35 Successful Bloggers Share Their Best Digital Marketing Strategy

Nowadays, many bloggers have decided to stop blogging as a mere hobby, but instead, focus on actually making money from their writing efforts.

It’s a trend that’s exploding like wildfire.

More and more people realise they can make money from home (even while they sleep) using the internet.

More importantly… business owners have jumped on this trend and those profiting from the Internet understand the power a strong SEO digital marketing strategy (whether that is via Blogging, Paid Traffic, SEO or Social Media) can add to their bottom line.

We all know the lifeblood of any business- big or small is more clients!

That’s why we decided to interview 33 influential bloggers around the Internet to let us in on their secrets and reveal:

The Best Digital Marketing Strategy Business Owners Should Implement To Get More Clients?

We received a variety of answers, ranging from content marketing to social media promotion, paid advertising, search engine optimization, to creating a product-centered on the needs of your targeted audience.

So, without any further introduction let’s find out what the experts had to say:

Talia Wolf – TaliaWolf.com

~ Talia helps businesses build and execute conversion optimization programs using emotional targeting, persuasive design, consumer psychology and real-time data to generate more revenues, leads, engagement, and sales.

It is a well-known fact that it is 5 TIMES more cost-effective to retain customers than gain new ones. While you keep your main focus on getting more new clients, you may be losing out on huge business potential with your existing customers.

My biggest recommendation would be building a conversion optimization strategy that connects personally with your site visitors and not only turns them into customers but focuses on turning them into loyal ones.

Everything from the first step in your funnel (the landing page or ad for example) to the last has a huge impact on your customer’s journey and how they will continue with you. You have a higher chance of converting that visitor into a customer if you focus on:

Being customer centric
Clearly highlighting the value of your service (not the features and pricing)
and make it about them (telling their story, not yours)

However, it doesn’t stop there. Highlight the sense of community, support and ongoing relationships you have with your customers right in the first step of the funnel. This will help you not only turn more visitors into customers but retain them for the long run.

In short – don’t just focus on getting their business, focus on building a meaningful relationship with them that lasts.

Zac Johnson – ZacJohnson.com

~ Zac is an entrepreneur and a super affiliate, with nearly 20 years of experience in the online marketing space.

Here is a simple (yet extremely effective) 3-point strategy for content creation and digital marketing.

1 – Know Your Audience / Niche Down as Much as Possible

Before creating a digital marketing strategy or even writing your first post, you need to first know why you are creating content and who it is for. The best way to accomplish this is to simply niche down as much as possible, then create content for a specific audience or task.
A great example of this would be to niche down “sports” (sports>basketball>skills>jump training). Anyone who searching for jump training obviously wants to know how to jump higher, which makes it easy for you to create content for this audience. You can see a full breakdown of this process here. Best of all, the same model works in any niche.

2 – Create an Actionable Guide or Resource for Your Audience

Once you found your audience and niche market, it’s time to create content around a specific need or service. Again, sticking with the concept of “jump training”, anyone searching for this will likely want to learn how to dunk, jump higher and do exercises to accomplish this. More often than not, when someone is searching for something so specific, they are going to spend some money on the process as well.
This means you can create an action plan for them to accomplish their goal, or review/recommend other online services to help with this process. These ten content creation tips will help with the process of coming up with content ideas, what to write about and where to get quality references from.

3 – Promote on Mass Scale and Implement Shareable Content

The last step in the process is to promote your content, gain backlinks and increase social shares. An effective way to accomplish this is to reach out other sites within your niche and see if they would like to link back to your resource and include it within one of their articles. For this to work, you need to create really amazing content. Guest blogging also works extremely well.

If you want to step up your content promotion even further, think about how you can add shareable content within your article as well. Infographics are a great way to accomplish this. Check out these expert tips on infographics and how content creators around the world are using shareable content to increase traffic, backlinks, and mentions to their own sites.

This is a simple 3-step process that anyone can follow to find success. It will take some time and effort, but it definitely works like a charm!

Jan Koch – WPMastery.xyz

~ Jan shows online entrepreneurs how to generate more revenue from their WordPress websites. He creates WordPress tutorials for non-techies.

I don’t think that there’s „the best“ digital marketing strategy. But there are strategies that get results faster than others. Let me start with the absolute basics and must-haves, which every business owner with a website should have in place:

1) you need solid content on your site, telling your readers exactly what it is that you do, how they benefit from your service, and why they should hire you. Those would be static pages most likely, not blog posts.

2) you need a few high-quality blog articles on your site, some cornerstone content. Those articles should NOT sell, but only provide value to your readers.

3) you need your tracking tools in place, like Google Analytics or Pixels for retargeting on Facebook or Adwords.

4) a simple funnel on your website to capture emails and educate your newsletter subscribers about what it is that you sell

Once you have these three steps covered, you can start promoting your content to a relevant audience of potential buyers using paid traffic. That gives faster insights about your market and your offer than relying on organic traffic.

