12 Ways to Promote Your Online Consulting Business for Free
Are you wondering how to reach clients and boom your online consulting business? Well, there are two ways to drive traffic to your business.
- Organic Reach (Free Traffic)
- Paid Advertisement (PPC)
Paid Advertisement (PPC) is an effective way to drive traffic in a short time, but it needs investment. And if you don’t target your customer well, your paid advertisement may not work efficiently, too.
Instead, if you want to promote your consulting business for free, there is another way of generating traffic without financial investment. You only have to invest your time and expertise. This is an organic reach method of traffic generation. In this method, you create content to engage the prospects and convert them to customers.
Unlike paid traffic, the organic reach method is slow – but can drive traffic for the long term. This method increases your domain authority, prospect engagement, search engine ranking, and high backlink. Ultimately, your single content can send you traffic even 10 years after now.
Social media marketing, video marketing, writing blogs, and creating engaging content are some free traffic generation strategies for your business which we will go step-by-step in this post.
But before I dive into the organic reach method, let me share a few facts that you need to understand.
- Quality content is king. The more you create valuable content; the more you reach your prospect.
- Understand the algorithm of each platform where you promote your content. Every social media or other platform has its house rule to follow.
- Online user behavior has less patience. Present your content in the best ways. Insert images, videos, illustrations, infographics, and facts to capture and attract the reader. Make your content engaging.
- Work out on headlines. On average, 8 out of 10 people will read the headlines, but only 2 will read the rest. This is the secret of powerful The headlines are the most important elements of your content.
- Never make the sale your priority. Instead, build a relationship with your prospect and create a list. Money is in the customer email list. Once you have an email list and good relations with your customers, you can make money easily using email marketing.
- Don’t spam. There are no shortcut strategies. Don’t make a house of straw.
- Create one content a day. Work on the schedule and deadline. Make a 90 days challenge. One content a day and wait to see your result after 90 days. By that time, you have 90 articles and a habit of content creation already.
Alright! Ready to promote your online consulting business for free?
Here are the 12 ways to promote your content and get free traffic.
1. Facebook Marketing for Businesses
Launched in 2004, Facebook continues to grow and by 2020 it dominates the social media platform and became the number one most used social media. With 2.7+ billion monthly active users, Facebook gives the best opportunity to all kinds of businesses to promote their products and services. Apart from connecting with friends and loved ones, business houses can directly engage with their clients, followers, and grow their business.
Why Facebook Marketing?
- 7+ billion daily users
- Large demographic
- Personal pages, business pages, groups, community building, and advertisement opportunities even with a low budget
- Multiples options to promote content
- Various built-in tools for marketing opportunities
- Video monetization opportunities to earn extra money
How to Promote Your Online Consulting Business on Facebook?
- You can create various pages to engage with your followers.
- You can link your website to your post.
- You can share engaging content to hook your followers.
- Build a Facebook community group to create a large audience.
- You can sell directly from Facebook via an online store set-up service.
- Low-budget advertising opportunities.
- You can target your advertisement in any demographic.
- Go live, webinars, and video marketing.
Which Content Type to Post on Facebook?
● Facebook wants users to stay on its platform for long times. Thus, create more engaging content that can capture your followers and attract new ones.
- More video content; Facebook wants to be the number one video streaming platform. Post more video content than a normal post to promote your business on Facebook successfully.
2. LinkedIn Marketing for Businesses
Launched in 2010, LinkedIn helps you to drive traffic to your website, find quality leads, share your knowledge through inspiring content, and extend your network. It’s also a great way to market job openings and attract new talent to your company. LinkedIn is the best B2B and B2C platform to engage.
Why LinkedIn Marketing?
LinkedIn has grown from a networking site for professionals to one of the top social media networks, with about 700 million active users in 2020.
By now, most of us have used LinkedIn to market our brands, post industry thought leadership, or look for our dream jobs.
How to Promote Your Online Consulting Business on LinkedIn?
- Make your profile complete and don’t skip details on your business.
- Join relevant groups to attract new customers.
- Connect with other industry professionals and expand your connection.
- Post content about your brand, products, and services. Showcase your products and services.
- Ask questions and answer other’s questions that are related to your field.
- Follow the news feed of your competitors to make yourself up-to-date with their strategies.
- Post discussions and polls.
- Link your business website to increase traffic from your LinkedIn page.
- Create engaging content to build mutually beneficial relationships through LinkedIn answers.
Which Content Type to Post on LinkedIn?
