As you may know by now, there is no such thing as a guaranteed recipe for success but there are for sure some tips and tricks you can use to grow your business online and gain more visibility, and you don’t have to be an expert to understand them.

Lucky for us, there are many sources of inspiration on the internet that can teach you how to understand your audience and how to reach more people and convert them into long-term readers or clients.

One of those sources is the Hubspot blog.

The Hubspot Blog has a lot of amazing marketing tips to help you start and grow your business.

Here are some of the best online marketing tips from the Hubspot blog.

Write Amazing, Original Content

• Understand Your Audience. Before starting to address their problems, you need to learn what your audience’s problems are. Firs, try to learn who your audience is, what their pain points are, what they are looking for, and how you can offer a solution to their problems.
• Respond Promptly. It doesn’t matter if your business is online or offline, it goes by the same rule: trust is built by communicating with your audience and giving them a response in real time. Every time someone is seeking your advice or they address you with a problem, try to stay honest and find a solution. Trust is important on the internet too. Especially when people don’t have a pre-existing relationship with you, they need to trust you before they buy your products.
• Use the Right Words. After you learn who your audience is, try and learn their language too. Use their lingo naturally. Writing for an audience of lawyers, for example, is different than writing for an audience of restaurant owners. Also, people will feel more important when you address them with “you” and “your” instead of “us” and “our.” Oh, and, embrace the words “I,” “me” and “my.” The key to gaining your audience’s’ trust is to get personal and make them see in you as a person who has a solution to their problems and is willing to help.
• Become a Storyteller. I’m not saying you should start your blog post with “once upon a time” but try to integrate a story here and there that proves that your solutions work. At the same time, keep the instructions very clear so people can act on it without having to read your words too many times before they understand what you are trying to say.
• Spread the Word. After you have created the best content you can, it is time to promote it. Don’t be shy about using social media to promote your content or reach out to influencers in your industry to do so. Promoting your content is as important as creating it, and if the content is good, it will promote itself, without you putting too much effort into it.

If you want to learn more about how to create content that your audience will love, check this article here.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Some tips on how to get your business found online.

• Make Sure Your Website Works Properly. Nothing is more annoying that having to wait for a page to load. Chances are you will leave the page before it loads. You know what they say, if you don’t like something, don’t make someone else deal with it. You have to keep your bounce rate (percentage of people who leave your site after seeing 1 page) as low as possible, and one of the ways to do it is to make sure that your website is loading fast. Slow load time decreases time spent on sites.
• Keywords Are Important. Yes, using the right keywords will help you increase your website rankings on search engine. No, it is not old-fashioned and it definitely still works. Make sure you use them correctly and place them in your title, in the first paragraph, image title name, internal links, and head titles. Also, don’t forget about the long-tail keywords, as they are very important as well and they sure do make the difference. Try to come up with phrases people would use to search for your product.
• Fresh content. Try to keep you content fresh as the publication date is very important – searchers tend to look for fresh, new content all the time.
• On-site optimization. Optimize your meta description and your URL format.
• Choose a Friendly Interface. It’s very important that your website is intuitive and easy to use. People want easy access to your content so try to make it easy for them to find it by choosing the right colors, the right theme and creating main pages that they can access from your homepage. Also, don’t forget to include a “contact us” page and a “reviews and testimonials” one to prove that you are trustworthy and have experience in your field.
• Reviews Are Important Too. It is important to have some reviews on your website, but it is more important to have your business listed on important reviews sites such as Google My Business, Yelp or Facebook and even local reviews sites. Also, always try to encourage your customers to leave you reviews.
• Social Media. Some studies have shown that people would rather check your social media accounts than your actual website. With that in mind, make sure you are visible on social media, and your accounts are up to date and offer the support and information people are looking for.
• Going Global. Although it is better to have only one website for your business and all the products and services you are offering rather than creating a website for every single one of them, if your business is present in more than one city or country, you should create unique landing pages for each and every one of them.