You’ll see which part of your audience responds to what type of content, get traffic to your site right away, and will be able to adjust depending on the feedback and results you’re getting.

Sarah Arrow – Sarkemedia.com

~ Sarah helps thousands of entrepreneurs improve their websites, blog better and generate more leads with just a few daily tweaks.

I’d say the best digital marketing strategy to gain more clients is to have a digital marketing strategy in the first place. A business owner has to know who their ideal clients are, their demographic and their psychographic data. A successful digital marketing strategy is built around this avatar.

The next step would be to create your content style good so that your brand voice is consistent across your marketing strategy. When your brand voice is consistent, you can build rapport and connection with potential clients at a faster pace.

Once you have your avatar and content style guide created, you need to focus on the main platform of your digital marketing strategy. If your client avatar is at home on Facebook, that’s where you set up the base. If they prefer Linkedin, that’s where you go too.

Moving the ideal client one step closer to your goal is the question behind everything you create and share as part of your digital marketing strategy

One goal of your content is to attract the right clients and then direct them to your website and your email list. As you move your reader from one space to the next you build trust. How does that work?

Our minds have evolved for millennia, this means if you’re moving around with someone you’re doing so because you like them. The movement from social media to website to email list facilitates the know/like/trust factor that digital marketing needs.

The final stage of your digital marketing strategy is to focus on converting the reader into a client, I’m assuming here that you’re a business owner and that more clients are your end goal. This is where knowing your ideal client really comes together for you because as you’ve built up rapport you’ve gained an insight into them and their needs. The email content and sales pages you send out to them

This is where knowing your ideal client really comes together for you because as you’ve built up rapport you’ve gained an insight into them and their needs. The email content and sales pages you send out to them speak to this need.

When you speak only to your ideal clients, you’ll find that your engagement rates and social proof significantly increase. What’s not to love about that?

Elizabeth Bradley

~ Elizabeth is a holistic, creative writer and blog mentor for life and health coaches. Her work has been featured on sites like Tiny Buddha, Olyvia, The Branded Solopreneur, and Cameron Diaz’ blog.

The best strategy comes from first knowing your Ideal clients/customers extremely well. Where do they spend their time online? How ( and where) do they consume content? How are your competitors marketing to their customers?

After taking this all into account, you can then craft a digital strategy that’s right for your unique business.

Blogging and content marketing is one excellent way to show your customers that you understand them and exhibits how your business can help them overcome the problem your product/service is designed to help them with.

Almost any business can benefit from having their own blog IF they write high-quality content on it that again helps potential customers know you get them.

After creating a blog, you’ll need to get traffic to it from SEO, ads, or social media marketing so that your posts get in front of your Ideal clients.

Lilach Bullock LilachBullock.com

~ Lilach is a social media expert, consultant, trainer and professional speaker.

I think that a good digital marketing strategy should include different channels, not just one. But right now, one of the biggest, most successful strategies in digital marketing is content marketing.

Although it’s been around for a while, it feels like only in recent years has it really started to gain ground and businesses have really started to get it.

Content marketing is not just about having a blog that you update whenever you have some free time; a good content marketing strategy will include different types of content, on different channels, that provide value to audiences and lead to more subscriptions, downloads, customers and a better, longer-lasting relationship between business and consumer.

Sean Smith – SimpleTiger.com

~ Sean is the co-founder and content director of SimpleTiger where he is leading the social strategy and content marketing team.

I strongly believe the primary digital marketing strategy that business owners should implement to get more clients is a solid content marketing strategy targeted at their most influential customer base.

If you spread content that informs and educates your customer base, you can gather a large amount of organic traffic and create a following around your business with relative ease.

Eventually, you will be sitting on a compounding base of traffic that is essentially free because you aren’t paying monthly for it. That’s what I recommend everyone focuses on immediately.

Mi Muba – BeAMoneyBlogger.com

~ Mi is the founder of Be A Money Blogger. He writes about blogging, social media and SEO.

The best digital marketing strategy needs four major steps to build and expand your customer base. These steps are:

1) Identify your most accurate target audience and then get connected with it through social media, discussion forums, commenting on other blogs and vlogs, question-answer forums and guest posting.

2) Bring your target audience to your blog or website by sharing with them content that aims to solve their biggest problems with the ultimate objective of sales promotion of your main products and services to sell to them eventually.

3) Convince your target audience you are the one who can solve their problems, help them improve further and get them easily achieve their objectives by regularly following your blog.

4) Offer them the best services and products to get them rid of those long-standing problems which are a big hurdle in achieving their targeted goals.

Niraj Ranjan Rout – Hiverhq.com

~ Niraj works on programming, customer support and sales, and also contributes to Hiver’s design and UI. He has a B.Tech in Electronics Engineering.

Having a marketing funnel in place is certainly an extremely important strategy, if not the most. Even if you attract millions of leads, if you don’t know what to do with them and how to deal with them, then all your effort comes to naught.

