Yet there are many ways that you can achieve excellent promotion of your business, and at relatively little cost. Even outsourced PR can be inexpensive - certainly a lot less than an advertising budget may run to. Some of the best methods for cost effective promotion of your business include:

Start a Corporate Blog

The amount of companies that still don't have a business blog today is not only high - over half in North America alone - but also surprising when you consider that blogs are amongst the most search engine friendly methods of online promotion today. Not only is a blog excellent for allowing your customers and clients an instant way of hearing your latest news, you can also use a blog to build a network of contacts and invaluable links back to your website, increasing its ranking on the major search engines.

Use Online Classified Ads

While it's true that professional advertising and promotional campaigns can often be very expensive depending on the scope, there are other options available to you - best of all, they're free. Online ad listing site Craigslist, for instance, is now one of the most effective methods of both promoting and finding a particular service.

Advertising there is simplicity itself - create an account and post your ad. You can even target specific cities if you have a certain demographic that you're after. Just make sure you read the site Terms of Service for advertising guidelines.

Social Media = Free Media Outlets

One of the main problems for any business looking to run a PR campaign is whether they have adequate media contacts - this is where the services of a specialist PR agency become invaluable. Yet while there's no question that a PR agency offers much-needed expertise at getting your business in front of the people that matter, there are also ways that you can achieve a limited version of this yourself.

Set up a corporate Facebook or MySpace page showing potential clients what you can offer them. With over 300 million users between these two social media sites alone, there are an awful lot of opportunities for getting your business known. Combine it with submitting news stories to social websites like Digg, Technorati and Stumbleupon amongst others and you have an instant inroad to an information-hungry audience.

Video Advertising

There's no doubting that Youtube has shown just how effective the medium of video is at attracting an audience when used right. The fact that it's free to set up an account and upload videos at Youtube makes it an even more attractive proposition for promoting your business. With high-quality video cameras costing less than $200, making a short promotional video and using video advertising to promote your business is easier and more cost-effective than a traditional television ad.

Press Releases

Perhaps one of the most trusted yet still hugely effective methods of promoting your business is via a press release. While there are more benefits to using a paid press release submission site like PRWeb, there are also numerous free press release submission websites that offer impressive results. Using a search engine optimized press release will offer even more results and traffic. Just make sure that your press release carries a newsworthy story and isn't just a quickly put together missive to get your company out there.

While there's no denying that using either an in-house PR team or an outsourced agency to promote your business is the best way to ensure the results you're after for your business, the above methods show that it's also possible to achieve a modicum of PR success yourself. And as cost-effective ways to promote your business online, they're hard to beat.