If youâre running a small business, none of these things should be your focus.
The digital marketing strategies that deserve your attention are the unsexy ones.
In this post, weâll cover seven of those strategies and how to make them work for you based on experience rather than just theory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZZnxXyES80
Blogging isnât writing what you did today. Thatâs a diary.
If you take that approach to blogging, and you donât already have an existing and loyal audience that hangs on your every word, then your business blog is going to be a ghost town.
How do you fix this?
Write about the problems your target customers are actually searching for.
Say that you sell computer parts online. Chances are your customers are searching for things like:
- Why is my computer so slow?
- How to build a computer
- How to speed up a computer
If we plug those keywords into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, we see that there are thousands of searches for each of them every single month.

Keyword search volumes via Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
But hereâs the best part:
You can help people solve these problems while integrating products from your store in the content itself.
For example, a slow computer may come down to the RAM, or hard drive, or CPU. So help readers diagnose their problem and offer product solutions in the process.
Same goes for âhow to build a computer.â Explain how to do it and recommend the specific components they need.
This concept works in almost every industry.
If youâre a realtor, then instead of blogging about the latest industry award that nobody cares about, write about real-world problems potential customers are searching for like:
- How to invest in real estate
- How to buy a house
- What credit score is needed to buy a house
All of these topics have the potential to attract a vast audience:
Not just any audience, either: these are people in the market for what you offer, who likely have deep pockets and a burning desire to own their own home.
But how do you find what your audience is searching for?
The first option is to guess. The second and better option is to use a tool like Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and search for some relevant seed keywords. For a realtor, these might be things like âbuy a house,â âreal estate,â etc.
From here, head to the âQuestionsâ report to see the most popular questions people are asking.
Itâs then just a case of picking out the best keywords for your business, analyzing keyword difficulty, and creating optimized content.
If you can do this and rank, youâll get free, consistent, and passive traffic from Google month after month.
YouTube is the worldâs 3rd biggest search engine, and itâs yet another place where people are searching for solutions to their problems.
For example, there are 17,000 monthly searches worldwide for âmakeup for beginnersâ:
Now, Iâm no expert, but Iâm guessing that itâs easier to pull off this look when you use the right makeup and brushes.
So if you were a retailer of makeup and makeup accessories or even just an affiliate, then you could easily create a video about this topic and recommend a few products in the process.
This is what popular vloggers like Danielle Mansutti do.
Danielleâs video ranks #1 on YouTube for âmakeup for beginners,â and her video has racked up over 2.6 million views to date:
Throughout the video, she recommends the best products to use and tells you where to buy them in the video description:
Furthermore, because Google now shows video results for a lot of searches, her video also ranks in Google for related terms.
In fact, that video gets an extra 2,900 visits per month from Google alone:
Back to business: To find relevant topics that people are searching for on YouTube, go to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, switch the search engine to YouTube, and search for a broad keyword in your industry.
If you sell iPhone cases, then this would be something like âiPhoneâ or âiPhone Xâ:
From here, check the âQuestionsâ report to see what questions people are asking about this topic. Right away, youâll see some great topic ideas like âhow to unlock iPhone 6â and âhow to replace iPhone 6 screenâ:
The latter is a particularly good keyword to target as an iPhone case seller because viewers will likely want to take more care of their phone once fixedâin which case, they may want to buy a case.
For best results with this strategy, make your videos are genuinely helpful and valuable, keep the fluff to a minimum and refrain from being overly promotional.
Doing this has helped us to grow our YouTube channel to over 150,000 monthly viewsâŚ
⌠which has led to thousands of new paying leads and customers:
Learn more about ranking your videos and growing your channel in our guide to YouTube SEO.
Most businessesâ social media marketing strategy can be summed up in one sentence:
Keep posting boring updates and promotions to followers across every channel.
If thatâs what youâre doing, stop now. Thatâs not a social media marketing strategy; itâs merely a way to waste time and alienate your followers.
So what should you be doing?
Here are a couple of tips.
Focus on one social network
Building a following takes time and effort. If you spread yourself too thin, then itâs not going to work out.
For that reason, itâs better to focus on just one social network, at least initially.
But which one should you choose?
Contrary to popular belief, itâs not necessarily the one with the most users. Itâs about finding the network where your target audience hangs out and understanding whether you can serve their reason for being there.
If you have your finger on the pulse in your industry, then that first part shouldnât be too difficult.
For example, most SEO professionals hang out on Twitter or Facebook. Few of them are on Snapchat or Instagramâat least not in a professional capacity.
So, for us, weâd want to focus on building a following on either Twitter or Facebook.
