11 tested ways to market your business online
Are you wondering what it will take to carry your business to the nest level? Without waiting years and years to move up the rankings on Google’s SERPs, There are some ways to market your business that will offer a better return on the investment of your time than others. Some will take weeks to germinate; while others will take months and years.
No matter what method you choose for marketing your business on the web, as long as you ensure that you’re adding value along the way, and you’re implementing the proper set of marketing habits, the following ways will help you grow your business exponentially with a limited time.
- Create a blog and post high-quality content regularly
Clearly, the most important way you can market your business online is to build a blog where you can post and share high-quality content that adds an exceeding high amount of value on a regular basis. This is definitely a very long-term strategy, and it won’t pay off overnight, but every entrepreneur needs to understand the importance of embracing this online marketing method.
Not only does building a noteworthy blog in any industry or niche help to drive traffic by peaking the interest of Google, but it also leads to creating authority. If you can become an authority in your industry, you’ll garner the attention of consumers, the media and business owners alike. That, in turn, will snowball, build more authority, and eventually, enormous amounts of visibility and sales.
- Connect with others on LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn groups are a great way to quickly connecting with others in your industry or niche to help spread your message. You can promote your content through LinkedIn groups as long as you don’t come across as spammy. It’s best to add value to a conversation or discussion before trying to drop your links.
LInkedIn groups are also a great way of contacting people who you might not have mutual connections with. You can message any other member in the group without being connected, which can become a huge asset depending on the particular circumstances. Share updates often in the group, and be sure to stay in the spotlight without oversharing.
- Use Facebook ads and strategically-targeted landing pages
Facebook ads, while not free, offer a great opportunity for reaching the right demographics for your business. As long as you know your customer well, you can use metrics like interests, geographic location, marital status, age and many others, to locate potential consumers to send to strategically-targeted landing pages, also known as squeeze pages.
Experiment with micro-spends to see which ad copy and squeeze page receives the best responses for dropping consumers into your sales funnel. It might take a considerable amount of time to find the right mixture or recipe when it comes to advertising on a platform like Facebook, but once your campaign is profitable, all you need to do is continue to scale.
- Leverage the power of Instagram influencers
Today, with the ever-pervading power of social media, you can instantly reach droves of people from across the world at a moment’s notice. But we also know that algorithms and visibility are working against us, especially when we don’t have the reach of hundreds of thousands or millions of followers.
To reach those people, we need amplifiers, power users and influencers to help spread our messages. While this won’t be free, it will give you instant access to a wide audience in your specific niche as long as you select the right Instagram influencer to help spread your message.
- Create useful video tutorials on YouTube
YouTube offers a great resource for marketing your business on the web. While you might find some friction at the outset for building your audience, if you focus on creating useful video tutorials, eventually, you’ll reach a vast amount of people. Again, you have to focus on adding value without much concern for generating profit.
YouTube is a great resource for tutorials because you can teach people just about anything in an easy-to-understand format. Whether you’re screen-sharing to teach a digital skill, or you’re capturing something in the real world, just ensure that the quality of the recording and the overall content is high. Also, be sure to drop a link inside the description back to relevant content on your site.
- Develop a relationship with your customers through email marketing
Email marketing is something that every business owner should be engaged in, but it’s no easy feat. To succeed with email marketing, you need to give something away for free in exchange for the consumer’s email address. It needs to be something of value. If you are serious about collecting emails, take the time to create a free report develop a relationship with that consumer through drip-fed campaigns using a system like Aweber, Get Response, Constant Contact or Mailchimp..
- Build consumer trust on platforms like Yelp and Trust Pilot
One of the barriers holding back business owners and professionals alike is that of trust. People are reluctant to trust businesses that they don’t have direct knowledge of or know someone who’s worked with them. Clearly, sites like Yelp can assist with that, but so can a site like Trust Pilot.
Trust Pilot and Yelp are specifically dedicated to helping consumers find the right company to work with, and it increases transparency by providing past customers’ experiences with the company. These sites are the largest in the world for online reviews and should be leveraged to help build trust with potential consumers.
- Collaborate with popular bloggers in your niche
Reaching out to popular bloggers in your niche might be an effective way to market your business online, especially if you have something of value to add to one of their posts. If you find a popular blogger who often writes about a particular subject that directly correlates to your line of work, why not reach out and look for ways to collaborate?
A great way to make this happen is to offer your services as a guest blogger. Clearly, you’ll have to have a good background in writing yourself, and it might be difficult to find a popular blog willing to allow you to do this, but it would be worth a shot if you eventually secure a guest post.
- Regularly contribute on industry-specific forums
Many people have the whole forum-strategy posting for SEO all wrong. They get out there and drop spam links, and they wonder why they’re booted off the forums. You can’t do that. If you’re serious about marketing your business online, when you do find an industry-specific forum, join conversations and add value before you try to link-drop.
No one likes a person who comes in as a new guest to a forum and begins spamming links. Again, you have to think about doing the most amount of work for the least initial return. Add value. Chat with others. Make suggestions. Answer questions. Just don’t spam links. Add your link to your signature after a few posts or after the rules of the forum allow you to do so, but don’t try to direct people to your site at every bend and turn. It won’t work out well for you if you do that.
- Offer a free product or service to customers
Studies have confirmed that people are more likely to accept something for free than they are to pay a nominal price for it. So, why not provide a free service or product to your customers? Maybe you offer a free 15-minute consultation or an entry-level product that you want to give away.
Whatever you offer, be sure to secure the customer’s contact details so you can get in touch with them later. If you’re giving away a service for free, you have an opportunity right then to upsell those customers to your paid services. People are more likely to feel like they owe you when they accept something for free as well.
- Optimize your website for SEO
Clearly, optimization of your site for relevant keywords is an important aspect of marketing your business online. However, the one thing to keep in mind is that if your business is new — less than two years old — and you’ve built very little authority or content, you’re going to have a hard time ranking at the top of Google’s SERPs for any keyword that’s marginally competitive.
The goal is to build excellent content, but also ensure that you optimize your site’s On-Page and Off-Page SEO. While this can become a very lengthy discussion, pay attention to things like your site’s speed, mobile usability, meta descriptions, link profile, reading level, citing of sources, content quality and insightfulness. This is more likened to a marathon than a sprint, so don’t get discouraged in the short term if you don’t see enormous results.
