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Digital Clinic Marketing Codex | An Introduction to Digital Marketing
It is finally here! Ive been working on this for a long time! I worked hard on it and im offering if for free, IM NOT EVEN ASKING FOR YOU EMAIL, let me know if it helps you!
Click the image or this link, to view/download the pdf and see the book in all its glory. Or you can read it below:
Overview
I’m not going to lie. I had a big long introduction page typed up, in a way that wasn’t real. I read it once I was done writing it, and, it just seemed corny to me. It sounded like all those fucking asswholes, the frauds and the scammers, the “GIMME YOUR EMAIL MARKETERS”, those asswholes that motivated me to create a place for honest marketing.
Thats not me. I’m not going to fluff up my content to try to attract more people, I’m going to keep it real as fuck:
Marketing is no easy cakewalk, your not going to be able to quit your job and go work on a beach in less than 90 days like most of these asswholes are claiming.
There is literally so many components to Marketing, that I’m not even sure I covered it all in this Ebook. In fact, I know I didn’t, I don’t think there’s anyway I could unless I was writing a dam encyclopedia.
Thats why this Ebook will serve as an overall outline and amazing reference for marketers. Then I will be doing deep dives into the subjects and topics covered in this outline in future Ebooks, Videos, and Content. So not only will this be an awesome resource, it will serve as my content strategy.
I want to be clear, I started sharing my experience with Digital Marketing because of all the scam artists, and posers that are selling shitty webinars and just want your email to try to sell you shit. I was tired of their videos in the nice car or walking through the nice house trying to sell you the good life.
I am not selling the good life, its true that if you can pull off being your own boss no matter what you decide to do, you will be way happier than ever before from the freedom that comes with it and the satisfaction from all your hard work. BUT, its not easy, its very hard work, it takes responsibility, motivation, positivity, drive, and passion, and nothing will happen overnight, this game is all about the long game. IT TAKES TIME.
Im not promising you anything, I am simply offering you a resource, this is a good chunk of information and will get you a good idea of what it takes. All the content in this Ebook is mine, I have learned all of this thru various digital mentors, whom I always recommend to my audience.
One thing I don’t do is cover subjects and topics that have already been hashed out to the point that its been fully covered lol. I wouldn’t even be making these Ebooks but I needed some pillar content for Digital Clinic and I wanted that content to be in the form of resources, for 2 reasons, 1, content that provides value is the best content, and 2, this content will double as social proof, showing potential clients and others that I know what the hell I’m talking about. I will be creating an outline Ebook for each one of my Streams of Income.
I wanted to do a broad overview of the major components of Marketing, offering a paragraph or two on each component, giving you the gist of it, if you will. There’s very specific reasoning to this, 1, I didn’t want to be like most other comprehensive guides and throw too much information at you, I want you to get the broad ideas without feeling overwhelmed like I was when I first started, and 2, like I said earlier this gives me opportunity to create even more content down the road for my deep dives into all the topics that I cover.
This book is full of Strategies, Tools/Resources, Recommendations and much more, please contact me and let me know what you think of it, I worked hard and for a very long time putting it together, I hope it helps at least one person.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.
Digital Marketing can include the management of social media accounts, the initiation of specialized ad campaigns for various social platforms, the implementation of proper SEO, Client Acquisition, Marketing Research & Measurement, and various other tactics leading to increase growth of sales, brand recognition, market share, and audience.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Search engine optimization is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine’s unpaid results—often referred to as “natural”, “organic”, or “earned” results.
SEO relates to your positioning on a search engine result page (SERP), so when a customer searches something, and you have a higher SEO rating you will be one of the first listings. With so many people implementing proper SEO, getting listed first on google is getting harder and harder these days. But do not fear, if you follow the steps outlined through this PDF you will be in good shape and on your way to being listed as one of the first on google!
How Important is this Stuff?
Its crazy that in 2018 I feel the need to include this section, but you would be surprised on how many Business Owners, Entrepreneurs, and other people do not realize the power of Social Media and Marketing. Like I said before, this shit is hard work and it takes time, time to do it and time to see the results you really want. But, if you can pull this off, you can literally scale your business or brand beyond what you ever thought was possible, and I know that sounds like some of that fluff I said I wouldn’t use, but its not. Thats real shit.
There are so many ways to make really good money with marketing. You can use your knowledge to scale a personal brand or you could literally make a killing running only Facebook ads, or managing a brand’s Google Adwords account, it just depends on what you want to do, you don’t have to be like me and offer every service that has to do with marketing, you can focus on a core component of marketing and dive super deep to offer a tremendous amount of value for that one area of marketing, for instance some people only focus on social media marketing, some even go as specific as a platform, such as, like I said before, only offering Facebook Services such as running ads.