However, if youâre a food blogger, Pinterest would likely be a better option.
But what about that second part of the equation?
Cater to the platform
Regardless of the platform you choose, you need to make an effort to understand why your audience is there and how you can serve them.
For example, people tend to go to YouTube for entertainment or to learn something.
Facebook, on the other hand, is different. People donât want to see 30-minute tutorials or promotions popping up in their newsfeed. They want to see interesting, funny, or shocking content which they can share with friends.
To get peoplesâ attention here, you need to tell a story, create a short video, or do something else thatâll stand out in an endless sea of promotions and vanity shots.
On Twitter, itâs more about communicating quickly, efficiently, and not overwhelming people.
Thatâs probably why we tend to get more attention on the short tips we shareâŚ
#SEO tip 48: Answer questions on Quora/forums to build traffic-driving links đ
Participate genuinely and answer questions.
Youâll be able to share the occasional link that will bring traffic back to your site! đđhttps://t.co/hjdvViYB05
â Ahrefs (@ahrefs) June 10, 2019
⌠than links to in-depth YouTube videos:
đ˝ď¸ Digital Marketing for Beginners: 7 Strategies That Work by @samsgoh
SEO. Social media marketing. Email marketing. PPC ads.
Where do you even start? đ°
đ˝ Hereâs exactly how all of these work â based off a decade of experience rather than theory.https://t.co/OrJ9czQV6D
â Ahrefs (@ahrefs) May 22, 2019
There are two ways to market your business with podcasts:
- Create your own podcast
- Get interviewed on someone elseâs podcast
Creating a podcast is great for brand and audience building, but it can take a while to build traction. Also, most of us donât have the equipment or industry connections to create a popular podcast.
Getting interviewed on podcasts is a different story.
Podcasters are always on the lookout for interesting people to interview. You donât have to be a celebrity for this. As long as you have some industry experience (online or offline) and are willing to share some serious value, youâve got what it takes.
Donât believe me? Iâm a nobody and Iâve still being interviewed on podcasts:
But how do you find podcasters that might want to interview you?
Look through your favorite podcasts for interviews of others in your industry.
Looking at the podcast page for Entrepreneur on Fire, we see this episode with Jim Kwik.
If we then click through to the interview, we notice two things:
- The guestâs name is in the title.
- The page links to the guestâs websiteâspecifically, the homepage.
Both of these are very common for podcast interviews, and we can use that fact to help discover other podcasts that this person has been on.
How? Paste the personâs homepage into Ahrefs Site Explorer, set the mode to âURL,â then go to the âBacklinksâ report.
Next, use the âIncludeâ filter to see only backlinks where the personâs name is in the title of the referring page.
Now we have a list of over 100 podcasts featuring Jim.
From here, all we need to do is filter through to find relevant prospects, then pitch the host by telling them why they should interview us and what we have to offer their audience.
Although podcasters usually link to their intervieweeâs website from the episode page, that isnât always the case. Sometimes they link only to their social profiles.
For that reason, itâs often worth repeating the process above but with the intervieweeâs social profile URLs.
For example, if we repeat the steps with Jimâs Twitter URL, we find this podcast:
This didnât show up when we analyzed links to his website because the episode page doesnât link to it.
Each time we publish a new blog post, we send out a newsletter.
It takes minutes to do, and it sends thousands of people to our blog.
But this didnât happen overnightâŚ
Weâre able to do this now because weâve spent years building our email list, and now have tens of thousands of subscribers who actually want to hear from us.
So if you havenât yet pulled the trigger when it comes to email marketing, the best time to start is right now.
How? The first step is to generate traffic to your site.
There are plenty of ways to do that, but blogging with SEO in mind (see #1) is the best long-term strategy. Weâve been focused heavily on this for a few years, and we now get an estimated ~230,000 monthly visits to the Ahrefs Blog.
The next step is to convince those people to sign up to your newsletter.
There are lots of tips and tricks for doing this: Lead magnets, content upgrades, etc.
But the thing that unites all of these tactics is providing something of value. It might be a PDF version of the post (content upgrade), a free 7-day email course (lead magnet), or something else.
Here at Ahrefs, we keep things simple with a slide-in that triggers at the end of a postâŚ
⌠and a subscribe box at the bottom of each page:
This works well for us, but you may want to be a little more aggressive with your opt-ins if building your list is a priority.
Just remember that list building is not something with a beginning and an end. Itâs an ongoing process, so donât put off emailing your list because youâre scared itâs not big enough.
Make an effort to keep subscribers engaged and send them valuable informationâeven if you donât have many.
Do that consistently over time, and youâll have an engaged, responsive list of people that actually enjoy hearing from you.