A funnel system is where you map out the customer’s journey from being a total stranger to your product to becoming a lead and later, a customer. Depending on where the prospect is in your funnel, you have strategies in place for them. You plan out aspects like call-to-actions, email newsletters, personalization, offers, etc. based on this.

This system gives you a clear action plan and is the best way to optimize all your leads.

I broadly like to follow the funnel system below:

Educating the prospect: This is the stage where the prospect doesn’t really understand your product; they have come to you because you promised to solve a problem and now they want to know how.
Generating interest: Now they know what your product can do broadly and you have managed to generate their interest. Next step is to give value related to your product/service to the customer in exchange for some information about the customer such as an email ID. One example would be giving them a free eBook.
Creating desire for the product: Through your emails and newsletters, you have managed to build a desire for your product. Now it’s time to take it one-on-one. Offer a consultation and give a complete demo of your product, for example.
Causing action: The final step is where the prospect actually becomes a customer. This is where you discuss pricing, offers, payment etc. One good offer or one convincing phone call is probably all you will need at this stage to drive action.

Felix Tarcomnicu – Cross Promo

~ Felix is the CEO & Co-Founder at Cross Promo, the first cross-promotion platform for SaaS and online businesses. You can connect with him on Twitter.

I’ve used most marketing strategies that are available today, and several ones worked great. Out of these, the ones that have given the best return on investment are content marketing, email marketing, and SEO.

However, the one that I considered the best one is lesser-known and used. It’s called cross-promotion, and it’s very simple. You promote your partner’s services, and they promote your services to their users.

It’s a mutual benefit that helps you reach a quality audience in less time than you would with most of the other marketing channels.

Big companies are already doing cross-promotion, but they prefer to keep it a secret and not making a huge deal out of it.

Minuca Elena – MinucaElena.com

~ I am a freelancer that creates expert roundups. My posts provide quality content, bring huge traffic and get backlinks. I also help bloggers connect with influencers.

To get more clients you need to focus on your customers’ satisfaction. Your clients are the best ambassadors for your brand. Make sure to always over-deliver, respect deadlines and provide services or products of excellent quality.

Include testimonials on your site. You can also create case studies where you show results from your clients.

When you are talking with people who are interested in buying from you, be less focused on the features of your product. Pay attention to what needs the person has and explain how their life will improve thanks to your work.

The question of your client you need to answer: What is in it for me?

Ron Sela – RonSela.com

~ Ron is a Profit-Driven Marketer who was recently named one of the Top 100 Influencers in Social Media Marketing by Onalytica. His unique talent lies in helping businesses increase their bottom line by creating innovative digital marketing experiences.

In my opinion, the best digital marketing strategy that business owners should implement to get more clients is influencer marketing. Even though it has been around for centuries, influence marketing has a further reach than it has ever had in the past, thanks to social media platforms and the popularity of blogging.

Not only can influencer marketing reach much more people, but it can also be narrowed down to very specific niches and is no longer limited to the “big-time” celebrities, to have the most productive results.

With the right influencer marketing strategy, a person who has a following and trust relationship with their fans can spread the word for you and represent your business through sharing. It is very much a hand-in-hand business relationship.

Knowing your specific goal, the best social media platform(s) that appeal to your specific audience, and having a fair compensation plan in place are the main keys for success with this form of marketing. Another great tip is to let the influencer you’re working with be genuine, after all, the connection they have with their followers is because they built that bond, they know their fans well, and their fans are genuinely interested in them.

James Norquay – ProsperityMedia.com

~ James has over 10 years’ experience in digital marketing and SEO in highly competitive verticals in the USA/ Australia.

It really depends on what the business is and what their goal is and what the timeline for implementing the strategy is.

For example, if you are an event launching in 10 days, you would use a paid search strategy to drive traffic and customers quickly.

If it is more a long-term play and expensive B2B niche by CPC, you would use Content and SEO as a key way to drive customers.

Kash Lalka – BestExpertReviews.com

~ Kash is the co-founder of Best Expert Reviews. She compares various products and suggests various options based on price and features on her website.

I use a combination of search and social to get traffic to my website. Today with Google Sandbox, websites take time to rank and you need to have a lot of patience if you want to get traffic only from search.

That is why it is always good to mix your SEO activities with social promotion. Social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Flipboard send a lot of traffic to your website. This traffic also helps show Google that your site is an interesting one which helps in ranking it on Google.

Facebook Groups are an excellent platform to get traffic. Pinterest too is A great platform to get traffic. Especially of your images go viral, you can get a lot of traffic to your website.

So my suggestion is that have a mix of social and search so that you get the best traffic to your website.

Chris Makara – Chris Makara

~ Chris is a digital strategist. He is specialized in SEO, social media, and interactive marketing.

Every business is different, so what might work best for one company may not work well for another. With that said, I think a great opportunity for businesses to get more clients is to seek out a way to find more people with similar characteristics to their existing customers.

And one of the best ways to do this is through Facebook Ads. Particularly with look-a-like audiences.

Basically, you will upload a list of your current customers’ email addresses and then Facebook will build out an audience composed of people who essentially match the characteristics of your current customer list.

