There are a lot of digital marketing channels. The book Traction lists 19 of them, including:
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Content marketing
Email marketing
Social and display ads
Since you’re running your website alone, it would be impossible in terms of time, effort and resources to execute on every marketing channel. Instead, we recommend focusing on just one area of digital marketing.
But which channel should you choose? Let’s look at the pros and cons of three popular channels.
Online advertising
This involves buying ads on platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Generally speaking, this strategy is great for getting traffic to your site fast.
However, if you’re a complete beginner, this channel may be on the risky side. Managing online ads is not simply a matter of turning it on and letting the traffic flow. You’ll still need some knowledge and experience so you don’t end up losing all your money.
So if you’re able to set aside some budget to test and learn this channel, go ahead. Otherwise, it might not be the one for you.
Social media marketing
This involves building a following on social media and driving traffic from these platforms. You should be familiar with them. Plus, since it’s free to post content, experimentation is easy.
This could be an ideal channel to start with.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
However, bear in mind that social media marketing is not just casually posting something on your Instagram every few days. Each platform is akin to its own country. To do well, you’ll have to understand the “culture”—what makes it tick, what users want to see, the types of content that perform, and so on.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO is the practice of optimizing pages to rank high in search engines like Google.
The great thing is that once you’re ranking, you’ll be getting free, passive, and consistent traffic from search engines.
However, the downside is that it takes a lot longer for it to work. You’ll need patience to see results. But it is rewarding.
NOT SURE WHICH CHANNEL TO CHOOSE?
Start with SEO. Yes, of course we’re biased. But we’d still recommend it based on a few reasons:
It is free to start. Unlike online ads, you don’t need money to start an SEO campaign;
There are tons of free SEO tools around;
It is one of the only few long-term scalable customer acquisition channels;
The skills you learn in SEO (e.g., content writing, outreach, link building, content promotion, etc.) are easily transferable to other facets of digital marketing.