Communities and forums like Reddit, Quora, and Facebook pages can be great marketing channels.
Just remember a few critical rules:
- Never try to promote products and services directly. People often browse these platforms for entertainment or education. If you canât do either of those things, donât bother.
- Link to your content sparingly, and only where appropriate. Most of the links on these platforms are nofollowed, meaning they have no SEO value. For that reason, thereâs no need to spamâlink to your content where it has value and supports a point.
Think of these networks as a place to share expertise, experiences, build relationships, and help others.
Thatâs what my colleague Si Quan does on Quora.
Hereâs his answer to the question, âHow long will it take a new website to rank in Google?â
Itâs super in-depth and answers the question well.
Thatâs likely why itâs the most upvoted answer on the thread and has racked up over 5,500 views in the last ~six months.
But he also took the opportunity to link to a couple of relevant Ahrefs blog posts:
The key point there is relevant. He didnât link to our homepage or a landing page. He linked to blog posts with more information about the things he was already talking aboutâwhich is useful.
Even if only 1% of the people whoâve viewed that answer click a link, thatâs 55+ new readers from just one answer.
But he hasnât just answered one question. Heâs answered 350+.
Combined, those answers have racked up almost 800,000 views to dateâŚ
⌠and now get tens of thousands of views every month with no additional effort.
Looking for a way to find relevant and popular questions to answer on Quora?
Follow the process in the video below, and pay attention to the bonus traffic hack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV5GQxLDZ70&feature=youtu.be&t=142
He also answers relevant questions in Facebook groups from time to time.
Most small businesses never even consider paid ads because they arenât âfree.â
But remember, nothing is truly free because everything takes time. And time is money.
For that reason, thereâs no need to shy away from paid advertising. What you do want to avoid, however, is throwing money blindly into an ad network because somebody somewhere said it was good.
Remember, what works for one person may not work for the next.
So before you start pumping money into paid ads, consider the ABCs of paid advertising success:
- A is for Audience,
- B is for Budget,
- C is for Commerciality.
Letâs start at the top.
Audience
Say that youâre selling menâs caffeine shampoo, would you advertise on Pinterest?
Probably not. 81% of Pinterest users are female, and itâs a platform used primarily by the younger generation.
So the first step is to figure out which platform your target audience uses.
Advertising anywhere else will be money down the drain.
Budget
Most PPC ads work on an auction basis, meaning that the more advertisers there are, the more expensive it gets for you and me.
Say youâre in the competitive industry of conference calls. If we search for that keyword in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer with Google set as the search engine, the cost per click (CPC) is $20 in the US.
If you have a paid advertising budget of $1,000 per month, then youâd only be able to get 50 clicks before your budget is depleted.
How can you solve this? Look for keywords with a lower cost per click.
To do this, enter a seed keyword (e.g., conference call) in Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, then go to the âPhrase matchâ report to see all keywords from our database containing that keyword.
From there, filter for the maximum CPC youâre willing to spend, and look down the list for lucrative opportunities.
Some good ones here might be âvideo conference call appâ and âconference call app.â
Not only are these cheaper keywords, but they also have clearer search intent. Someone searching for âconference call appâ is obviously looking for an app that does conference calls, whereas someone searching for âconference callâ could be looking for many different things.
But donât forget, PPC is bigger than just Google. You can also advertise on other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.âwhich are often cheaper.
Just make sure your target audience actually hangs out there.
Commerciality
If youâre bidding on a keyword like âconference call appâ in Google, then it may make perfect sense to send visitors to an informative landing page.
But that wonât work on platforms like Facebook or Pinterest.
Nobody there is in buying mode.
So you need to bridge the gap between the intent of the platform and how you monetize your products. And the way you do that is with content.
Say that you sell furniture and want to advertise on Pinterest. You wouldnât want to send people to sales pages for tables and chairs because people on Pinterest arenât looking for that. Theyâre looking for inspiration.
So it would make more sense to send them to a relevant blog post like â11 Interior Design Tips For Your Living Room That Wonât Break the Bank.â
You can then show relevant products naturally throughout the content, much like IKEA does.
Final thoughts
The key to digital marketing success in todayâs climate is to adopt the mindset of the consumer.
In other words, stop giving people the hard sell, and instead aim to solve their problems through free and valuable content that is relevant to your business.
Thatâs what we do here on the Ahrefs Blog, and itâs been working pretty well for us.
Itâs also important not to try the strategies above all at once.
Pick one of them, then experiment with and master it before moving on to the next.
Let me know in the comments if any of these strategies have worked for you. And if so, which was the most effective?