- Blogs, company news, and researches
- “How to do” guidepost to give in-depth information to readers
- Quick tips and strategies
- Images and videos
- Business updates
3. Instagram Marketing for Business
Launched in 2010, Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms and was bought by Facebook in 2012.
Instagram allows you to build your brand image through pictures and videos far more effectively than Facebook or Twitter or any other social media website. This is one of the best platforms to reach your client organically and become an influencer in your niche.
Why Instagram Marketing?
- More than 1 billion people use Instagram every month with 500 million people using Instagram stories every day.
- The gender mix on Instagram is pretty even (female 52%, male 48%).
- Almost 63% of Instagram users log in at least once per day.
- Instagram users spend an average of 28 minutes per day in 2020.
- 200 million Instagram users visit at least one business profile daily
- High advertising reach.
- 1/3 of the most viewed stories are from business.
- Almost 76% of U.S businesses used Instagram in 2020.
How to Promote Your Online Consulting Business on Instagram?
- Creativity counts on Instagram.
- Ramping up your content production and posting more frequently.
- Publishing to Instagram at least once a day is within the platform’s best practices.
- Find the best engaging times to post on Instagram.
- Instagram stories are so valuable.
- Work with influencers to extend your reach.
- Promote your Instagram posts across other networks
- Use hashtags.
- Don’t forget to take advantage of hashtag analytics tools.
- Make your job even easier by using scheduling and publishing tools.
- Advertise in a more human way without bombarding followers with messages that scream “BUY NOW!”
- Tag brands, followers, and locations whenever you can.
- Featuring Instagram content on-site is a brilliant way to increase conversions.
Which Content Type to Post on Instagram?
- Images, videos, infographic, posts, and go live.
- It’s all about showing your creativity and following the trends.
- Engage with your followers by asking questions.
- Provide in-depth how-to-do tutorials.
- Conduct an AMA (Ask me anything).
- Sharing thought leadership is a great way to establish your brand.
- Post interviews.
- Share user-generated contents.
- Use hashtags.
- Share your mistakes.
- Action shot contents.
- Work with an influencer or be one of them.
4. Youtube Marketing
Launched in 2005, YouTube is the number one video content platform which allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to playlists, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users. It offers a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media videos.
Why YouTube Marketing?
- YouTube has 2 billion+ logged-in monthly users.
- 81% of 15-25 years-old in the U.S use YouTube.
- It is the largest video search engine.
- Almost 15% of YouTube’s site traffic comes from the U.S.
- Users upload 500+ hours of video every minute.
- On average, each visitor spends almost 12 minutes per day on YouTube.
- 70% of what people watch on YouTube is determined by its recommendation algorithm. (source: Hootsuite)
- Over 70% of YouTube views are watched on mobile.
How to Promote Your Online Consulting Business on YouTube?
YouTube is all about video content creation. Create engaging videos and post regularly on YouTube.
- Understand the YouTube algorithm.
- Focus on a specific niche.
- Write an attractive and engaging title. YouTube marketing is all about presentation. Make your title concise and descriptive.
- YouTube channels are great for SEO, choose the right keywords.
- Use Google ads keyword planner, SERP, Google Trend, and other keyword research tools.
- Use your keywords in your title and description.
- Create thumbnails.
- Complete your profile information.
- Set metadata.
- Develop high-quality videos.
- Interact with your followers.
- Try question and answer, contest, and add call-to-action.
- Be consistent and engage in the community.
- Create a series.
- Don’t be shy to go live.
- Do cross-promotion of your videos on websites or other media.
- Create your own content style, rather than copying others.
- Learn from mistakes.
Which Content Type to Post on YouTube?
- Quality video content, stories.
- Opinion videos, review a product, interview, news. Respond to someone, challenges, adventure, travel, cooking, lifestyle, beauty, how to-videos, tutorials, and many more….
5. Write a Blog
Writing a blog is the most common and also effective way of getting free traffic from search engines. Based on your niche; you can develop valuable content and rank in the search engine, which allows users to find your listing in a specific keyword search.
But there are billions of websites and blogs covering almost every topic.
How to compete? This is the first question every new blogger might have.
Consistent valuable SEO content creation is the answer. If you have expectations from your blog in a short time, you may end up losing interest and give up.
Millions of websites and blogs don’t renew every year, because content creators lose hope. You need to keep on focusing on yourself and developing content that gives information to the readers.
15 Item Checklist to Start Blogging for Your Online e-Consultancy Business:
- Make your domain name catchy.
- Make your website user-friendly with a good presentation.
- Don’t talk about everything, be specific and focus on the specific niche.
