There are numerous ways to acquire traffic to your business. As you may already know a business needs a continued flow of customers in order to survive the most important stage, the starting stage. You can own the best McDonald’s on the block, but if there isn’t traffic your finances would reach a negative stance no business owner wants to achieve.

If you own a McDonald’s, chances are you won’t ever need to even talk about it to your friends as most modern and successful offline food chains separate a monthly advertising budget from the franchisee. However, owning a small business and starting from scratch may be a more interesting yet different ballgame as far as finances go.

Understanding that the Small Business Administration defines a small business as an organization or company with 500 or less employees, here is a simple example of how you may start acquiring customers from scratch without having to lose your cool on a franchise $1,000 plus a month advertising budget.

If you own an offline or an Internet business, there are two simple concepts to grasp and understand. You either get your traffic for free or your business most often runs from paid advertising. If you already own an Internet business, you can acquire traffic for free. However, acquiring traffic for free means that you have to convince other business owners to promote your company in exchange for something to their gain!

This can be easily viewed as the famous saying “You scratch my back, I scratch yours”. Of course, it would be healthy financially wise to have businesses helping each other in the simplest way possible by using the effective method of JV partnerships; but you need to assure yourself that such JV partners aren’t directly competing with your business. One of the ways to make this work efficiently is to know if your JV partner mailing list leads have not received too many similar offers. This is based on a good-faith answer from your JV partner.

One of the simplest ways to know an accurate number on how fresh your leads really are is by buying a direct mail mailing list. Offline there are numerous ways to do such, the most famous ones are expensive as they just rent you a space for the advertising that you have to pay just to mail your advertising from their entire database of leads. Valpak being an all time favorite for pizza coupons around many US towns, it is one example of a route.

However, there are ways to catch wholesale rates for acquiring loyal customers. Instead of leasing, renting or buying your own mailing space for a given time frame, you can acquire a fresh direct mail mailing list if you own an offline business. These leads can range from 2-5 fresh leads to 60 days or more in their database from moment of extraction.

The same principles apply for an Internet business. If you want a flow of continued business opportunity seekers, one of the best options is to invest in a targeted mailing list of people who have already confirmed interest in a specific industry or market. Another option would be to invest in a system that teaches you a step by step process on how to build your own profitable list. Whatever your conclusion, make sure to acquire new customers in the most effective ways possible today.