Contrary to what others will have you think, you don’t always need to spend truckloads of cash to grow your online business. Also, you don’t always need to have decades of business experience to succeed. With the right marketing shortcuts strategies in place, you can fast-track the growth of your online business — all while spending less and waiting less.

In this guide, we’re going to talk about just that: The marketing strategies you can use to fast-track the growth of your online business. If that’s something that you’re interested to learn, then let’s hop right in.

Online Marketing Shortcuts

1. Improve your old content.

Instead of creating new content from scratch and putting in all the effort to get your new post to rank in the SERPs, why not look for an old post — your highest-performing one — and improve it?

Since your old post already has traffic coming to it, it has a good chance of building organic links, therefore, making it easier to rank. You just need to improve your old post and update it, then add your new target keywords to it.

You can even add LSI keywords to your post to increase the likelihood of getting your newly added target keywords to rank. (Note: LSI keywords are keywords with a high correlation to your target keywords.)

The good news is, uncovering LSI keywords is dead easy to do especially if you know which online tool to use. For example, LSI Graph does such a swell job at helping marketers find LSI keywords. Allow me to demonstrate.



Let’s say you’re in the fitness niche and you’re trying to rank for the keyword phrase “best Paleo diet for beginners.” You can head over to LSI Graph, enter your root keyword, then let the online tool do its magic. Here’s how it looks.

#mindblown

With this online tool, finding LSI keywords to add to your old content is going to be a breeze.

The downside of using LSI Graph, however, is its features are quite limited.

To help you get more keyword suggestions, you can use a reliable keyword research tool like Long Tail Pro.

Not only does the platform help its users come up with more keyword ideas, but the tool even shows its users some crucial info about the suggested keywords.

With the insights shared by Long Tail Pro about the keywords, the business owner can pretty much determine whether a specific keyword is feasible to target.

The tool also has other features that you can use for backlink analysis and rank tracker (etc.).

As you improve your content and add more keywords to it, the easier it’ll rank for all sorts of relevant keywords.

Of course, adding more keywords isn’t the only thing you can do to improve your old content.

You can also add infographics, tweetable lines, memes, charts, and other captivating elements to make your content “pop.”

If you don’t have the time to improve your content, you can also hire a reliable freelancer that specializes in content development.

When you have skilled and reliable freelancers helping you with your online business, you are bound to skyrocket your productivity while increasing the quality of your output.

2. Spy on your audience’s ads

Running paid aids is a powerful way to get truckloads of traffic to your site. And not just any traffic, I might add, I’m talking about web visitors who are highly likely to make a purchase.

Whether you’re planning on using dynamic search ads, paid ads on Linkedin, or on Facebook, you can expect great things from your campaign — if you do them, right, of course.

Out of all the paid ads we can cover, I’d like us to talk about Facebook paid ads — one of the largely used platforms by marketers to promote their business.

Facebook rolled out a fairly recent update that can help ninja marketers determine the ads their competitors are running.

Marketers can now use this new Facebook feature to benchmark on their competitors’ winning ads to have a better grasp of what’s working in the industry.

What new feature am I talking about, you might ask? I’m talking about the “Info and Ads” feature, of course

Because you can see the ads that your competitors are running — and how their audience is responding through their ads’ engagement — you’ll know which products are likely to get you sales and the best angles you can use when approaching your audience.

Spying on your competitors will put you in a better position to create winning campaigns instead of having to go through all the costly and tedious guesswork.

Bonus tip: If you read the comments made on your competitor’s ad, you can get truckloads of product ideas, pain points, and other helpful data that you can use to improve your marketing efforts.

3. Take advantage of automation

If you want your business to run smoothly, then you need to take advantage of automation tools.

Doing so will free you up of the menial tasks that are hurting your productivity, and help you focus on more important things like growing your business.

While there are bajillions of tools out there that you can use for automation, I’ll point you to one of the most established automation tools online. I’d like to introduce you to IFTTT.

IFTTT allows you to get the most out of your apps. Through the platform, you can connect two apps so you can complete a task automatically based on the conditions you’ve set.