- Start blogging in a profitable niche where people want to read the content.
- Make short and attractive headlines.
- Use proper H1, H2…. description, follow links, on-page, off-page SEO, and backlinks.
- Make your post readable and understandable targeting the keywords.
- Use hook methods to engage your readers.
- Use images, videos, charts, illustrations, and podcasted to add spices to your post. A complete post rank rather than just boring text.
- Follow the trends.
- Never stop learning. Update yourself every day.
- Share your content on other platforms; social media, third websites, or guest posting.
- Monetize your blog.
- Learn from your mistakes and criticism.
- Make a habit of content creation. Never stop it.
To learn more about how to create a professional website for online consultancy business, click here and start creating your own blog posts now.
6. Webinars
Webinars are an effective way to bring traffic to your business. Actually, successful webinars convert your visitors to paying customers.
Webinars include; platform, host, presenter, content, and audience. It’s like a seminar but conducted online.
8 Tips on How to Plan a Webinar and How to Host a Webinar
- Define the objective of your webinars and expected outcomes.
- Focus on the content; give tons of value to your participants.
- Promote your webinars at least one week before live. Hook a Giveaway program for participants.
- Don’t be boring; be energetic and engage your attendees during the webinar. Make your content presentable.
- Don’t forget to collect the email list of the participants.
- Record the webinar for future purposes.
- Email the recorded webinars to everyone that signed up but didn’t attend the webinar.
- Repurpose webinars into great content like blogs, videos, podcasts, or infographic content to drive long-term organic traffic.
Click here to learn more about webinars and how webinars help your online consultancy business to grow.
7. Guest Posting
Guest Posting is the best way to gain massive traffic to the website. In this process, you will write content for other websites and attract traffic to your website using external links.
Guest posting gains backlink, credibility, domain authority, and increases ranking in search engines.
The idea of guest posting is to write content for an already ranked website having high traffic. Once your content is selected for their post with your external link to your website. It will bring tons of traffic to your page.
Quality backlinks are fuel for search engine ranking. With guest posting in top websites like; Forbes, Outbrain, Huffington post, About, HubSpot, Investopedia, Site Point, Entrepreneur. You will receive a quality backlink for your search engine ranking.
8. Answering Public Questions
Answering the public questions on a platform like Quora helps you to build backlinks and generate traffic to your website. This is one of the most efficient ways to engage with online users and build trust. Who doesn’t appreciate, if someone answers your queries for free?
In Quora, thousands of online users post questions on various niches. Pick the niche which is close to your business and answer the public questions and by placing an external link to your website, you can easily attract Quora traffic to your website.
9. Trials, Giveaways and Training
Everyone loves free stuff if it gives value. If your business is having any products or services, add trials, giveaways and free training are effective methods to build a relationship with your online users.
Most online users never buy the products or services right away just seeing advertisements or landing on the website, unless they are already looking for it.
Online users’ buying behaviors have changed more and more over the years. There are many competitors and many options to choose from, buyers analyze your products or services before they decide to swipe their card.
Adding free trials, giveaways, and a money-back guarantee makes users feel secure and build trust in your business. Always remember money is on the list and engagements with your prospect.
10. Email Marketing
Email marketing never dies. It was there in the past and it will be in the future. But the ways of email marketing make a difference. By 2020, internet marketing is all about building trust. If you try to spam your user, they will unsubscribe you and put you in the spam box.
But, if you build a relationship with your list and give them what they want, they are ready to listen to your recommendations.
Always build an email list and engage with them. But saying this, I don’t mean to say to collect the random email or buy list and irritate the people.
You have to collect the list in genuine ways. You can build a list from a social media platform, your website, or a PPC program in exchange for your content.
11. Video Marketing
You might have already realized or feel by yourself, that online users by 2020 will be less patient while searching over the internet. Even I jump from one website to another to find the answer to my queries.
Video content is the best way of marketing to attract online users. This is why YouTube is a trending search engine. Also, most of the social network platforms change their algorithm and prioritize video content.
Video marketing allows more engagement than other forms of marketing. Well, it depends on the quality of video; but video content is the trending way to promote your business or services.
12. Cold Calling
Last, but not least cold calling is a technique in which a salesperson contacts individuals who have not previously expressed interest in the offered products or services. Cold calling typically refers to solicitation by phone or telemarketing, but can also involve in-person visits, such as with door-to-door salespeople.
To be honest, I don’t admire calling random people, unless they are my prospect. It’s my personal decision but with an effective method of cold calling, there are still many companies closing even high tickets.
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