Recession or no recession, it is possible to start Marketing online and get a real return on your investment, especially if you can start off with little or no costs. This doesn’t mean you’ll make a profit overnight. It doesn’t cost much money…but it does cost time, consistency and patience.

You can start by setting up with several “free” tools, but you need to devote a consistent amount of time to continue tweaking, testing and changing online elements to find what works. Oh yeah, and you need the patience because it can take weeks, months or even a year or two to really see your efforts pay off…but it will be well worth it!

Here is a list of solutions to help you “jump start” your online marketing campaign even if your marketing budget has been cut.

Tip # 1) Use copy that sells. Learn to write copy that sells. (there are many free resources online to help) Many small business owners are realizing the importance of selling web copy. You can put all of your efforts into driving web traffic or sending promotional emails, but if you don’t send your prospects to landing pages or other web pages that make them take action…your web traffic efforts fail.

Tip # 2) Post useful content for your prospects. Keeping fresh and useful content on your website, or in your email marketing pieces is a great way to keep prospects interested in returning to see what you are offering them. Remember…prospects only care about “what’s in it for them”. You can write articles or borrow relevant articles from free directories that syndicate articles for free such as ideamarketers.com or articlegeek.com.

Tip # 3) Start a blog. Starting a blog is easy, free and is a great way to start conversations that can drive traffic to your website. You can go to wordpress.com or blogger.com to sign-up for a free blog. Link the blog to your website. It is important to keep the blog updated in order to drive traffic.

Tip # 4) Use keywords in your web pages. Make sure that each page on your website has “relevant” keywords for that web page. DON’T use the same keywords from page to page. Look at each page of your website as though it is a mini-site and use keywords that are relevant to the page topic. Use keywords in the HTML tags, image file names, alt tags, other page file names and your page content.

Tip # 5) Create pages for your business on social media sites. Create a page for your business, product or service with free social media tools such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and/or LinkedIn. Many business owners are starting to realize how valuable this can be for little or no cost. These sites have millions of visitors and you can potentially pull them to your business site through these social media resources.

These are just some of the ways to drive traffic. Other ways are posting ads from Google or Amazon with related ad content or products, posting ads on craigslist with links back to your website, distributing press releases about your product or service online, writing and giving away free valuable information in exchange for prospects’ email addresses…and the list goes on.

I know it seems overwhelming, but just start by implementing a couple of these strategies at a time and you will see a return on your investment of time.