The future is here, and it’s digital. If you haven’t wrapped your head around that, and do not understand that the internet is the greatest thing for your business, your going to fail, unless you make a change. Be like thousands of others and educate yourself. Start with the information in this book.
Creativity is King
You will hear a lot of marketers, including my Primary Digital Mentor, Gary Vaynerchuk, say that content is king. I would disagree. Content can be good or it can be shitty. Shitty content is not king. Thus whatever is king needs to always be good. You know what is always good no matter what your doing? Creativity. Whether your doing content marketing, social media marketing, running ads, or anything else, you need to be creative in the way you carry out your strategies, and that goes beyond your content.
Content is Prince
After Creativity, Content is by far the most important thing of all! You could be the best marketer and have the best SEO implemented, but if your content Is shit, then you will fail. So number one priority is Content, its good to have proper SEO and other marketing techniques in play, but before all that you need to focus on your content. You need to either be entertaining, or provide some kind of value, or BOTH! Preferably both, lol.
You don’t need to over think it, but you do need to put some decent thought into it. You need to think about what people are interested in, where is the attention right now? What do people like? What kind of posts do I like? You need to do some. Research and scope out the competitions content strategy and take notes of the successful ones.
You need to come up with a detailed plan and schedule and stick to it, after a while and you’ve been paying attention to the analytics, take stock of what is working and what is not? What do you need to approve on? What should you get rid of? What kind of content can you add?
Im not going to go to much into it, I will provide more “Deep Dives” on content marketing in another book and on my website. I will cover a little more within the SEO section.
Proper SEO Strategies
S.E.O stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a marketing technique used to help your website show up higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Your SERP Rank depends on a factor of things; how well your website is coded and structured, how easy it is for the engines to understand your site, how user friendly your site is, the keywords you are using, how many back-links your site has, how mobile friendly your site is, how fast it is, the amount of words on your page, the relevancy of your content, the number of images, etc. You probably get the picture.
Despite just listing off all that crap, SEO isn’t all that complicated, though it takes some knowledge, and a lot of little tweaks here and there, and those little tweaks may not seem like anything at all but in the grand scheme of things all those little tweaks add up. I can not stress how important Proper SEO is to any business.
When you have proper SEO implemented you show up higher on Search Engine Results Page’s, leading to lot more organic traffic to your site, which then you convert into more sales. Search Engines Crawl Websites nonstop and then index those pages and provides them to users based on keywords, relevancy, and popularity.
Site SEO Checklist
When reviewing the target website, use this check list as a good starting point to get an idea of where the site stands SEO wise. Then use the links I post below to run tests on your website to see some problems you may have.
Quality Content
The most important component to all of this, is the content. You have to have top notch content, you can do everything right SEO and Marketing Wise, but if you have bad content and a bad product/brand, your not going to get anywhere.
You need to come up with a Content Strategy, which will consist of many things, such as;
Your Mission
What are you trying to do with your content? Are you providing value for your industry? Are you trying to spread your truth? Just share fun content? Whatever you end up doing its important to put thought into your mission, it will help with the next step.
Plan For Social
Next after you know what you want to do with your content, you need to start planning what social platforms you will be active on, I would recommend as many as you can handle, but for starters I would suggest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Reddit.
You need to think about how your going to convey your content through different mediums and methods to match the format of each specific social platform, its good to have native content for each platform, meaning your not just posting the same thing across all your channels. Because if you do, there’s no point for people to follow all of your accounts, you need to come up with really valuable exclusive pillar content for each channel.
Its good to make a schedule for all of your posts for all social media channels and stick to it, its nice to provide your audience with constituency in valuable content.
Curated Content
Curating Content is the process of gathering other peoples content. You don’t always have to create every single piece of content that’s on your page, you can and should repost popular videos and content from your industry. Curated Content is a huge help in many ways, especially when just starting off.
Provide Value
Something to always remember, always approach any situation with the question of: “How can I provide Value here?”. If you want to see some amazing things happen, start providing people with tremendous amounts of quality content stuffed with value, and expect nothing in return. I’m dead serious. It may sound like dumb business model, buts it proven. By me and many others, good things happen, good karma, you build relationships, and a ridiculous amount of lead gen.
Focus
Content is the most important thing when it comes to all of this, make sure before you focus on anything else you nail this section down.
Keywords
Before you pick which keywords you want to rank for, you will need to do a lot of research into what keywords will work best for you and your content, low competition and high search frequency is what you want, but some times the keywords you need to rank for will have high competition, just the name of the game.
While your creating and posting your awesome content throughout your website and pages you want to be using relevant keywords throughout the title and text the keywords will help search engines find your page and connect people that are searching, make sure to not include too many keywords in your titles, they consider it a black hat technique called “keyword stuffing”, you will get penalized for this. Below are some Tools and Resources for Keyword Research.
Meta Tags
Meta Tags are sections of code inside the header tag that describe a page and its content. They tell crawlers how to act, though they don’t always listen, these tags do help!
