The most important aspect of being an entrepreneur or small business owner is self-marketing. Self marketing, in itself, is a full time job. And, for a bootstrapped entrepreneur it is a full-time job even more so. Luckily, there are plenty of entrepreneur resources to help you through it to self-market yourself, the best and most popular being the Guerrilla Marketing series of books by Jay Conrad Levinson. Guerrilla Marketing is defined by Wikipedia as an "unconventional way of performing marketing activities (primarily promotion) on a very low budget."

When entrepreneurs deal with self-marketing on a low budget they must realize that there is not one golden technique that they could perform that will draw loads of new business their way. New entrepreneurs and small business owners must perform a variety of marketing activities because no one marketing tactic on its own will be enough. That is why self-marketing is a full time job.

With that in mind, here are just a few self-marketing techniques that a new entrepreneur should do. If you are a new entrepreneur, don’t do just one. Do them all and more.

• Article Writing: Write expert articles in your area of expertise and submit them to article directories. The most important directory you can submit to is EzineArticles.com. At the bottom of each article that you write you can include a link to your website (if you have one), your business phone number, or an email address. The most important thing to realize with articles is that most people will find your article via a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, or MSN. And, most of the search engines will give you a ranking based on the title of the article. You must make the title keyword rich; use words that you think people searching for your services will type into the search box. Don't write just one article; write plenty.
• Internet Sales Leads: You can purchase executive contact names and phone numbers from leads list companies like InfoUSA and D&B. Or you can receive free B2B and B2C sales leads from Trade-Pals.com. There is a TradePals category for most business professionals like accountants, advertising & marketing professionals, insurance brokers, real estate brokers, lawyers, engineers, website designers, sales consultants, motivational speakers, financial planners, and writers, for example. When creating a profile remember that, just like EzineArticles.com, most people will find your profile via a search engine so it is important to create a descriptive profile, especially the "brief overview of services" section.
• Free Publicity: Free publicity could be the best advertising that you and your business could receive. The media's reach is wide and far. You could try meeting with editors of local newspapers or even news stations. You could send relevant press releases, as long as they are newsworthy. Don't believe the hype that a press release can get you instant publicity. You must realize that the media receive thousands of press releases daily; they don't even read most of them. But again, you must try everything when self-marketing yourself including writing a press release. There are online press release services like PRWeb.com and Send2Press.com.
• Business Networking: Business networking could be an inexpensive way to learn from other entrepreneurs, to make business contacts, or to receive business referrals. You could join your local Chamber of Commerce or your local BNI (Business Networking International) chapter. As well, there are online business networking websites such as Ryze.com and LinkedIn.com.