we all have at our disposal, but we often over look.

Three easy techniques that can be used for growing small businesses on a budget include:
1.

On-line marketer, ProspectZone, increased open rates by 28% and click-throughs by 53% in a recent split-test. What can you learn from their results?

First, some background: ProspectZone sells sales leads to busy health insurance sales people. They had experienced an average 34.8% open rate for their email campaigns. However, considering their product is the life blood of the insurance industry, they really believed their conversion rates should have been better.

I recently came across a quote from a web marketer saying that people who "include PDF documents [in their websites] don't realize the search engines cannot see this text." Fortunately, that's not really the case. I believe the real problem is that most people don't take the appropriate care when creating their PDFs. In fact, PDF documents can be a great way to improve your search traffic, as long as you follow a few simple rules.

You might be surprised to learn the results of a recent split test I designed to analyze a client's upsell capabilities. I know I myself was extremely surprised!

I have always advised my clients on the importance of upselling, and, as a marketing student, I was indoctrinated with the common practice of gradually working new customers up the price ladder.

I have some very interesting split test results that I think will really surprise you. Here's the story of a major retailer who increased sales over 7% by going against conventional wisdom.

Conventional web design tells us to minimize the number of clicks it takes for your visitor to make a purchase. So Michael was pretty satisfied with his clear, graphical web design.

I have a client who sells advertising at her website and in her e-zines, and because of this, she is hesitant to remove hard bounced email addresses from her mailing list. She mistakenly believes that she can charge more for her newsletter advertising by saying her email list is so many names big - even though at least 20% of those email names are "no good".