The 4 tags you should worry about are, the Title Tag, Description Tag, Keywords Tag and Robot tag.
Title Tag
The title tag: The Title of My WebPage, is the text that displays at the top of your browser, the title of your webpage should describe what your webpage is about, and include keywords that you are trying to rank for.
Description Tag
This is where you will put the description of your webpage, what your webpage is about in a little greater detail.
Keywords Tag
This is where you will include the keywords that you have done research for and want to rank your page for.
Robot Tag
Tells crawlers how to index the page, you don’t necessarily need this line as the default is to index, but feel free to include it.
Index
Which tells the crawler to index the page, though as I said this is the default.
No Index
Which tell the robot not to index the page.
Follow
Will tell the crawler to follow all your links and check the validity of them, even if your page is not yet indexed.
Other Options
Others include; nofollow, noimageindex, none, noarchive, nocache, nosnippet, noodyp/noydir[obsolete], Unvailable_after, but I have never had a use for them.
Link Building
Back-links are a key factor to your ranking position, Websites that link to yours will increase organic traffic to the site and will further the sites validation which will increase the (SERP) rankings. The higher the authority of a website that links to yours, the higher the boost, thus giving you more authority, its one big cycle. You can get a huge boost from backlinks depending on the quantity and quality.
The process of gaining quality back-links is just that, a process. Many BlackHat Seo’s (See Hat Color Section) will buy or sell backlinks, this is black hat marketing and will be penalized by google, meaning they will un-index your site and kill all your traffic.
The only sure way to get quality back-links is to have quality content that provides a ton of value so more people link to it.
Mobile Friendly
There are almost 5 billion mobile users, so make sure your website is mobile friendly. Do this by visiting the site on your phone and see how your experience is, look for any flaws or mistakes, not only will you get a ding for having mistakes, if users spot them out they are likely to see your website as unprofessional and will not give you their business. Once you have looked over your site on a mobile device, run the site through Google’s Mobile Friendly Test, found at the link below:
Site Speed
You need to make sure that all the site pages load quickly, otherwise google will rate your page lower down. Make sure your have reasonable image sizes, minify your css and javascript, get rid of any unnecessary content or code. You can test your site’s speed at Google’s PageSpeed Insights at the link below:
About Us Page
Many sites neglect the About Us page, there are many ways to boost this page’s SEO which will boost the overall SEO for the whole site. Make sure there are some images on the About Us page as well as a video. Add testimonials to this page, people love reading other people’s reviews so having testimonials will give you a real boost. Make sure your contact information is on here as well, Phone Number, Address, Map, Website, and any other contact information.
Social Media Presence
Make sure your client has all the proper social media channels that they should be on. If they aren’t, create the accounts for them and follow the marketing strategies outlined in my other pdf’s. Make sure the Social Media accounts are linked to from the website and vice versa thus driving more traffic to each.
Local Business Directories
Make sure your client is listed in all the Local/Online Business Directories, this can drive a lot of traffic to you. Find a list of directories here that you can list with and increase your online traffic. Make sure all your listings are displaying the same information. If for some reason some listings have different information listed (it happens alot) make sure to claim that listing and get it changed, not only is this not helping you SEO wise, this will confuse the hell out of your customers and they will get frustrated and take their business elsewhere. I would also recommend the Better Business Bureau, You get a good SEO boost from them in my experience.
Optimized Properly
Make sure the site is producing nice lengthy content on a daily basis utilizing niche keywords within headers utilizing high search and low click competition. Make sure coding is clean and correct with no errors and entire website is structured properly, this is crucial for making your website clear to understand for search engine crawlers.
Videos & Testimonials on your Website
As stated before these two things will give your site a significant SEO boost. People always look to a fellow customers option before they take the dive, especially online, its all they have to go on other than what the seller is telling them. Videos are also a big boost and will increase your overall SERP Rank.
Img Alt Tags
It is extremely important to have alt tags on all your images, you get a nice boost when you do, it makes your images easier to find for crawlers, and its actually in compliance with a newer rule that your website has to be compatible with a screen reader. Makes it equal for handicap.
Contact Information Easily Found
Make sure the contact information is always easy to find no matter what page your on. This will give you a boost. Like I said earlier its little things like this that don’t seem like much, that add up to give you a really nice SERP Ranking.
Social Media Strategies
Social Media is what everyone is using now a days, so much so that its more likely that a user visits a businesses Facebook page before visiting their website. For that reason it is imperative that all businesses are connected to the ever growing marketplace that social media offers.
Many companies will pay you to run their social media accounts for them and post to them on a daily basis. Some companies, depending on their advertising budget, will ask you to run paid ads for them. The Ad Manager on Facebook and Instagram are fairly self explanatory and easy to use, the key here is the keywords that you use and the audience targeting parameters you choose, make sure to use niche keywords pertaining to your clients subject matter and be specific.