Then you will need to create ads to market to this audience.

Ideally, since this new audience aligns with the characteristics of your current customer base you should have a high success rate converting this audience into new clients.

Of course, there are lots of details involved with doing this, but a strategy revolving around this approach will result in more clients.

Fervil Von Tripoli – FervilVon.com

~ Fervil is a search engine optimization specialist who has 4 years of mixed experience in SEO, internet marketing, and blogging.

Digital marketing is a very broad spectrum. It would cover social media marketing, paid search, email marketing, or SEO (to name a few) and indeed, there are a lot of ways on how to get clients on the web using the methods I mentioned.

For the strategy, you first need to determine if you’re aiming for a long-term or short-term result and then assess your market. Do you have an idea of where’s the favorite hangout of your prospect clients? If not, then build a buyer persona, narrow down and have a laser-focus campaign towards these audiences.

Buyer persona via Facebook adverts

Source: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0263/8267/files/Facebook_Advertising.png?2018

For me, the best digital marketing strategy with immediate results, creating an FB ad campaign and allow a decent marketing budget for FB advertising would be ideal considering Facebook is still a titan in the list of social media platforms.

Nevertheless, it really depends on the business model and the target audience of the money site or business you want to. I have seen many webmasters fail to get results with Facebook but have been booming in LinkedIn or Twitter.

As for long-term digital marketing strategy especially for online marketing or SEO service providers, I personally vouch for SEO. Rank a site and have a claim on getting results with your SEO campaign – make it your case study and show it to your prospective clients.

Once they see solid results, then there’s no need to hard-sell your service. Pick a niche where you want to get your pool of clients.

Contact the webmasters of the sites in the second to the last page of Google of the keywords you have already assessed (one which you are confident you can rank well), these websites need a very good SEO and I believe their webmasters are also keen to find someone who can help them with their businesses. 🙂

Dennis Seymour – LeapFroggr.com

~ Dennis is an online entrepreneur, author, podcaster and blogger. He writes about SEO, business, and startups. He is also co-founder of Leap Froggr, a digital marketing company.

When it comes to starting with digital marketing, I have a very basic strategy for those starting out. They just need to set up each of these and go from there.

1. Perfect on-page SEO

2. Establish Social Media Presence

3. Run Ads to Test landing page conversions and gather data

I call it my marketing tri-force.

Do really good SEO right from the start (I’m creating a course for this soon over at http://perfectwordpressseo.com) and understand just the basics of content marketing.

Be sure to have a social presence ONLY in the places where your market is so you don’t divert too much focus.

Finally, you NEED to test running ads. Both on Social, Google and even on different blogs. Why? It helps you craft your messages better and faster. You’ll be able to gather a lot of good information that you can use on your site that helps with conversion optimization as well as for your content marketing and overall SEO.

Just do it one at a time if you are starting out. Always know that the work you put in now might not reap results as quickly as you’d hope but down the line, you will always start seeing results. You just need to keep putting in the work.

It’s very much like what you do in life. You get rewarded soon for working on something versus those that just sit around and wait for stuff to come to them.

Albert Mora – Seolution

~ Albert is the CEO of Seolution, an SEO and content marketing agency, founded in 1997, with 1200+ clients from over 40 countries.

1. Choose 10 to 15 target long-tail keywords with an optimum popularity/competition ratio (you can get the popularity data from Adwords, and use the following query to measure competition all int title:mydomain.com “keyword”)

2. Create an epic piece of content for each target keyword (at least 2000 words per post)

3. Use Facebook ads to promote each post to your target audience

4. Perform an outreach campaign to get backlinks from high authority sites

5. Create a lead magnet (a free video course, a downloadable checklist PDF…)

6. Use Leadpages to create a Lead box inside each post you create

7. Set up an email funnel to “warm-up” your leads

8. Create a retargeting campaign focused on those visitors to your site that didn’t convert.

James Reynolds – SEOSherpa.com

~ James is the Founder and Managing Director of SEO Sherpa, which along with our sister Google Adwords management agency called Click Jam makes up the company Veravo.

Buy advertising space on post-purchase thank-you pages.

Why thank you pages?

Well, it’s simple…

Because only proven buyers and action takers land up on thank-you pages.

Here are a few tips to choosing thank-you pages on which to promote your business:

1. Pick websites with high visitor numbers and spending on paid traffic. If sites are spending a lot on advertising, you can be pretty sure they are converting a good chunk of their traffic. This means more visitors to your thank you page offer.

2. Look for websites with complementary but non-competing offers. For example, an SEO service provider might buy space on a website designer's thank you page and a wedding photographer on a site selling wedding invites. Ask yourself, what do people buy before they buy my product or service? Then, advertise there.

3. Get creative when crafting your deal. Few sites you approach will have thought about selling ad space on their thank you pages, therefore you can position a deal however you want. Monthly rental, cost-per-lead or even affiliate commissions, there are no rules at all.

