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The Best Online Marketing Strategies For Explosive Growth – Free and Paid

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Online marketing is essentially the same everywhere you go. Not much changes as far as how you can market online except the effectiveness based on what you’re marketing. Today I want to go over the different ways you can market online right now, both free and paid. There are strategies you will see others online doing, and likely have even seen somewhere online today.

Here are some of the greatest and most effective forms of online marketing that I know of, divided into paid, free, and hybrid methods in no particular order:

Free Online Marketing

When it comes to free online marketing strategies, there is usually a skill gap holding back most online marketers. Yes, free methods are nice, but to really excel in some of these, you need to know what you’re doing. Luckily, if you have trouble, there is a plethora of videos demonstrating guidance on how to do this on YouTube and other video platforms like Facebook and Instagram. There are also paid places like teachable and udemy that can teach you how to do these skills properly. Once you learn it, you’ll have it forever, and you can even charge to teach others how to do it yourself in an online course. But that’s off topic. Lets get into it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Starting off with the hardest one, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a strategy that makes your online visibility high based on what search engines use to index and rank websites with. You can be higher on the list depending on what focus keyword you use in your content, and if the users search intent matches what your content is displaying.

There are many moving parts involved in search engine optimaztion, and I won’t go into all of them here, but it it attached to all aspects of your site such as the keywords, content word count, image title, alt text, headers in your content, meta tags, and much more.

Social Media Marketing

On social media, you can get free traffic by posting status updates, images, videos, articles, and links. Social media verifies the desire or social effectiveness on a platform through engagement from people liking, commenting on, sharing, saving, and reposting content on their pages.

High engagement posts are the things you need to pay attention to because there’s a reason it has high engagement. If it’s for a good reason, use that to your advantage. You can also join groups or special pages and discuss important topics and if the platform and group allows it, post links to your marketing content.

Content Marketing

Content marketing if marketing you’re looking at right now—content, but with marketing. Using content to market is very effective because through it you build a relationship with your target audience and get them to trust you. The trust comes from sharing your expertise with them to the point where they see you as a reliable resource to get information from.

Content is not just written, it’s also images, short videos, long videos, podcasts, or any form of media created for you audience to consume. Ensure the content is about topics your market find value in, and while you’re doing it, promote your product or perform some tasks to monetize what your content covers.

Email Marketing

This one is worthy of this list because although you may have to pay somewhere along the journey of sending out emails, you can also send emails out to market your offers. Sending an email is absolutely free! You can find these emails on websites of companies or privately owned blogs that should have the owners or a member of that websites contact information available. From one email address, you can email blast as many people as you want.

It’s the best idea to send out the email to everyone as a BCC (blind carbon copy) so others you send the email to don’t show up in the “to:” section of the email. Doind this properly with a valuable enough offer can be quite lucrative even though it’s rather ineffective. This means you must maximize the value of the offer once someone does respond with interest or decides to purchase.

Community Engagement On Forums

Using community forums as a place of marketing is very effective because you can simply search for who is searching for information or solutions right now. Here’s how it works: go on a forum like Reddit or Quoraa, search for the question, appraise it’s engagement is high, ensure you can post outbound links, and begin answering questions and providing value along with your link to your offer, especially if your offer solves the problem or answers the question on the post.

Forums are permanent, which means if you post a link to a product or service that solves that problem effectively, people will see your link for years and years down the road. I’ve sen posts on forums dating back 10 years ago with solutions that I myself have even used.

YouTube Channel Creation

YouTube is one of the wonders of the web when it comes to marketing. YouTube is used by users to consume all kinds of content in the form of long term and short term video. It is known that YouTube has the highest traffic generation and user engagement of any platform in existence, and because of this, content creators make sure they have a youtube account to supplement all their other platforms, especially of they have blogs. Yes, I have a youtube channel, too.

Although videos are difficult and time consuming to make, they are very lucrative, especially if they offer value to your market. In the description of your video, you can post links you mention in your video to your offers based on the valuable content of your video. This has proven effective time and time again. If you haven’t yet, create a youtube channel and publish valuable video content if you have the resources to create videos, and direct your audience to your offers now. You can craete videos easily with softwares like Canva and Capcut.

Paid Online Marketing

Paid advertising is usually the fastest way to get traffic to a website or a link on the internet. Below I will be talking about the paid methods you can use right now to get qualified traffic to your website.

