Many entrepreneurs at some point will have Googled “What is the quickest way to make money?” or something similar, however that’s the wrong mindset to have, as you’ll end up diving headfirst into one get-rich-quick scheme after another, often ending up worse off than when you first started. Instead, you should focus on persisting with one long-term marketing strategy to ensure that your business is profitable for the foreseeable future.
In this article, I shall explain a few areas where you should be investing your time and effort into in order to establish long-term business opportunities. Following that, I will further clarify how you should approach these long-term marketing strategies in order to better your competition and to stay motivated when times seem tough.
Blogging
As a blogger myself I know how frustrating it can be to write post after post and see no change in website traffic. If it weren’t for the fact that I know that my blog has been helping others in the process, then I probably would have packed it in ages ago!
Blogging is a fantastic way of bringing traffic to your site and establishing yourself as a credible expert in your respective field, but it can take a ridiculously long time to achieve that. How quickly you can start making money from your blog really depends on the amount of content that you’re producing, the quality of said content and the niche that you’re writing about.
If your writing niche speaks to a specific audience and doesn’t have much competition, then obviously you’re going to see some great results a lot sooner than someone writing about a huge, and general niche like marketing (like me).
YouTube
At this moment in time, I’m not producing any YouTube content, but, it’s not to say that I don’t have extensive knowledge of the social media platform. From the many YouTubers that I have followed, most if not all of them have mentioned how long it took them to actually get their first lot of subscribers, and even though it often felt like they were talking to a brick wall, it was their determination that led to their success.
Famous YouTuber Lilly Singh once spoke about how it took her a whole year of posting videos for her channel to suddenly blow up with views and subscribers. Until that point, she had been struggling to gain any momentum with her channel and had considered giving up, which she would have done had it not been for the fact that she was having fun making the videos. Since then, Lilly’s launched her own late-night talk show over on NBC. Crazy.
Much like the company that owns it, YouTube is a search engine. This means that your videos will only rank in search queries that relate to your content, and will do so in accordance with how relevant it is to the user’s search query. Again, the quality of your content will play a huge factor in where you rank in the list of results, as well as how many views, likes and saves the video gets too (virality).
With all things considered, your videos can receive next-to-no views or engagement for months on end, but it can just take one update to the YouTube algorithm, a viral trend or the sheer quality/quantity of your posts for your channel to just blow up with traffic. This is fantastic considering that your video can still be ranking at the top of search results for years on end, which is otherwise known as evergreen content.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (“SEO”) needs to be mentioned as it is heavily impacted by my two previous points. When it comes to how high you rank on searches, Google takes a lot of factors into consideration, but most importantly it focuses on the quality of your content, the amount of said content as well as how much traffic your site is receiving from other sources.
With that being said you can see how important a blog may be to your Google ranking, as it’s a fantastic way to increase both the quality and quantity of information on your website. Social media platforms, such as YouTube, can further help your search ranking as they allow you to send traffic to your website via engaging posts, stories and other inbound links.
As already mentioned though it can take a long to establish your blog, and be equally as difficult to develop a successful YouTube channel (or other social media account). Naturally, this is why it can take time to earn Google’s trust and have them ranking you higher in relevant search results.
Not only that, but Google also tend to have a waiting period of six months or over before they’ll even consider your website or blog, as they need a good reason as to why you should be ranking on the first page of their platform, which is why it can take bloggers a long time to gain any momentum when it comes to traffic.
Another social media platform that features an awesome search engine, is Pinterest. I genuinely believe that Pinterest is still one of the few underrated social media platforms among us today, and is still yet to be tapped into its full potential. The platform itself revolves around image-based ‘pins’ that contain links to various destinations, for instance, you might upload an image with a link to your latest blog post or product page.
Pinterest organizes its pins according to relevance (and quality) based on your search query, much like Google and YouTube, and will often rank older pins, purely because it’s established itself as a quality pin/link. The evergreen nature of the platform, and the ease of adding links, is a great reason as to why you should start posting content on Pinterest today to promote your blog or eCommerce site.
It must be said though that along with blogging, YouTube and SEO in general, Pinterest does take a rather long time to start gathering momentum, and traffic for your website. For many users, this can be more effort than it’s worth, which is why I always recommend that people check out Tailwind for Pinterest.
