You spend a lot of money on your marketing. So, how does free marketing sound? From Realtors like you, here are proven ways to get your name out to buyers and sellers.

Tired of shelling out cash to advertise your listings? Worried that you’re not standing out among competing Realtors in town?

While we don’t advise that you stop spending money marketing yourself and your listings — after all, it’s money well spent — you can boost your marketing impact with these free publicity techniques.

Take a look at your passions and interests, your personal network and relationships, your surroundings and any newsworthy issues that affect homeowners. Choose a cause, a news hook, an activity or even a gimmick that will distinguish you and generate free public exposure or recognition.

Here are seven unique ways that Realtors from around the country step into the public spotlight, brand themselves in their communities and boost their sales:

1. Join the Press Corps

Offer your real estate expertise to the local newspaper or television reporter who covers business, says Dan Sondhelm, vice president and partner of SunStar, a media relations firm in Alexandria, Va. Form a relationship. Regularly pitch ideas that will be educational to readers and tie in to current events. “Be a thought leader,” Sondhelm says.

You may even be able to persuade the editor that you’re the right person to start a real estate column. That’s what Richard Courtney did. He works at Fridrich & Clark Realty in Nashville, Tenn., and has sold real estate for 26 years. Courtney persuaded the publisher of an alternative paper that if he started a real estate column, other Realtors would start advertising. Courtney later moved his column to The City Paper, a five-day-a-week publication, and it appears on Fridays. Courtney writes about all kinds of topics including housing insurance, affordable housing, conservation easements and termites. His favorite column was titled, “Pets, Parents and Paranoia.” It explored how to deal with houses that smelled badly from pets, parents of young buyers who want to sign off on their children’s purchases and the general paranoia of sellers who “think buyers are out to get them.”

Courtney also writes an annual Halloween piece about a haunted house in the community.

“It’s really helped. I do it for free, and I love to write anyway,” Courtney says.

He also wrote a book, “Buyers are Liars, and Sellers are Too!,” which has established him as a local authority. “When the book came out, that really changed things, because every time the newspaper wanted a quote, they’d call an author — and they got me!” he says.

2. Start Giving Speeches

Think of a group to whom you’d like to sell. Speak on a topic they would find highly appealing, says Marcia Yudkin, author of “6 Steps to Free Publicity,” and president of Creative Ways, a marketing firm in Goshen, Mass.

“Public speaking is highly underrated,” Yudkin says. “It can really work to have people put a face and a name and a business specialty together.”

Yudkin advises you to step outside your frame of reference. Think in terms of information you can offer that’s new to your audience. “For example, at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, you might speak to local employers. One topic they might be concerned about is how to help employees and executives who have to relocate,” she says. “It requires that you put yourself in the shoes of people who are of a different population — what would they be interested in and what can you offer them?”

Mary Zentz, of RE/MAX Suburban in Arlington Heights, Ill., has received many referrals from giving speeches at Chamber of Commerce affairs.

 She started speaking publicly seven years ago.“The speeches are not typically on real estate, but they are business oriented,” Zentz says. “It opens me up to large crowds. In the course of the speech, I mention that I’m a Realtor. Most of the Chamber of Commerce presidents from around here are clients of mine.”

3. Write a Free Online Newsletter

Although this isn’t necessarily free for you to produce unless you exclusively publish it online, it does generate a lot of publicity. Rather than produce a slick personal brochure, write a newsletter that’s filled with specific, helpful nuggets for your target population, Yudkin says. “It’s not directly a sales piece, but it offers tips and information.” Tom Stone, who’s been with Michael Saunders & Co. in Sarasota since 1991, started a newsletter to compete against companies that had more name recognition. “I said, you can’t advertise to compete with them. You have to look at yourself like a boutique,” Stone says.

His audience of prospective buyers on Casey Key was mainly older retirees who were relocating or who were selling properties that had been in their families for years. “My approach was educating people. It was a way to gain credibility with a group of buyers and sellers. You don’t gain this instantly, but you do gain it by writing a newsletter that shows you know what you’re talking about without tooting your own horn.”

Today, the newsletter, Tom Stone’s Waterfront Update, has generated more than 70 percent of Stone’s business. It is circulated to about 400 families on Casey Key. Stone includes articles that update the selling market on Casey Key, the latest news on new local developments, local land values, the economy and how it affects the local economy, local zoning — even turtle season. The information-chocked newsletter is published online. However, he also sends out printed copies about three to six times a year.

“My cost is minimal by nearly all standards since I write and design it myself using [Microsoft] Publisher," says Stone. "The annual cost to print the newsletter is about $800 to $1,000 since most of it is in black and white and Stone pre-prints the basic form in bulk. “The printer folds the newsletter into a standard letter envelope. I do find it important that it be sent first class with a stamp and not run through a meter,” says Stone. “The regular letter size Michael Saunders envelopes are pre-addressed by the company with my list. I also stamp on the outside of the envelope the fact that it’s Tom Stone’s Waterfront Update. This is to avoid having it just be considered another piece of mail from a Realtor,” says Stone. “I have clients who save them in a file!”

Stone never knows when the next big client is coming, but the newsletter is almost a guarantee that one will.

“I’m standing in a property right now [that I] listed for $6.25 million,” he says. “I didn’t meet [the owners] until a year and a half ago, when they contacted me. They said they thought they’d sell, and didn’t know when, and just wanted to meet me. They knew me through the newsletter”.