Companies want to see a return, they want more traffic, more followers, more likes, more shares, paid and organic. There are many ways to gain interactions organically and with paid ads.
Instagram Strategies
Instagram can be a powerful tool, research other accounts within your niche and utilize the strategies below.
Hashtags
Its incredibly important to be utilizing hashtags on Instagram, their essentially keywords for finding content, and its imperative you use hashtags that closely relate to your niche, you can do some easy research to find the most popular keywords in your desired niche. Instagram allows you to use 30 but that can look a bit spammy, research shows that posts with 8-15 hashtags get the most interactions, and its also a good idea to put all your hashtags in a comment on your post so users wont see them unless they comment, it makes your post look more neat.
Its also a good idea to get creative with your hashtags, lets say your posting one of your photographs, the hashtag #photography has millions and millions of posts, if you were to use this hash tag your post would more than likely get pushed down in the feed quickly and get lost. So research is important, find hashtags, like #gameoftones, that talented photographers are using to showcase their work without competing for space in one of the most used hashtags.
Wine & Dine top 9
Now once you figured out what hashtags are working best for your posts, start using them more frequently and consistently. After you post something, click on the hashtags your using and view the Most Popular 9 Posts for that particular tag. Click on these images and view the poster’s profile. Scroll thru their wall and engage with their content, like multiple pictures of theirs and comment(just be genuine), then comment on the latest post and leave a nice comment like “I LOVE YOUR WALL, such cool content, cant wait to see what you post next” or something along those lines, don’t do this in hopes of a follow actually take the time to view their content and make a thoughtful comment, I just gave a broad example, but a little more heart into yours. Once your comment is posted, follow this user, after all of this, this user will usually follow back.
All the Rest
Now perform the same thing that you did in the “Top Nine” strategy on all of the rest of the posts in that particular tag, then go back and do this with all of the other tags you have been using.
Mutual Deals / Collabs
The power of the DM is strong on Instagram. Use it to your advantage, but before cold-messaging strangers with call-to-actions, think of something you could offer them. You need to offer more value than what you get in return, that’s not to say this deal won’t benefit you though.
Feed the Likes
Once you gain followers make sure you keep them, everything you see on your feed make sure you like and comment on to keep you fresh in your followers minds and to share the love and support.
Facebook Organic Strategies
Facebook has become a platform with low organic reach, there’s just so much content it has become a pay to play platform, I will outline my free organic strategies which will show an increase in traffic, to see bigger results on Facebook you will need to put some money into ads, but if you don’t want to put too much into it, you can spread out low costly ads and still see results.
Optimize Your Page
Start by filling out all of the information Facebook asks of you, the more information they have the better they can catalog you in their databases, which will lead to better Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rankings.
Invite Friends on Facebook to Like Your Page
This is a good way to get early support and a few hundred likes on your page to further legitimize your page early on in the game.
Post Interesting Relevant Content
Make sure you are posting on a regular basis, once every few days is safe but if you want to keep up with everyone else you need to be posting at least once if not twice a day, and make sure the content your posting is good interesting relevant content.
Post a Link to your Business Page on Your Personal Facebook profile
I would say once a month maybe more often if you would like, post something from your personal Facebook account with a link to your page, inciting people to go to it.
Get Involved
Don’t expect for everyone to like your content and not be an active user yourself, make sure your spreading the love, liking, sharing, and commenting on other pages/users posts, this is a good way to build a community and a loyal fanbase. Don’t forget to post links to your page when ever it feels right, leave a link in some similar groups, just don’t get to spammy with it.
Add your page to your Email Signature
This will appear more professional, and drive more traffic to your page.
Use Communities like Reddit
Sites like Reddit and Pinterest are awesome for content ideas and posting your content and if users like your content they will keep bumping* your content to the top.
Ask your Followers for Relevant Questions
Give them incentive to comment, ask them meaningful and relatable questions that are relevant, this will build engagement.
Embed your Facebook Posts
If your clients have a blog make sure to embed all the Facebook posts into their blog to drive more organic reach.
Encourage Users to Tag Others
This is seen a lot in contests, “Tag 3 of your friends for a chance to win!” There are many situations in which you could apply this method but its a good way to get reach.
Respond to Comments
Always respond to every comment ever left on your page, this shows professionalism, further validates you with Facebook and shows that your real. It will build a loyal fanbase. Try to respond to comments as quick as you can, algorithms reward you for engaging back with your audience, the quicker the better.
Trend Riding
Always check out the trending tags, often you can use these tags within your post to get your content seen by a larger audience. Free Advertising.
Check the Time
Use insights to find out when the best time to post your content is, you wouldn’t believe how important the time of day your posting is. Check out insights for this information, on Facebook and Instagram.
