It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest post is from Jon Rognerud.  – Enjoy!

Outbound marketing is essentially any marketing that involves a business or person reaching out to customers directly. A traditional method of outbound marketing that was used for years (and still is) with great success was direct mail.

You can use outbound marketing in a variety of ways to create future success for your business. Outbound marketing is a newer type of marketing where you spend your time creatively reaching out to new and existing customers in an attempt to draw in additional business.

#1: Blog Outreach

The idea of reaching out to blogs is a seemingly simple one, but in reality there are plenty of nuances that you need to get in right in order to really be effective with this type of outbound marketing.

After you’ve found your partner blogs, you will need to actually cultivate that relationship, understanding who runs the blog, making sure to contact them on a regular basis, and most importantly you need to personalize the content and track how your engagement is actually paying off. Think of how you can best provide value to THEIR audience via your content.

Fortunately there are a few tools to help you out with this task: GroupHigh and BuzzStream.

#2: Sending out emails for limitless results

Sending out emails is a far less time consuming method of outbound marketing than trying to cold call hundreds or even thousands of people. While you should invest in a quality email list (including always building your own house-list), in the end this investment will be well worth it if the list is marketed to correctly. The key to getting results when using email for outbound marketing is by utilizing a targeted list.

Two of the most popular email services are Aweber and Mailchimp.

WARNING: Make sure that you are allowed to import outside data, and that it has been fully vetted. Read and understand their guidelines and don’t spam.

Another good tool to use is Streak’s CRM.  It will help you manage all of your prospects and give you the ability to mass merge personalized emails.

#3: Building a Brand on Social Media

If you are just getting started with social media, a Facebook page is a must for your business. From there, you can move on to Twitter if you are looking to interact with your customers more regularly, and Pinterest if you have more of a visual brand and would like to interact with a female-biased audience. Google+ and LinkedIn will serve you as you continue building out your social platforms.

Managing multiple profiles can be a pain, therefore a tool like Buffer will save you a significant amount of time.  One of the most powerful features is custom scheduling so that you can post high quality content on sites like Facebook & Twitter during peak use hours.

SproutSocial is slightly more advanced and powerful, offering advanced features such as customer relationship management through social media, team collaboration, and much more.

#4: Utilizing Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Paid search engine traffic is a great way to market your business, especially when you work with someone who knows what they are doing.

Companies wouldn’t utilize this great resource if it didn’t work, and the best part is that you can get started for as little as a few dollars a day. There is plenty of information online to help you learn the ropes.

Wordstream helps with managing paid search campaigns via easy to use software tools and great support.

#5: PPV Advertising

This type of advertising is often considered derivative of paid search, but in reality it is anything but that.

Have you ever seen commercials on online television, or on websites that you navigate to? This is PPV, and it is growing faster than most other kinds of outbound marketing today.

Companies like DirectCPV let you customize your PPV campaigns to target a specific type of customers, and you can reach a large audience.

#6: EBook Giveaways

You know what just about any customer loves? That’s right, free stuff.

Since you can give away copies of an eBook for effectively nothing, these books can also be used as effective outbound marketing tools. You simply have to write an eBook, or even just pay to have on written.

Once the book is written, all you have to do is add a few links to your company and give it away to anyone that you want.

When it comes time to actually put the book together, you will want to get help from a graphic designer like the ones that you find at 99Designs to really set your eBook apart with a beautiful cover and even a theme for the individual pages.

#7: Multiple Competitions with a ‘Priceless’ Reward

One way that is less well-known is using competition to market your company.

Shopify did something like this when they first got started, offering prize money and a priceless meeting with a major entrepreneur to the company that could achieve the highest revenue in a Shopify store during the competition’s timeframe.

While this might not seem like a form of outbound marketing, Shopify was able to get their name out there in an extremely competitive space by offering something that was more valuable than money to their customers.

Outbound marketing has been around for a while, but because of the Internet it is now available to businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Entrepreneur Magazine says Jon Rognerud is one of the most sought-after SEO and Digital Marketing Experts for Small Business. He is famous for his high-returns and passionate approach to optimizing websites and integrated marketing solutions that brings process, profits and brand loyalty…without wasting time. His brand NEW website optimization book, “The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Website” from Entrepreneur Press/McGraw-Hill is in bookstores now. Act today, and get a FREE website coaching session here.