The beauty of thank-you page advertising is that you are getting in front of proven buyers at exactly the moment they are most likely to buy again.

Jon Dykstra – FatStacksBlog.com

~Jon is a wildly successful Internet marketer known for his Fat Stacks products.

As a long time small business marketer, the best digital marketing strategy is a simple 2-step process which is as follows:

1. SEO: Because search traffic is intent-based marketing, the best strategy any small business can incorporate is local SEO. While there is a fair amount of up-front effort involved, a solid SEO strategy that attracts a business’ target audience will yield an insanely high ROI in the long run.

2. Have a high converting website: Traffic to a website that fails to turn visitors into clients renders traffic useless. Therefore, it’s imperative a business has a design and offer a user experience and include conversion tactics that turn visitors into customers.

There is definitely a lot involved in this 2-step process, but if done right can in itself build a successful business.

David Krauter – Websites That Sell

~ David Krauter is first a marketer first and a “techy SEO geek” second… he is the founder of Websites That Sell providing Website & SEO services with a focus on more traffic, leads, phone calls & sales – not just rankings…

Hands down the best buying traffic for local business owners on the Internet comes from Google – there is no better place to drive hot and heavy prospects to your offers than via Google (be that via Adwords or SEO).

Adwords we look at as a short-term solution – quick traffic to finance a long-term solution which is SEO.

We look at SEO as a long-term solution that will drive traffic & leads long into the future.

Mark Verkhovski – American Webmasters Association

~ Mark is the president of The American Webmasters Association, a professional association founded in 2003 to connect and support the individuals and organizations responsible for creating, managing and marketing websites.

The best digital marketing strategy that a business owner can employ is to have his website as his main marketing platform. A website is a 24/7 salesman for your business. Though when you think about digital marketing, you think of things like email, social, search, visitors, etc. But people often don’t realize that their digital marketing strategy should start with their website.

You need to pay attention to satisfy visitors’ requirements when they come to your website. Things like testimonials on the website, sales pages, email opt-ins, etc play a huge impact when you want to convert a visitor into a customer.

A great website, it is a sales machine that will always make you money. You can even use paid traffic to monetize your website if it converts well into sales.

Louie Luc BuzzNitrous.com

~ Louie has been starting and growing online businesses in the last decade. He developed tools and systems to run things almost in full automation freeing up time to do what he likes best: focus on online business strategy.

The word now is video. Video has been growing exponentially in popularity in the last few years. If you really want to get new customers and move away from your competitors you need to harness the power of video marketing with both of your hands.

Think about all the different channels you can make use of to broadcast your videos to an enormous audience. It’s not just YouTube, there’s also Facebook and Twitter. Don’t forget Instagram and Snapchat too.

Try different formats and the various channels to understand which one provides the greatest return on investment and the lowest cost per acquisition. Be where your potential customers are and make it easy for them by offering something that they might interest in watching (and sharing) in the form of a moving picture: video.

Sean Si SEO Hacker

~ Sean Si is the CEO and Founder of SEO Hacker and Qeryz. A start-up, data analysis and urgency junkie who spends his time inspiring young entrepreneurs through talks and seminars. Check out his personal blog where he writes about starting up two companies and life in general.

Oh my gosh! There are so many things that business owners could implement. I’m at a point in time where I’m paying a lot for high-quality videos to convert my site visitors into leads and sales. So far it has worked really well and I’ve been able to achieve ROI for the video itself at around the 3rd month of its run. That’s a pretty fast turnaround.

You could see the video at work right when you land on the SEO Hacker Services homepage. It’s just a minute long but it explains what we do in a clear, concise way. Plus there are more testimonial videos for those who are really interested to get our services so that pretty much closes the deal for us.

David Leonhardt – SEO-Writer

~ David is the chief SEO (search engine optimizer) and writer. He is also the chief marketing strategist on his blog Seo-Writer.

I think that going mobile is probably the best strategy in most niches. Even in B2B, people are taking their tablets and phones out into the field in the trades, in sales, etc. In an increasingly mobile world, a mobile site is a must.

My preferred option is to go with one, fully responsive website. That makes the website technology-neutral. It can fit any size screen, from mini phones to TV screens, and everything in between, including tablets and phablets, desktops and laptops. Furthermore, it prepares your website for the next crazy thing that will be all the rage next year, that none of us can predict right now.

The main alternative available is to go with AMP – Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages. There are several reasons why, at least for now, I’m avoiding AMP:

· It is not technology-neutral. It is a Google thing.
· It strips down your pages, and you don’t have control of that.
· Google serves up your pages, so you don’t have control over what it does with your website (on mobile).
· Google is switching its main index to mobile, but your AMP site won’t have the inbound links that your responsive site will, so there is a huge SEO question mark if you plan to go with AMP.

However, if you choose to go mobile, do it. Giving mobile users a better experience will increase sales or leads or whatever you are aiming for. A better user experience will also greatly decrease your bounce rate, and that will lead to better rankings.

