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Home / Seven best places to put marketing efforts for solopreneurs
Seven best places to put marketing efforts for solopreneurs
2018-01-24Staff Report 2 Tim Brown Running a business as a solopreneur (a solo entrepreneur) is tough, not least because you have nobody to help you with complex tasks that can take a considerable amount of your time each week. One great example of this is your marketing efforts which in an ideal world would be done by a large team of experienced members of staff. But in your case, you must find time spare to bring in more customers and generate further revenue. Content Creation Digital marketing is arguably far superior to offline advertising methods because it can be done from your home in your spare time and it’s relatively cheap compared to offline strategies. By creating content on your website, you can give yourself something to promote across the web, including on your social media and industry related sites. Plus, that content is likely to be indexed by Google so that people can find it in the search engine results. Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways to bring in traffic because the people who are searching on Google are specifically looking for a solution to their problems. Guest Posting Guest posting is when you reach out to different blogs and websites to offer a piece of free content for them to post. Within that post, you can reference your products or services, as well as linking back to your website. This tactic has two benefits, by mentioning your business you can encourage people who are reading the guest post to purchase from you instead of your competitors. But secondly, those backlinks will improve your SEO and help you to rank for more competitive keywords. By doing this, you can drive more targeted traffic to your website, the type of visitors who are incredibly likely to make purchases from you. Guest posting is ideal for solopreneurs because it’s easy to do without any resources. The first step is to identify a list of magazines, blogs, and websites in your niche that post articles similar to the content that you would contribute. Second, you should send an email to those people and suggest that you would like to contribute an article to them. Within this email, you should make it clear what you can offer, your expertise and how this extra content will benefit them. Third and finally, you should create a fantastic post that you can send to them. Within it, you should make mention of your business, with a link to your site, but it shouldn’t impact the quality of the article, it should still be exceptionally valuable to anyone that reads it. Helping in Online Communities Online there are plenty of communities which are designed to talk about your industry, either in the form of a forum or a Reddit group. Here you can talk to people who are interested in your niche, both as amateurs, clients, and business people. By helping people, you can form a reputation and encourage them to purchase from you when it is time. For example; if you work in the building trade you could answer questions that consumers have about construction. By doing this, you make it likely that they will buy from you when it is time for them to hire a builder. Social Media As a business owner, social media is an opportunity for you to connect with current and potential customers. Being a solopreneur your time is limited but social media posts can be made on your phone, which is ideal for when you are traveling to meetings or when you are in bed at night. To make the most of social media, you should post detailed content as regularly as possible so that you can build up a following. It’s also wise to comment on multiple relevant posts each day, helping those that you can. This tactic will spread brand awareness and encourage people to become customers. Offline Events While digital marketing is an incredible tool, offline events can also bring in more revenue, especially if your business is B2B. These events should be treated in the same way as online communities; you are there first to help and provide value, only secondly to sell to people. Influencer Marketing Across the world, there are thousands of influencers who have significant followings in your industry. These audiences trust the influencer, and they are willing to purchase from businesses that they believe. One way in which you can benefit from these influencers as a solopreneur is to pay them to promote your business to their followings. In most cases this will be in the form of social media posts, allowing you to hijack the influencers follow count for a small sum. YouTube Marketing Finally, as a solopreneur, you have a unique ability to spend time on inefficient marketing tactics like video creation. Large companies rarely use this because they would instead utilize techniques that can scale and don’t depend on a single individual. But this means that the competition on YouTube is relatively low. Here you can create excellent videos about your industry, helping people, providing value and giving them a clear choice when they are in need of a business like yours. • Tim Brown is the owner of Hook Agency- Web Design Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, and is a web designer and SEO Specialist out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tweet him at @hookagency 2018-01-24Staff Report 2