Contest/Giveaways
Use things like contests, polls, surveys, give-a-aways, and or anything else you can think of to incite engagement out of your audience.
Facebook Paid Reach
Organic Reach is on a rapid decline on Facebook, to compete you have to advertise, the good thing about advertising on Facebook is that it leads to a lot of organic reach as well. Now the more money you have the better, obviously, but Facebook ad’s can be a black-hole so you need to be smart about it. The good thing is I am going to share the tips & tricks to running cost effective ad campaigns, even if you don’t have a huge marketing budget.
Before I continue, just remember to keep an eye on your insights and analytics to see what’s working and what isn’t, and you need to know the tips & tricks to nail targeting your audience, if you don’t target your audience correctly your ad won’t be effective.
Targeting Your Audience
Its important to correctly target your audience, and its easy for beginners to mess up the targeting. Make sure to properly optimize each section on how it pertains to your business or service. If you speak English and your business operates where the majority speak English, put English in the language area, or whatever language it may be. If you have a physical location and want to build a local following first put your area and surrounding areas in the location box. If your an internet based company and want to go national United States will work fine, unless you know for a fact your business or product performs better in certain states for a specific reason then let the locations box reflect that.
Its just so important to know who your audience is so your not throwing away money, make sure to really think about your audience’s age, gender, location, language, and interests. Facebook has an audience insights tool within the ad manager.
Look-a-like Audience
A way to reach new potential customers, Facebook finds people that are somewhat similar to your existing customers.
3-Step System
Here is a low budget system that myself and many others like me use to get businesses results from their Facebook Ads, and its a very simple and easy to do 3 step system, each step is an ad campaign, these 3 campaigns will work in conjunction with each other. I have a video on my blog showing you visually how to do this, but the outline is this:
1st Campaign
Brand Awareness/Traffic/Engagement, Create an Ad from a pre-existing post that has traction, videos have the best engagement on Facebook now-a-days, so I recommend a video introducing your brand to potential customers.
2nd Campaign
Conversions, Opt-In, Here you need to entice people to sign up for an email subscription by offering something for free, then continue interacting with these people thru email marketing. The target for this Audience will be the people who viewed your Video Ad from the 1st Campaign.
10,000 Audience per $10.00. = 1$ = 1000 people
3rd Campaign
Retargeting, Conversions, Purchase, Now you will create an ad offering a product or service, the target audience for this Ad will be the people that Opt-in on your 2nd Campaign.
Youtube Strategies
YouTube Is huge, its essentially Netflix but better, you can get full shows and movies, as well as a vast ocean of free content, sure there are ads, but no where near the amount of commercials on tv. No matter your Niche or subject matter your need to figure out how to incorporate it into YouTube videos, even if its just starting a Vlog of the behind the scenes of your business, you need to be creating content for YouTube.
YouTube is also essentially a college, I have gained more value from individuals on YouTube than I did in college. So you can use that as an advantage and create tutorial videos pertaining your field of expertise that will drive up your traffic.
Develop a Plan
Don’t just throw half-ass, poor quality videos on YouTube and expect something to happen, make sure you have something that can shoot HD videos(most phones do), and come up with scripts or ideas for interesting content that can stand the tests of time. Just remember the video has to offer some sort of value, even if its just entertainment, but if that’s the route your going it needs to be over the top entertaining so it stands out.
Create a Channel Trailer
Create an introduction video that lets users know what your channel is all about, make sure to prompt a subscribe at the end of the video. You upload this from your homepage and what’s cool about this video is, it will auto play when a non subscriber lands on your channel and stops the auto play feature once they subscribe.
YouTube Widget on Blog/EMBED
Make sure to put a YouTube widget on your blog or website, or embed your YouTube videos into your posts and pages.
Schedule your Posts
Consistency is key in social media, if you let your page lay dormant for awhile it can literally kill your momentum and you’ll have to start over. Make sure you have a schedule of your posts, a good rule to stick by is at least one video per week, that will help build up a consistent following and engagement. Don’t feel pressured to have to provide all original content, you can use user curated content and create new fresh content to fill in the gaps between you advertising for your business or client.
Value Users Time
You need to start providing value right away, studies say you have 8 seconds to grab a users attention, whatever your video is about, get right to it, don’t waste time displaying a really long intro to your video, you can put all the promotional items at the end of the video, its essential that your video gets right to the valuable content, humans attention spans are shrinking every year!
Get Engaged
This is social media, make sure to get engaged and actually put in an effort, and if you can’t genuinely be interested in something, just remember, this Is a person just like you trying to get content out there doing something that’s important to them, so that’s a good thing to keep in mind. When first starting off on YouTube you need to find channels that are like yours, newer, or lower in terms of subscribers, start befriending these people start liking their content, subscribe to their channel and ask for a subscribe back, just passing on the love. Do this until you have a nice following to make you appear more legit to others, when people see lots of followers they figure the content has to be good, more followers = more social proof.
