Marketing budgets are getting slashed and re-allocated all over the place. So, how do you go about promoting your brand without making a dent in that valuable marketing budget?

1. Crowdstorming – get free ideas from your clients on what they want to see you doing next – check out what Dell are doing for more of an idea

2. Linkedin / Xing - Create a profile and join in with professional online networking – don’t lose touch with your business network, especially if they’re moving jobs this year!

3. Twitter - Get your message out there, be it promotions, news and info. Word is that Twitter is planning to charge companies for its use though. Great for monitoring what people say about your products or services.

4. Online PR – create more news stories for your website and build up a network of free PR distribution sites such as Pressbox.

5. Social networking presence – create free pages on the social networking sites, such as a fan page on Facebook.

6. Build your customer email database – sounds obvious, but you’ll be amazed how many businesses still aren’t doing this. If you already have one, use it! Start segmenting your messages to your audiences.

7. Be authoritative and authentic – have your say on opinion pieces, articles and user generated content relevant to your business to get your voice heard and to give your website an authentic presence.

8. Blogger / Wordpress - create a blog and get information out on the www – no time to blog? Why not share it amongst your team?

9. Social sharing – add a social share tool to your website and get your content out there – you could get over 10% increase in traffic by doing this- sharethis or addthis give you the tools to do it for free.

10. Create a mash up – pull free content into your website, use Yahoo Pipes to pull in RSS feeds for your industry news as we did on wetisdry.com or create videos for YouTube and feature them into your website.