On the other hand, if your website is not mobile-friendly and your competition is, guess which one will rank better in Google’s index. And Bing’s, too.

Allan Pollett – AllanPollett.com

~ Allan has been an SEO and web marketing specialist, since 1998. He is known as the “SEO Guru” having written several books reputation management, social media, and SEO-related topics. Over the years, he has helped over 1000 businesses get to the top of the organic search results.

There are no one best marketing strategies and not all strategies work for every business. However, here is one strategy that will work for your business. The strategy is simple.

Tap into your existing traffic. Most sites get about 60% of their traffic from Google. To tap into this traffic source involves knowing how Google is giving that traffic to you. Using the Google Console tool you can see which keywords are bringing visitors to your site.

The “Search Analytics” tab shows the ranking, impressions, and click-through rate for the major keywords for your website. If you see a keyword that is poorly ranked but driving clicks then visit the page associated with that keyword.

Look at how well that page is performing in terms of optimization and ability to convert clicks to sales. Improving the page to rank better means more visitors. Improving the ease at which people can convert on a page means more sales. Both of these things will grow your business.
Sometimes a few tweaks can go a long way in improving a website page’s ability to generate more clients for you. This is how you can tap into your existing traffic.

Ian Spencer – ISDigitalMarketing.co.uk

~ Ian has worked in SEO for well over 12 years and now acts as a search marketing consultant for firms based in the UK and is Google Adwords Certified

For me, the biggest strategy is to really understand your market, and then identify where these people are.

I think that SEO and PPC should always be part of any digital marketing strategy, as the audiences from these two aspects are of course huge, but things like paid Facebook advertising, Twitter campaigns, and other elements means that you need to understand where your client is likely to be found, and then form your strategy around and based on this.

It is too easy to spend a load of money and gets no results, so the first thing any business should look at is their own website and get help with sales funnels, as no matter how many people you get on the site, if it is not set up correctly to produce enquiries and sales, then you are simply wasting your time, so this has to be at the forefront of any digital marketing strategy.

Traffic is easy, but conversions are the focus that any business should be looking at improving, as getting ten sales from 100 visitors is of course much better than 1 from 1000, so chasing new traffic and rankings should be the concentration once you fully understand the market and make sure your website is set to sell efficiently to it.

I would also say that Remarketing is still an element that far too many businesses miss out on, and with Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter all offer remarketing elements, this is critical, as only a tiny percentage of customers convert on their first visit, so the need to keep in front of them and encourage them back has never been so important.

Gina Horkey – HorkeyHandBook.com

~ Gina helps people start and grow their own freelance businesses.

Build an email list. Hands down!

Most experts say this is THE ONE THING they would have done earlier. I thought starting mine a few months after launching my business was late (it really wasn’t), but you should set one up ASAP to court prospects and eventually turn them into customers.

Hernan Vazquez – HernanVazquez.com

~ Hernan is an entrepreneur and digital marketer that helps business owners, professionals, freelancers and entrepreneurs to get more leads and sell more stuff using the power of the Internet.

– Combining paid advertising with email list building has proven to be one of the best strategies in terms of ROI and long-term sustainability for many of the businesses I consult with. Having a consistent flow of traffic, clicks and leads to an email list can literally make or break your business.

Facebook, in this case, is one of the best sources of traffic, since the targeting capabilities you have there are par none. How do you set this up? Pretty simple: You just need a lead magnet to gather email addresses, which can be a small solution to a specific problem your audience currently has.

Then you’ll need to set up a follow-up sequence accordingly, that delivers value and sells after you have created enough authority in your prospects’ minds. Those two weapons alone can build your customers and subscribers base like no other.

You can also combine organic traffic, SEO, and offline traffic, but turning paid advertising into profit is the best way of achieving long-term success.

Dominic Wells – OwnYourPage.com

~ Dom is the founder of Human Proof Designs. He teaches people how to succeed with niche marketing websites and offers his own websites for sale.

Many businesses are exhausting themselves chasing new leads and wondering how they can get better quality leads. In truth, the biggest source of new revenue for their business is via their existing customer base, or via those “burned” leads.

Everybody knows that email marketing is essential, but it’s amazing how many businesses are either not emailing their customers or are executing their campaigns wrong.

Get this right and you will have an instant cash injection into your business.

Jon Tromans – Jtid.co.uk

~ Jon is a former broadcaster and new media expert that offers a range of SEO and Digital marketing training.

I’m going to go a little old school and say Email Marketing.

It’s still a really powerful strategy for direct selling, branding, lead generation and just keeping yourself in front of your prospective customers.

The biggest piece of advice I can offer is to invest time and money in creating a quality list. Crap List = Crap Open Rates. Making sure the people on your list are interested in what you do is very important. My second biggest tip is to give people what they want when they join your list. If you offer tips and advice don’t send over sales emails.

A great way to increase open rates, clicks, and leads/sales is to make sure you personalize your emails and not just by saying Hi Dave! Look at location, gender, previous sales data for ways to segment your mailing list into tighter groups. Online stores can target people who have spent a certain amount and multi-branch companies can target locations.