Partnerships
Make sure to reach out to other youtubers and see if there’s any way your brands can collaborate on a project, this way you guys expose yourselves to each others audience, you just need to make sure you have value to offer when reaching out to make deals with other youtubers.
Make Playlists
Create specific playlists for specific groups of people possibly visiting your channel, create one for people new to your channel, create playlists for certain topics so users can find it those specific videos faster. It comes down to being organized, the easier it is for a user to navigate through your content the better.
Give-A-Ways/Contests
Like any other social media platform contests and giveaways are always a good idea to gain a following. Have people tag their friends on your post at the end of the contest like to winner give them merchandise or whatever the prize may be.
Use Pinterest
Make sure you have a Pinterest account and are sharing all your content to organized boards, that will help with increase in traffic.
Trend Ride
Like on all Social Media, its important to know what’s trending, or in other words where all the attention is right now. If you can incorporate trending topics into your YouTube Content you will be piggy backing the trends, on your way to more views.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask
Once you start to gain a following you will be able to see a list of your fans and see who your top fans are, this is a wonderful tool to target your loyal audience, don’t be afraid to ask them to help you promote, make sure there’s something in it for them, other wise it gets a bit spammy. Just remember value for value.
Facebook Groups
There are millions of FB Groups plenty of which cover your area of work, lots of these groups offer a spot for free advertising, make sure to utilize that and do not underestimate it.
Social Media Networking
Its important to use all the social media platforms in conjunction with each other, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc. you can use them all the grow each other, you just need to make sure you have native content for each platform so there’s a reason for users to be following each account.
EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGIES
Email Marketing is a huge tool in the marketing arsenal that needs to be utilized to its fullest potential, the amount of leads that Email Marketing produces can be unparalleled, as long as you have the right targeted “Opted-In” Email Audience.
The best email audience consists of those who “Opted-In” to receive your emails. Some marketers rely only on Email Extractors to build email lists and that is the wrong way to do it, an audience that is receiving emails from you that did not ask for them will see your emails as spam and won’t read them anyway.
Now, I use email extractors, but it depends on the type of list I’m building and the type of client I have, but I do not rely solely on email extractors, the main time I use them is when I’m collecting emails from unclaimed businesses which I will explain later on in the Lead Generation Section.
So, you may be asking yourself, how do I get people to “opt-in” for my email subscription? The first thing you do is put a Email Follow/Subscribe button or form on your website and social media pages to get current traffic to subscribe. Offer deals and other exclusive things in your email that they could not get anywhere else, inciting them to subscribe.
You may be wondering how to increase your email list outside of your current audience. There are many ways to do this, lets go over some.
Building A List From Scratch
Many people don’t just give out their email willy-nilly because most people are already subscribed to 100’s if not 1000’s of email subscriptions, so you need to be creative in your Email Marketing List Building Efforts.
Think of creative ways that will make people want to give you their email without you even asking for it, like I said include deals or other exclusive offers.
I’ll give you a creative example that I use for an Art Blog that I do Marketing for: So this art blog features Instagram artists, so what I do is message artists and ask them if they want to be featured and have an interview and join our online community/database of artists and mention that i’ll send some questions over thru email, and when they say yes and send me their email address, boom there you have it, I got their name & Email, plus personal info from the interview, AND content for the site which will boost SEO, and they got their art featured online.
So everyone is happy, and when you give someone more value than what your asking for they’ll show there appreciation not only with their email but by following you on social media if they aren’t already, this will help build a loyal invested following. I have not had one artist decide not to opt-in.
So as you can see with this trick alone you can build huge email lists as well as a huge loyal following within a matter of weeks, which will help with your overall social proof.
What Do I Send People?
You may be thinking, how do I create a newsletter? And What do I Put in it? Don’t think of this as some new piece of content you have to worry about creating every month or week on top of everything else. I would add at least one piece of exclusive content, and then you can treat the rest of the email or newsletter as a highlight reel of your website for that particular time period.
I will cover more about Email Marketing in my “Marketing Codex: Email Marketing Deep Dive” video on YouTube that I’m going to make in the future, remember this guide is my channels content strategy.
Lead Generation
Now that you know the fundamentals, you may be wondering how do I score my own clients? The idea of having to land your own clients may be frightening, but you would be surprised how many eager clients are out there awaiting for someone like you to come save them from the social media world. The mere fact that you know how to properly do this stuff is generating leads for you, you just need to put yourself out there for the ones that don’t come directly to you.
There are many different ways to generate leads in this business, I will focus on the ones that I use to find clients.
Website/Portfolio
I would highly recommend you get yourself a website displaying all of your work, portfolio, show cases, testimonials, about you section, contact forms all that good stuff. If you cant dull out the cash for a website I recommend you getting on a free portfolio site and list your work there in the form of presentations or slides. Bottom line Is, you have complete control over your website and can build high converting sales funnels, your website can generate a lot of digital cash flow if you set it up right.