Search Engine Advertising (Pay-Per-Click – PPC)

  • Platforms: any of all social platforms that can host video and image content (e.g., facebook, tiktok, pinterest, instagram, snapchat, and x.com)

Search engine marketing is used to display a link to a website of your choice at the top of search results for speficied keywords without the need to rank the link using classic SEO methods. This is a form of marketing that takes advantage of someone’s intentions. It is a guaranteed way to gain online visibility for people who are already looking for what you offer.

Search engines also have algorithms that vary based on location, past search results, and efficacy of content. All that means is that you may not have the same results place to place, or keyword to keyword. But you will have different results based on the quality of the content in your ads. At the end of the day, it’s a human, not a robot that will rank your results higher or lower on the first page of search. This appleis to almost all of the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Target demographics and characteristics don’t matter because the only people who will visit the link are people searching for your offer. This is also beneficial because depending on who is searching for the product could affect your idea of who your actual target audience is. You are generally charged per click when doing this, so be sure to have a certain budget based aspects like competition and keyword difficulty.

  • Platforms: Google Ads, Bing Ads, Yahoo ads, and a few more
  • Ads appear at the top of search results for specific keywords.
  • Cost: varies
  • Result expectancy: high

Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is extremely effective if done correctly thanks to it’s large and ever growing audience base. Any of everybody in your target market is on social media nowadays. Social media advertising, if done correctly, can lead to instant leads and sales. However, from my experience there is a way to do it incorrectly. Targeting of region, gender, age group, or even time of day can affect your results. The closer they are dialed in, the better your results will be.

What some of these platforms also offer is something called a pixel that can be used to effectively skyrocket your results on social media. How a pixel works is it will use the data points of someone who purchased your product and target other people just like that person on the platform. You can even take the data collected by the pixel and find what some platforms call “look allike audiences” and find people who are similar to that demographic but within a defined percentage outside of certain parameters the pixel specifies.

This makes your chances of success on social media platforms that much better. The best part is pixels are free to use with your paid efforts. It’s just a matter of setting them up properly. You can do it yourself. It’s a matter of copying and pasting a certain line of code in a certain place, and you can achieve the results yourself fairly easily.

  • Platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter.
  • Use social media to get eyeballs on your offer through sharing and engagement
  • Cost: mid
  • Result expectancy: mid to high

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing involves reaching out to specific individuals who are like mini-celebrities on social media platforms who have a large following of people who follow that individual for specific content. Based on their content, their followers may align with the target audience you are trying to reach based on who your product was made for.

Because of this, you can make deals with these influencers and get them to create a post on their social media account marketing your product with a testiomonial or feature showcase, usually in the form of short video, and get instant results. Be wary, however. The price to get a social media influencer to work with you can range from tens, hundreds, and in common cases, thousands of dollars.

Because a social media influencers have a current following they have to cater to, you can’t expect them all to agree to you terms, and you may not agree with theirs. Not all influencers are created the same, and some may have extra “strings” or add ons they may request. It’s all about negotiation, and the influencers know this.

Influencers have the power to create what is called User Generated Content (UGC) which is one of the most powerful and engaged with forms of content on the internet. It’s when a user creates video content about a product for you or a company that is promoting something of value.

  • Places to find influencers: Upfluence, Heepsy, Neoreach, Creator.co, and many others
  • Get influencers on popular social platforms to market your products to their entire following
  • Cost: high
  • Result expectancy: high

Native Ads (Content Syndication)

Native ads, or paid content syndication, takes content that you want displayed and replublishes it on a myriad of other platforms and websites to reach a wide audience range. Places where this content will be displayed include MSN, Newsmax, CNN, Buzzfeed, Mashable, and many other small news or blog websites. Native ads are usually displayed right in the content archive of these websites and appear as if they are naturally part of the websites already trending and popular content. This positions your ads to be something newsworthy to read or at least click on.

Native ads may caost a lot of money depending on the websites you want them to be displayed on. For example, a small blog or private news website may cost a few dollars to have your ad displayed on their website. But a website like MSN or buzzfed gets millions of visitors a month may cost you hundreds of dollars, and sometimes thousands to get your ads in front of their audiences.

Generally speaking, because people go on these websites to read news and learn about current events, you want to create ads about what’s currently trending to be successful. The success rate of these ads are not as instant as search traffic or influencer marketing, but they can be effective once they catch on and reeaders have seen the ads enough times.