It’s always a good idea to clean your list from time to time by seeing who has not opened an email in the last 3/6 months. Create a separate segment for these people and email them asking if they want to stay on the list, if they don’t engage delete them as they are obviously not interested.

Email Marketing, when done with some thought and care, can bring in new customers and generate sales/leads but it’s always going to be about the quality of the list and what you say. Focus on this and you’ll be off to a great start.

Josiah Nelson – ReadySettle.com

~ Joe started his first company at 12 and at 17, he created a smartwatch company that sold for 8 figures. Last May, he dropped out of college and moved to Manhattan where he started a company that just made its first million.

The best strategy that I’ve found for digital marketing is to work with affiliates. Affiliates are marketers by trade that will drive traffic to your site.

The best part is that if nobody buys your product, you’ve lost nothing as you only pay affiliates on commission.

This is the most effective way that I’ve ever utilized as you get an army of salespeople with little or no upfront costs.

Jan-Willem Bobbink – Notprovided.eu

~ Jan is the Owner of Notprovided, a freelance international SEO consultant and an affiliate marketeer in multiple niches.

There is no best marketing activity or strategy suited for every business. For every product, service, and brand there is a unique composition of the marketing mix required throughout time.

If I should pick one for a starting business, I would say to heavily invest in creating a top-quality product and offer extremely good client service. Initial sales can be driven through paid acquisition: affiliate or paid advertising will do the job.

Since you have a quality product and service, it will do the promotion automatically after that.

Colin Klinkert – Serped

~ Colin is a full-time internet marketer and entrepreneur. He provides consulting services in the area of internet marketing and business development.

As a business owner, you want your company to succeed. Investing in marketing is vital to that success, but being a small business, you can’t splurge on — or spare the time for — expensive campaigns. I too was in the same boat when I started around three years ago.

I tried different marketing strategies talked by marketing gurus, failed at many and luckily, succeed at few. So, here I’ll keep it short and to the point by only talking about the ones that actually worked for my businesses.

Offering a free standalone tool
Integration with other products

Offering a free standalone tool

One of the proven marketing strategies is to create and offer standalone tools as a top-of-the-funnel acquisition method. The objective of these tools is to provide free service that helps build a funnel to pre-qualify users for your primary product offering. It’s fantastic and great fuel for your core product.

One of the famous examples of standalone tools is – Marketing Grader by HubSpot.

Inspired by HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, we also adopted this marketing strategy. We added a similar tool named “Pro Site Auditor” in SERPed.net. It provides the complete audit report for a website.

Our customers use this as a standalone tool to generate new top-of-the-funnel leads for their marketing agencies and use the report to make an argument for the use of their services or offerings to help increase online visibility.

Integration with other products

Integrating your product into or building integration for an existing, often much larger product is another low-hanging fruit option.

There are few examples of successful marketplaces such as – Shopify Marketplace, Slack Marketplace, and Hootsuite. Applications listed in Shopify Marketplace see 10-12 installs per day.

There’s truly no barrier to doing it, only the investment of your time.

Having seen the positive impact of integration for SERPed, we are building integrations with leading SaaS apps for Platform.ly– A platform that runs your whole backend business!

The impact of integration is not just limited to new users acquisition. It is often the entry point to a much deeper relationship and potentially even an acquisition.

Cyril Nicodème – Cnicodeme.com

~ Cyril is a French developer specialized in web architectures. He loves to build web applications in Javascript with powerful RESTful backends in Java or Python.

There is a various set of recognised techniques that help drive growth, and for me, one of them is having awesome customer support.

At VoilaNorbert, we do our best to provide a reply to our customers’ messages in less than 12 hours. Of course, we don’t always respect this rule, but having an answer to your question quickly shows your customers that you care about them.

And they feel more confident to use your service because they know that in the case of a problem, they won’t be stuck with no help.

Moreover, this increases the likelihood that your customer will share your experience with their friends, and it’s always better to have a message that says “They answered my email in a few hours” than “I’m still waiting for their help … it’s been a week now! I think I’m going to use {competitor}”.

Nirav Dave – Capsicum Mediaworks

When it comes to planning a digital marketing strategy a one-size-fits-all approach is not going to be helpful. You need to experiment in order to find out what works best for your business. However, having said, there are a few basic internet marketing techniques that have proven to work well across all platforms. These are;

1. Content Marketing – The most effective tactic, Content marketing should be a core part of your digital marketing strategy. Once you know who your target audience is, what they need and what they are interested in, the next step is to create engaging content that is beneficial and provides value to your audience. Publish high-quality content consistently and you will soon see a rise in your site’s traffic as well as ranking.

2. Search Engine Optimization – No digital marketing strategy is complete without SEO. To improve your site’s visibility, you need to invest time and effort in optimizing your site for users and search engines alike, as it is only then that you would be able to grow your business successfully in the online world.

