Last updated on March 26th, 2024 at 12:16 am
Taking upon the role of business owner is a monumental decision that presents great opportunities for success but many hardships along the way. You will have the solo ability to develop a strong online presence through your dedication to writing, community interaction, and promotions but there will come a time when trying to do everything on the table will run you into the glass ceiling.
Over time you should consider paid strategies once you feel you’ve hit your limit.
Outsourcing areas of your business presents one set of options if you’re feeling overwhelmed with business tasks. Virtual assistants, too, can keep your projects in motion while giving you the ability to monitor and dictate the tasks and goals of the individual.
If you’re unsure where your hard earned money should flow when you’re in the mindset to re-invest in your business than consider the following four marketing strategies – they’re worth every penny.
1. Pay-per-click advertising
PPC advertising can intimidate just about any business owner because you’re essentially rolling the dice and hoping that someone not only clicks through your ad but converts on your page; if they don’t like what they see, that’s just money down the drain.
However, even lost money from PPC can provide great insights about how you can improve your web pages and marketing message.
PPC advertising isn’t very expensive, either. You can begin testing the platform with just a few dollars in your account and scale it to whatever budget you choose to set. If you look into the services of Search Engine Optimization Inc you can leverage their expertise and understanding of the platform to reduce your costs and increase its effectiveness for your business.
In all, PPC will allow you to quickly test your campaigns without having to wait to be indexed and build a pages’ search ranking. Cutting to the chase will reward your efforts with conversions and sales soon after your ads have been approved – what’s not to love?
2. Guest posting
There may come a time when you’re absolutely booked solid throughout the day and this means you may not have the ability to work on promotional content for link building and community outreach.
The short version:
Consider hiring an individual (or two) to produce content for websites to create a solid link building campaign.
The long version:
Content creation can take a great deal of time especially if you want to explore rich media such as video.
The great success you find in your business the greater amount of time you will need to dedicate to accomplishing your goals and completing the daily tasks. This crunch on time means you may not have the ability to create guest content any longer and this means you may drop out of the public’s eye within your industry.
Hiring individuals to create and publish content will allow you to continually build quality links and reach new communities all-the-while giving you the ability to focus on your important tasks. You still have control over the content and the last say, so consider making an investment in this area of marketing if you feel you match this description of a busy entrepreneur.
3. Infographics
Infographics have been an incredible method to market your brand and authority. However, if you don’t have an artistic bone in your body you’re going to miss out on this craze.
The good news, though, is that you can hire talented individuals to condense your information, create stunning graphics, and aid you in producing these powerful marketing pieces of content. Head on over to just about any of the major freelancing marketplaces and you’re bound to find individuals that have experience creating infographics or mini-infographics – and the costs won’t be too heavy, either!
Likewise, hop on Google (or whatever search engine you prefer) and type in a query such as “infographic design tool” and you should be given a list of paid tools that will be populated with designs and formatting so you can create your own in a relatively short amount of time.
Try to put together one of these on the regular and you could see a good amount of backlinks coming through to your site which means higher rankings!
4. Contests
Lastly, instead of paying businesses to do the marketing work you could invest that budget into a cool product and have your community do the marketing for you – through contests, that is.
One of the hottest tools for handling contests, right now, is RaffleCopter. You can get started with a basic version for free but the paid features give you tons of additional options that can extend the value you’ll gain from running a contest such as doing polls, adding slideshows, terms/conditions forms, and more. Alternatively you could check out the contest tool, Cub.io, which also offers many of these same features.
In essence: find a cool product that fits your community (or offer your own), start the contest, promote it like crazy, and sit back as individuals enter the contest and share their entry across social media – that’s win/win for both parties.
