If you're not a marketer by nature, it can be very difficult to understand all the little intricacies of getting your name out there. Whether you are trying to market yourself as a brand, or you have a new business idea, chances are if you have little to no experience with digital marketing, it's hard to know where to start first.
The following are four really important tips for marketing yourself, all of which I had to teach myself.
Step 1: Set Up A Website
It may seem obvious, but you'd be surprised to know how few people actually have a website set up properly. The truth is, a lot of individuals entering the online marketing world struggle to figure out where to even begin when it comes to getting a website.
Wordpress, Weebly and Wix are a few intuitive web-hosting options to look into. You don't need much design skill at all, let alone any technical knowledge about coding a website. Weebly is a great start because they also provide you with $100 in Google Ads credit.
Step 2: Create Linkable Content
The next step in marketing yourself is providing valuable content to potential readers. This can also be termed as "Linkable content". All that means is that you are producing content that is well-researched, data-driven and useful. When you write blog posts or produce videos and podcasts that are practical in nature, other marketers and bloggers are more likely to link to it. This will in turn help your search engine rankings and potentially your referral traffic.
And as you likely know, better SEO and more quality referrals means more visitors to your site, leading eventually to an increase in revenue.
Step 3: Optimize Your Content for SEO
Since you will already be working towards producing high-quality, linkable content, optimizing that content for SEO shouldn't be too much trouble.
Start out by conducting some keyword research. You can do this by using Google Keyword Planner or Moz Keyword Explorer.
Once you've discovered which keywords relate best to your content, and which ones have a high search volume to low competition ratio, you need to make sure that the keyword in question in present throughout your article.
This means that your keyword appears early in the title of the article, in the URL of the post and in the headers throughout your post. Doing this will help notify Google about the subject of your article.
Step 4: Pitch Influential Writers
Now it's not enough to just write your words and hope for the best. If you truly want people to visit your site, you need to promote your content. In order to do this, Google topics similar to the ones you write about. Compile a list of all those sources and reach out to the authors. You may be surprised how far a simple ask can get you.
Simply let them know that you read their article and were wondering if they would be willing to reference the one you wrote in an existing or upcoming article. Chances are if they produce a lot of content themselves, they will be pretty happy to get access to a good and new resource.
Conclusion
Just because you don't have experience marketing yourself, doesn't mean it's something you can't learn. Like any skill, marketing gets easier with practice. By consistently producing high-quality content and pitching it to influencers, you will make a name for yourself.