3. Social Media Marketing – Social promotion and SEO go hand-in-hand. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are a great way to increase brand awareness and garner a large fan following for your brand. Moreover, to achieve success on these platforms, all you have to do is create content that is worth sharing, actively interact with your followers and use tools that are available on these platforms like Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads smartly, to extract the maximum benefits.

Laura Driver – Tillison.co.uk

~ Laura is an experienced content marketer and copywriter, writing for a myriad of clients from all sectors at Tillison Consulting. Her copywriting work has been published on sites such as EasyBuild, Guides For Brides, GenieBelt, Modern Mirror Design and Glocal Media.

I would say the best content marketing strategy comes from knowing your client and the industry inside out, including their competitors. What are they doing that’s working? What keywords are they targeting? What are they writing about? What does your audience want to read about? What do they need? Not only can content marketing bolster your SEO efforts, but it can also really drive leads and conversions. You need to work holistically in content marketing, considering your brand’s expertise and USP and what your audience is actually looking for. In addition to this, Laura recommends carrying out extensive keyword research, as the keywords that’ll come up in the research are those that’ll help bring in organic traffic for your content and website too. It’ll be exactly what your target audience will be entering in Google, so it’s imperative to include those keywords in your content.

Dean Dallman – Red-Fern

~ Dean Is the Content Manager for Red-Fern, an inbound marketing and web design company based in the UK.

What we’ve found working with our partners over the years is that web design and marketing are separate terms, but exist holistically. You can’t have one without the other, and you have to keep upgrading in both areas to have the best success. It’s a domino effect, but a good one!

It takes an analytical, creative and sometimes lucky team to be able to generate the best results from the marketing and web design.

Some areas we always look at when we’re analysing a website are, design, user experience, lead generation, social media, content and SEO.

Jerry Low – Web Hosting Secret Revealed

~Geek dad, SEO data junkie, investor, and founder of Web Hosting Secret Revealed. Jerry has been building Internet assets and making money online since 2004. He loves mindless doodling and trying new food.

While it may be a little too far a stretch to aim for the best digital marketing strategy, two key points I’d like to bring to attention would primarily have to do with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO as you know is many-faceted but there are areas I’ve seen where many websites could increase focus on.

The first is in the usage of keywords. While traditionally there has always been a focus on keywords, with the increasing competition I feel that long-tailed keywords would be more effective. As a rule of thumb, the more complex or specific the long-tailed keyword is, the more likely the ‘fit’ is to be accurate. While this may result in a lower clickthrough rate it is also likely to result in higher conversion rates.

The next area I think more attention can be put towards is the content gap analysis. This helps you identify what areas of content are missing on your site and then you can fill that in. The process is relatively simple – all you need is to follow a few short steps; check for competitor ranking keywords where you are missing out on, see what low competition keywords can use to rank with and then build content around that.

Of course, no matter what you should neglect to leverage internal linking and the power of social media!

Jitendra Vaswani – Bloggers Ideas

~ Jitendra Vaswani is a digital marketing ninja, international keynote speaker and an influential digital marketer founder of kickass Internet Marketing blog BloggersIdeas.com.

During his more than 6+yrs long of expertise in Digital Marketing, Jitendra has been a marketing consultant, trainer, speaker and author of “Inside A Hustler’s Brain: In Pursuit of Financial Freedom” which has sold over 20,000 copies, worldwide. He has trained 3000+ digital marketing professionals to date and has been conducting Digital marketing workshops across the globe for 5+ yrs. His ultimate goal is to help people build businesses through digitization make them realize that dreams do come true if you stay driven.

Advice

Remarketing :

Another critical aspect of digital marketing is going after prospects again with remarketing strategy if they didn’t respond to your site checkout or didn’t take any actions for the first time. This works by tracking these visitors through cookies and creating new ads on related sites.

So remarketing is going to be one of the key digital strategies that every brand has to adapt.

Mobile-Friendly:

Reaching your targeted customers by smartphone is more important now and that’s going to be so important to have your business website mobile-friendly.

Making your site conform to mobile screens is one of the most essential parts of digital marketing. Talk to your developer and ask him to make responsive site design on every device.

Have you thought about how you can take on a digital marketing campaign without having to spend too much money? While you can save money doing email marketing and inbound digital techniques, hiring influencers can do a massive impact on your business.

Influencer Marketing:

You can simply look out for influencers in your targeted niche and see how that influencer interacts with his/her audience. Engagement through comments & views can help you determine the actual ROI of your campaign. Don’t go for influencers with a lot of following always go very niche-specific and do cross-check if those likes & views are real or fake.

Influencer marketing is proving a game-changer for many fortune 500 companies and it can help your business in 2019 too.

# # #

Thank you so much to all the bloggers that contributed to this expert roundup! I’m curious to find out what is your favourite answer so post your feedback in the comments below.

Also, if you feel you’ve learned something useful from this post, then share it with your friends and help up us spread the word about it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Minuca creates expert roundups that provide quality content and bring huge traffic. She also helps bloggers connect with influencers. You can contact her at her blog, MinucaElena.com.