Continue to read this article on how to become an expert in SEO in 30 days and this one on how to write blog posts that rank on first page of search engines, by using SEO.

Keywords Research

• The More Isn’t Always the Merrier. Now, that you know keywords are important for your visibility, you must also understand that using too many of them, won’t do you any good. The most important thing is to understand which keywords work best for you and using them to get the best outcome. It is a long-term process, so you always have to monitor your results and make different adjustments based on what your audience is looking for and what they respond to.
• Choose the Best Keywords. Instead of putting the effort in using every keyword that may be relevant to your business, choose the best ones and focus on them. As I have mentioned before, originality is key when it comes to content and using the most searched words will not work every time. You need to find the ones that your audience is looking for to get results.

Here is a beginner’s guide on how to research your keywords that I recommend you to read it fully.

Build Backlinks

• Find Relevant Communities. One of the easiest ways to gain new readers is by building backlinks. To get good quality links, you must reach out to relevant communities in your niche such as bloggers, influencers or even press or publications. You can also use different forums and chats to acquire links.
• Prioritize. Now that you know which communities are important to your business, it is time to decide which are the most important ones and which ones are the easiest to get. After you have reached out to them, try and be objective about your results and see if your strategy has worked or not. If it hasn’t, you have to go over it again and see what didn’t work out and what you can change about is so you can obtain the backlinks you want.

Read this full article to find 33 ways to build backlinks for SEO

Gaining More Traffic

• Comment on Blogs. Many bloggers tend to leave a short comment saying just “great post, ” but that is a very poor strategy and most likely, won’t get you anywhere. You must leave a more explicit comment, analyzing what the other person wrote, sympathize with his/her opinion, providing similar tactics, and so on. Either way, the important thing is that you must look interested in their post, you prove that you have read it (not just scrolled through the images) and have a valid response, backed up by arguments.
• Search for Q&A Sites. People have questions all the time, and surprisingly, many of them choose to ask strangers on the internet for help rather than their friends. Make sure you find the topics that involve questions from your niche and answer them properly. You can answer briefly and leave a link to your website to prove what you said, or you can give a thoughtful answer with a link to previous posts you wrote. Either way, make sure your answer is relevant to the topic and helps the person that asked the question. You can also recommend your product directly, but make sure you always start with a disclaimer.
• LinkedIn. Find relevant groups for your business and try to connect with the people from those groups. Endorse them for skills you consider they demonstrated having and reach out to people who may help your business’s visibility.
• Social Media. Social media platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter are like the land of people who always have an opinion to share and are always looking for something new to discover and experience. Find relevant groups on Facebook that you can use to promote your business (there are so many groups on Facebook nowadays that it will be hard not to find at least ten groups relevant to your niche). Create catchy content for that group that will make you visible to the people in it and try to connect with as many people as possible. Leave comments on other posts and always respond to the comments other people leave for you.

For more relevant advice, here you can find a full article on how to grow inbound traffic by 300% in only six months.

Guest Posting

• Find Relevant Topics. Before starting to look for guest posting opportunities, try and understand which topics would be relevant for your audience and what would be helpful for them.
• Find the People You Need. Maybe there are already some people you are following on social media and think a collaboration with them would be good for the both of you. Sit down with your laptop and compose a friendly email in which you are proposing them to write a guest post on their blog. Worst case scenario? They might say no. Best case scenario? They will be pleased to work with you, and you will gain a long-term collaboration. You can also search for guest post opportunities on Google, for example. Just write your “keyword” and “guest post” or “write for us” and see what you can find. You will be surprised how many opportunities are out there.

If you don’t know what topics to choose, here are four ways to find the best blog topics for your audience.

Conclusion

That’s all folks!

For every topic I’ve discussed in this article, I’ve included a link to other articles that would be very useful and I strongly recommend you to read them and try to intake as much information as you can.

The Hubspot blog is an amazing resource with great posts all about online marketing. The content has great insights for any marketer from novice to expert.

I often find new insights from their posts, and I’ve been reading all about and doing online marketing for years.