Take this Applet for example.

If you’re using Craigslist to get leads for your business, then using this Applet can help you avoid having to check Craigslist daily for possible leads — since you’ll get an email for your keyword matches.

With this automation tool in place, you can save hours upon hours of doing menial tasks.

Here are some other marketing automation tools you can use:

– MailChimp: Perfect for email marketing automation.

– Buffer: Perfect for automating a good bit of your social media management tasks.

– Adroll: Ideal for automating your ad campaigns.

These are just some of the best marketing tools that you can use.

If none of these fit what you’re looking for, then doing a quick Google search will surely help you find the right automation tool.

4. Expert roundup

Expert roundups are awesome since you won’t have to market your articles alone.

Since you’ll feature influencers in your post, there’s a good chance they’ll share your article with their community once it goes live.

The way the strategy works is quite simple:

Step 1: Come up with an article topic that would make the influencers look good. For example, you can use “X Business Experts Share Their One Best Marketing Tip.” Because your title talks about “business experts,” they will want to be included in your roundup since they’ll be tagged as experts.

Step 2: Reach out to the influencers that your target audience are following.

Step 3: Ask them for their thoughts about the topic you’re writing about. Remember, these influencers are most likely busy, that said, don’t ask them to do something exhaustive — just a one to two-liner tip will do.

Step 4: Once you have ample amount of participants, publish your post, share the live link to the influencers, and ask them (nicely) to share your post.

To spruce up your expert roundup, be sure to add the profile pictures of the participating influencers. Here’s an example.

(Source)

Notice how the roundup looks better with their photos?

Adding the participants’ profile pictures will make them look better — because they can garner a bigger piece of real estate in your post — there’s a good chance of them sharing your post with their community several times.

Considering how these influencers often have thousands of followers, you’re bound to see an increase in your monthly traffic.

Before you start adding the profile pictures in your post, however, I’d like to caution you that adding truckloads of images in your post can decrease your page’s load speed.

That, of course, is a big no-no. After all, not many people have the patience to wait.



To improve your page’s load speed, you can either get a content delivery network, optimize your images, or remove unnecessary plugins in your site.

Using a CDN alone can work miracles on your site’s load speed.

To check your site’s load speed, use a free tool like GTMetrix.com. Here’s an example.

5. Run Loyalty Programs.

According to Harvard Business Review, “Depending on which study you believe, and what industry you’re in, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.”

The figure is a dead giveaway of the importance of customer loyalty.

With how costly it is to acquire new customers, you might find yourself spending truckloads of cash running your marketing campaigns to get new people to buy your products; when in reality, you could just spend a fraction of the cost to get your existing customers to buy from you.

Of course, no one here is advocating that you shouldn’t pursue new customers. What I am saying is you shouldn’t neglect your existing customers since it’s far easier to influence them to buy — you need to leverage that relationship.

And so the question becomes, “How exactly do you show your existing customers that you value them?”

That’s where loyalty programs come in. Running one can be as simple or as complicated as a business owner would like it to be.

If you’re on a tight budget and you can’t afford to spend for paid tools, then you can go to Canva, create a discount coupon, then use email advertising to spread the word about your loyalty program.

It’s that easy!

The best part is, Canva makes it easier for their users to create their coupon designs because the platform has templates for just about any kind of graphic design.

Check out the templates you can use to create your discount coupon creative.

With Canva, you should be able to create your discount coupon in minutes.

Before you start creating your digital coupon design, allow me to share with you these crucial points to increase the likelihood of your customers using them:

Your coupon needs to have one specific purpose only. Adding two or more call-to-action will reduce your coupon’s effectiveness.

Make your message clear.

Do not overwhelm your audience with your coupon’s design.

Focus on the benefits, and not the features.

What’s next?

With these marketing shortcuts, you’d be able to get better and faster results out of your marketing campaigns.

The best part is, it’s easy to take action on the tips I shared and they’re tried and tested to work.

If you have other marketing shortcuts that you’d like to share with the community, please share them in the comments section below. Cheers!

Author: Jonathan William