Tailwind is an amazing tool, and partner of Pinterest, that allows you to schedule hundreds of your pins, and the content of others, automatically over the next coming weeks and months. It also has a wonderful group feature called ‘Tribes’ which is a collection of other pinners within your niche (i.e. blogging, marketing, eCommerce etc) that all pally up together and share each other’s content to their respective followers. Perfect marketing tool for long-term success.
My favourite part about Tailwind though is the ‘Smart Loop’, which creates an automatic loop to repin the same pin/content every few months, which if you build up a large number of pins can mean that you can have pins being shared every single day without having to touch a thing. This is an excellent way to passively boost your website traffic and I would recommend it to anyone interested in blogging or eCommerce.
Affiliate Programs
So you’ve been picking up a few clients and they’re happy with your work, but it was something of a one-off project. Regardless, it’s always recommended that get your previous clients working for you and recommending your services to others, as without those referrals you could find yourself in a situation where your go-to marketing funnel has slowed down, all of your leads have dried up and you’ve got no money coming in.
Happy clients are an untapped goldmine when it comes to finding new business, as a referral from a trustworthy source can often remove any client scepticism that you might normally face with other sales methods, such as cold calling or emailing. So why wouldn’t you make use of the clients that you’ve got and have them singing their praises for you?
Well, it’s unlikely that your client will actually promote your services unless it comes up in conversation with a friend or family member. So, it’s worthwhile giving them some added incentive for them to do so more willingly. That incentive can come in the form of an affiliate program, in which you offer your affiliates (i.e. happy clients) a percentage of any sale you make off the back of their referral.
This strategy proves to be a win-win for both parties, as you’ve added another client to your business, who can then refer you to others in the future, and the referee receives a monetary prize for their goodwill. Depending on your service, you can offer an up-front percentage, an on-going (recurring) percentage or a flat fee of either.
How To Succeed With Long-Term Marketing
Knowing where to invest your time and effort is all well and good, but without the right mindset you can potentially end up losing a lot of money, patience and hair. Before you set off to start a blog, YouTube channel or Pinterest account it’s worth reading through the following points, to ensure that you’re approaching each long-term marketing strategy with the right mindset.
Be Patient
All of the above strategies will take time to build up, as blogging and YouTube can take upwards of a year to get some decent traction. That’s why you need to look at the bigger picture and ask yourself if you want to keep hustling for the next paycheck, or whether you want to build your business up to a point where it can bring in clients like clockwork and even run itself for the foreseeable future.
Have Tunnel-Vision
When it comes to social media I often recommend that you focus solely on one area or platform, and this is no different. These are long-term marketing strategies, meaning that they’re going to take a long time. One thing is for sure though, it’s going to take even longer if you’re chopping and changing between one idea to another.
To succeed with the above, you need to focus all of your energy on one particular area (e.g blogging) until you can afford to outsource certain tasks to others. As an example, once you’ve shared 100 quality posts and have thousands of people visiting your site each day, you can then outsource the blogging to others and focus on creating YouTube videos for each post, or vice versa.
Set yourself actionable targets
For me, my actionable targets were to write 25 posts, then 50, 75 and even 100 blog posts on my website. Notice that I’m focusing less on the number of website visitors I get and more on the amount of good, quality content that I’m creating. It also helps to work out your bigger goals in reverse, for instance, if you wanted to write 100 posts in a year then you’d just need to write a new post every 3 or 4 days – which isn’t too difficult, right?
Understand your limits
On the other side of working hard to hit your targets, there is a chance you’ll overwork yourself and burn yourself out. From a health perspective, you should always listen to what your body is telling you, as you’ll want to avoid feeling jaded, demotivated and migraines. In reference to the previous point; set reasonable targets, not ones that are going to destroy you mentally (and perhaps physically).
Conclusion
There are a number of long-term marketing strategies that can help you to build a respectable brand for yourself, and more often than not it includes focusing on one particular area and being consistent with it. Once you have established yourself in blogging, YouTube or Pinterest you can always then include the others too. All things considered, a consistent level of quality and quantity will help regardless.
Have any questions about any of these long-term marketing strategies? Let me know in the comments below