Old Fashion Way
Lately, one of the best Lead Gen strategies that I have been using is simply talking to people. Engaging in conversation with people IN PERSON, its extremely effective, every store or business I walk into, I always start talking to the owner about their website, which leads in to other related topics, get the conversation going and you will be surprised where it goes.
Instagram DM
As I stated before the power of the DM on Instagram, is almost unparalleled, don’t be afraid to put yourself out there and start reaching out to complete strangers with a sincere heart and the goal of providing them value, and you will be surprised at what happens. Bring Value…..Value, Value, Value, and be creative. The DM is not just made for hook ups(lol), you can craft the beginning of profitable relationships inside the DM, start messaging people! Don’t be a spammer, but really engage with people, make that connection, and watch what happens.
Unclaimed Businesses
Almost every business has a google+ account whether they know it or not, many times they don’t know or they haven’t bothered to claim it and fully optimize it. Its easy to spot these businesses out, when viewing a business listing on google, if you see a link that says “Claim this business” that means the business hasn’t claimed it and hasn’t fully optimized prime online real estate. You can email or call these businesses letting them know they have an unclaimed google+ page, let them know how they can claim it and why they should, this shows them you know what your talking about, this is also a good chance to let them know of other things you can do for them.
Cold-Calls
Cold Calls can be effective if done correctly, most of the time they are not done correctly hence why this is such an unpopular Lead Gen. You just need to be creative and selective in your calling. Before you call businesses make sure to check out their social media and website, see what kind of quality they have, if their content and website is low quality add them to your list. If they have a good website and really good content they probably wont feel as if they need you, a cold call won’t work for these types, you’ll have to use other strategies for the bigger fish.
Free Advertising
There are a lot of free places to advertise, you need to properly utilize this space, it only takes a little bit of time and it can only help, its free. There are free online classified ad sites you can post to, I would also recommend you joining a ton of FB Groups that have to do with your business or brand, most of the time these groups are havens for local or nation wide ads.
SMM/SEO/Email Marketing
Believe it or not, all of the strategies I have gone over in this E-book will automatically generate you leads. If you have good SEO, and running Marketing Campaigns your going to get more traffic which, if your conversion funnels are set up correctly will lead to more business.
List of Tools & Resources
A good way to get traffic to you is by offering exclusive resources that your consumer may find helpful. Information that you have that others may not, organized neatly into a eBook, PDF, Checklist, List, Blueprint, or Infographics are popular items.
Courses/Webinars
Okay, so if you follow my content, you know how I feel about most of these Webinar Marketers who are frauds, that go online and copy and paste someone else words and sell it as some master class or webinar, I hate those people, their fakes and their giving us all a bad name.
That being said, that does not mean their are not great courses(paid and free) and webinars that you can take by great, real marketers, and a ton of value from them, as long as your offering a web class or webinar like that its a great lead, if its not offering any real value, or if its someone else’s work you will not be taken seriously.
Audits
Audits are very important, you need to know where a site stands, marketing wise and SEO wise, audits can be done in a bunch of different ways, manually taking stock of all the data you wish to include in your audit, you can use online tools to see where you site stands, or a mixture of the two. Audits not only help you know where a business stands, it also shows the client that you know what your doing and you have a list of improvements that you can provide and how those improvements will help them in the grand scheme of things.
I personally take stock and monitor my analytics for insights, along with many free online tools to get a sense of where my clients stand SEO wise. I use a bunch of different tools to make sure there all giving me the same results, making sure their correct and on point, one audit tool may find something another had missed. I will list some free online audit tools in my Tools & Resources Section.
Color of The Hat
There are 3 colors of hats in this game; white, grey, and black.
White Hat Strategies
These are the strategies that us, real, honest marketers use. These strategies include any marketing efforts focused on content and bringing value to the audience. Proper SEO, amazing content, user focused, organic growth/management, while running paid ads.
Grey Hat Strategies
These strategies fall in between ethical practice(white) and unethical practice(black), a grey area if you will(hence the name). Sometimes a mixture of components from black hat and white hat marketing. Some may call it being less then honest. Purchasing emails from a third party, trying to lower competitions ranking, duplicating/spinning content, and many more would fall under this category.
Black Hat Strategies
These are the unethical strategies that horrible marketers and posers use to pump out quick results for clients to turn a quick profit, half the time the results are fake the other half the time those results are in danger of disappearing any second from being penalized by google. Black hat strategies include anything that you do specifically for the sole purpose of ranking higher in search engines.
So many things fall into this category, Private Blog Networks, Buying Engagement/followers, buying backlinks, buying data from third parties, scraping data, and many, many other things that if you try or try to provide for a client you will eventually be penalized and your site will essentially be dead.