  • Paid platforms: Outbrain, Taboola, Adsterra, Adroll, and several more.
  • Places your content on high-traffic websites to boost visibility.
  • Cost: varies
  • Result expectancy: mid

Email Marketing with Advanced Automation

Email marketing is as simple as it sounds. It’s marketing using emails sent out to an audience who ethically submitted their emails in agreement to be part of a list that receives emails containing marketing material about offers, updates, and new products. Usually emails are used to send out newletters, but as we know, they are also known to be effective if they come from a trusted and valuable source. Because of this unpredictability of if an email sent out will be very effective, it’s hard to determine the effectiveness of sending out emails.

Email marketing is not the worlds most effective way of marketing if done incorectly. The best approach is to give your target audience a reason to open your emails like a free gift upon submitting their email or something of value they look forward to. Likely if this is not present, the emails will go to some spam folder in your traget audiences inbox. If you check your spam folder in your email inbox, chances you have spam, junk, or cold emails is very high. Your email is used by companies as a first base of contact with a target market to promote products and services. If done correctly, emails can be very effective towards achieving results.

What you can do is use an email autoresponder to broadcast to a list with hundreds sometimes thousands of people at the same time either instantly or on a schedule. This makes an email marketers job easier because with software, this entire process can be automated with an autorepsonder. You can even segment your audience by identifying where they came from, what product their interested in, or even by how often they open your emails.

  • Autoresponders include Activecampaign, Aweber, Convertkit, Mailchimp, and many more
  • Automate personalized email sequences for lead nurturing and prospect converting
  • Cost: low
  • Result: low

Video Ads

Video ads are a relatively new because what it does is take platforms that host videos like Youtube, Facebook, Tiktok, and Instagram, and places a short video before the actual video starts playing as an ad. This is very effective because usually the content of the actual video has somethingg to do with the ad. What’s more important is that the ad fits the target audience of people who watch the actual video. Chances are they are interested in what’s advertised even though the video is about something completely unrelated.

Prices of these can vary because of the amount of time it takes to create the video ad. the cost of actually advertising is about the same as that of social media advertising. The effectiveness is far too unpredictable due to the varied results platform to platform. This is something a good amount of testing will figure out for you.

  • Platforms: YouTube Ads, TikTok Ads, Facebook Video Ads.
  • Videos capture attention better and allow for storytelling.
  • Cost: varies
  • Result expectancy: varies

Hybrid Strategies (Free & Paid)

Webinars and Live Streaming

Webinars and live streaming go hand in hand. They are form of content creation where the creator can interact with their audience live and do either a demonstration or preentation of some sort. With webinars, it’s usually about a product or an educational theme that usually involves a large audience for a specific purpose or cause. Streaming on the other hand is usually for entertainment and product showcases. For this particular blog post, we are focused on webinars due to the audience size reach, the overall purpose, and the technology one can leverage with it like email collection, interactive private chats, and multiple speakers who can add to the presentation.

This is paid because using webinar softwares like webinarjam and zoom cost money to have large amounts of people on the presentations. It’s free because you can talk about whatever you’d like, invite who ever you’d like, and do as many as you’d like.

Freemium Offers

Turning someones attention towards free trials or a free period of onboarding for your offer is a great way to market because it gives someone some time to adjust to your offers features and see how they fit into your customers life. Because of this drastically lowered risk, the barrier of entry to start using your product becomes very small.

The actual marketing of this may happen on its own because when word of your offer spreads that it’s free, users will try to use it to their advantage so they can do something with your offer, usually one thing, and then decide if it’s worth it to keep it later. Sometimes, they do not convert into paying customers, which in the short term could cost you money, but for the ones that do, that’s a converted and potentially life long customer.

Partnerships and Collaborations

Creating partnerships and collaborating with others may or may not cost money. The prespective invidividual or business may want some upfront money to do business with you, and they may not because of the benefit of doing business with you is worth it in itself. There has to be something in it for them to commit to a partnership. Having a partnership can have many benefits such as brand awareness, higher levels of trust from the target audience, and potentially better quality service.

Be sure that when you commit to a partnership that you and the other party involved have similar demographics in your target audience. This will ensure that your results are the same or better, and not stunted or held back. Also ensure that whatever benefit you have to the other party is affordable and manageable, otherwise your partnership may cost more than money.

Conclusion

Although there are many ways to market online, these are generally the main ways you will see other companies including your competitors marketing in your online industry. Of course, to use any of these, you will need to know more aobut them, so definitely take your time learning how they work because doing these wrong is definitely possible. Best of luck to you and I hope this article helped!

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