Why You Shouldn’t Use Black Hat Marketing Strategies!
Reputation is everything in this game. Once you get outed as a Black Hat, its over. You Lose. Not only should you not want to do black hat strategies because it could kill yours or your clients site. But you shouldn’t want to implement these types of strategies because you shouldn’t want to be remembered as a piece of shit scumbag that scams people out of proper marketing so they can make a quick buck.
I see it everyday, people falling for all these scams, their buying fake engagement from a shady dood on facebook, then 20 min later posting how this guy ripped them off. BIG SURPRISE!
Please do not waste your money on fake engagement, there is literally NO VALUE for anyone doing that. Instead run your page the right way and use that money for good by running paid ads on facebook, you will be surprised what happens.
Funny and True Story If You Can Believe It!
Someone tried debating me on this issue. Citing a study that some one in Britain did claiming that if you run promotions on your page to get more likes you will find that you get fake/bots/ghost followers. So he said why would we waste money and time doing that when its the same thing.
First of all I am not talking about boosting your page for likes, I am talking about detailed-data oriented targeting implemented into specialized ad campaigns that drive conversions, thus leading to a increase in following and engagement.
Yes, sometimes even on ads you will get a FEW fake follows or likes, but the only reason that is, is because of black hat services like these in the first place. Second, would you rather spend some money and see high ROI, valuable growth, with maybe a FEW fake likes and follows, or would you rather buy fake engagement and have it ALL be worthless, no ROI, or any other black hat service your throwing your money away and potentially killing your site and wasting all your hard work and progress.
I told those same words to the guy, and he still went with fake engagement, I DO NOT UNDERSTAND HIS WAY OF THINKING. He wont last long at all!
How To Make Sure You’re Only Using White Hat!
Want to make sure you are always deploying white hat strategies? Its quite simple, stop posting for the search engines. Stop optimizing for the search engines. Post and Optimize for you audience. They come first, the rest will follow, I promise you. Focus on bringing others value, real honest value. Great things will happen. I’ve seen it time and time again.
Mentors
Mentors are huge in this game, you need to find people that are successful and know what their talking about, people who actually do the work, not just claim that they do, its easy to tell if you have some common sense about you. You need to find these talented individuals and soak up all the information they provide, it will help you tremendously down the road. Below I will post the my mentors, the people that have helped me get to where I am today.
Gary Vaynerchuk – General Marketing Direction, Positivity, Motivation
Gary Vee is my number one Mentor, I discovered him a while back and been rolling with him ever since. He offers so much value, you can learn a ton from this dood. He offers great direction on marketing, business, and offers tremendous positivity and motivation. I suggest everyone to follow him on all of his social media channels.
Miles Beckler – Facebook Advertising
I stumbled upon Miles a while back as well, he really dives deep into Facebook advertising among many other things, I highly suggest everyone to check out his youtube channel, that is where his most valuable content is!
Surfside PPC – Digital Advertising
This is a really nice channel that covers pay per click advertising across all major platforms, definitely worth subscribing and checking out their videos.
Adwords Youtube Channel – Google Adwords Advertising
This is the Google Adwords YouTube Channel, you can learn everything about Adwords straight form the horse’s mouth. This channel is full of value, I recommend anyone wanting to learn Adwords I would follow this channel!
Google – EVERYTHING!
Everything else I know I learned myself, through various articles and videos through google searches. Google is one of the most powerful tools we have at our finger tips. It connects us to anything we want to know, you need to utilize that, literally type in what you want to know and it will tell you what you want to know!
Tools/Resources
These tools and resources will help you tremendously, I HIGHLY suggest you take the time to look over them and really absorb the content and use the tools to your advantage.
Directory of Tools and Resources: bit.ly/net_guide
Last Remarks
Well, if you made it to this point I am so grateful and humbled that you took the time to read my Introduction to Digital Marketing. I worked really hard on putting this together, if it helps just one person that I accomplished my goal. All I want to do is provide people with value. I want to help everyone grow, I want us all to succeed, and I want to gain friends in the process! Please DM me and tell me if you found this book helpful!
Just remember, this shit is hard work but if you apply yourself and learn as much as you can about this industry and implement these strategies you will be successful. You will not see success overnight, maybe not in months, maybe not in years! But I promise you, if you stick to this and don’t abandon it, you will make it to the other side, you just have to put in the work, everybody just wants shit to happen for them but their not willing to put in the work. There are no guarantees in this business, do not take shortcuts! Put in in the work, provide value, and good things will happen. Thanks!
Remember,
My Profile Page is at : https://www.facebook.com/EvansMediaEmpire/
My Website is: https://www.eme.direct
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/escapingfinlandia
Digital Clinic : eme.direct/dc
My email: escapingfinlandia@gmail.com
Hope to see you around! Lets Connect!