Need any advice on your digital marketing? AMA!

Hey Johnny!

Find something that you can offer for free that is low cost for you to produce and low commitment for them (email, name). Make sure it's something that specifically solves an issue your target market has. Not too general.

Promote that and then nurture people through educational emails, and if they're engaging with your emails, add them to a custom audience in Facebook which then gets hit with ads to a low-commitment action (trial, phone call, case study, email). Then up-sell to paid SaaS.

remember, once you have a larger customer base it'll be a lot easier to attract leads. You'll have a better understanding of your market positioning, hvae a good collection of emails to feed into FB for look-a-like audiences, and so on. It takes time.

If you haven't done so already, the biggest quick win is to set up a Google My Business listing. Try to fill out every field that you can and and get your listing verified. This will help you appear in Google search and maps, and makes sure that the information Google presents to searchers such as opening times, contact telephone number, etc. is correct.

https://www.google.com/business/

I'm not Jonathan, but I built a site that stayed on the front page of Google for a single, extremely common word for several months with no prior ranking.

I found that (1) following Google's PageSpeed Insights recommendations and (2) accumulating high quality backlinks were the most important factors. Backlinks are basically everything. moz.com/learn/seo/backlinks

Do you think your product is media worthy? Can you create an angle on something topical that relates to your product? Is it awesome? IF you answered yes to these three questions, go crazy reaching out to media. Hustle it - and i mean handwrite letters to people, reach out to people on LinkedIn, email, all at once. Someone will eventually bite and you'll suddenly get a bunch of traffic.

I would focus on better thumbnails, and a new channel header for right now. Made a quick channel review video for you - https://youtu.be/yo4gOi65nOw

Hey!

Nice work!

I think emailing people will be lowest hanging fruit.

Don't branch into new topics - be the pro there and you'll build a following there. Focus on what you're already succeeding at.

Ask your audiences what your next videos should be about. Engage them. Perhaps set up a private FB group and interact with your followers there. It'll provide value to them and help you convert them later down the line. Tease the group on your videos.

Export a list of the existing email list into a custom audience in FB ads. Invest a percentage of your premium revenue into targeting 'lookalike' audiences of your existing group with ads for your videos. Experiment to see what works.

Definitely, have some knowledge of Youtube SEO. Look at how other top performing videos are set up, length etc. On a top performing video, you can find out what keywords they have optimised the video for by simply inspecting it on your browser. Mimic what they're doing. Then set up a twitter account, and tweet the video. Then set up a Facebook ad that's optimised for click-throughs, but the URL is the tweet you posted. That way, Youtube will think that your video is suddenly getting a lot of social media virality through organic sharing and engagement (it can see if it's paid traffic otherwise), and if your keywords are set up properly, and people watch your video (because it's quality material), you will out-rank your competitors.

These a just a few quick thoughts, but are relatively easy to set up

it's a new site so will naturally take a while, so the key is to just continue to produce good content.

You need to establish some solid backlinking to your site. For such a new site, I'd focus on using guest posting and PR as a form of 'content marketing' first, and then once you have built up some traffic that way, you can start investing more in your own content.

That way, you'll make sure you're at least hitting people leveraging the authority of other sites first. I think given your industry, you could actually sweep up quite a bit of PR. I definitely see that going viral.

To be quite frank, I wouldn't recommend targeting those keywords just yet. You'll just get low-quality traffic that isn't actually interested in your product. At this early stage, you need to engage the right audiences first. It'd be far useful having 10 early adopters signing up through content marketing each month than 1000 people viewing articles just because they vaguely relate to cats.

Build a basic target persona and then build content around the specific problems she has, and make it long form (your current one is good, and nice use of table of contents). Also create some articles on medium that actually list keywords like 'how can i find someone to look after my cat while i'm on holiday' or 'where can i stay for free in return for looking after someone's dog'. Publish them on Medium (high domain authority, will rank fast, and the high quality prospects will likely click through to your website anyway). Also jump on Quora and make sure you've got a sizable real-estate portfolio on the questions posted there that relate to this topic.

Focus on positioning and getting that right and make sure your story supports that.

Set up some sort of marketing automation, using software like autopilot.com and map out your user funnel. People are going to drop out and you want to make sure you can re-target these people. Content at the top, email capture through lead magnets, nurture via email, CTA to sign up. Use ads to support each step.
Don't worry about fancy HTML emails, plain text works fine.
Just make sure to collect email addresses for those who may not sign up right away. Either offer a free e-book, webinar, whatever. And don't advertise for direct signups. You'll lose your money straight away. It's a bit difficult to answer without knowing a little more about the SaaS and positioning.

Focus on quality writing instead of quantity. Write 2-4k word posts and don't rush it. Include H2's that reflect keyword searches in the same semantic cluster / field of interest, and table of contents at the beginning of the article linking to each page heading. Tell people what to do as a next step, (i.e. sign up!!).

Focus on getting some backlinks to that article, and reach out to a whole bunch of other blogs and ask to do a guest post linking back to it. Answer a bunch of questions on Quora, linking back to it (will also generate very relevant traffic).

That's for SEO. For digital marketing generally, I'd say make sure you have a good marketing automation setup. I.e. identify each stage of the funnel, and aim to capture emails as early on as you can, using a lead magnet. Then optimise the funnel through emails, different types of ads, and so on. You could use Autopilot.com to start.

That way, your 20% encompasses traffic generation but also ensures your making it as easy as possible for the user to move through the funnel, and the low hanging fruits (warm prospects) are not falling off easily.

I think for apps it's critical to find a way that users can engage with their friends/partners/families. While personal finance is individual, there are many overlaps with social finances, such as shared household costs, family expenses, travel expenses, planning, etc. etc. Perhaps leverage that as a way to encourage people to invite their friends to it.

Sure. It's a way to drive engaged traffic and awareness to our core services. We looked at the market and saw a related product that people typically pay for. We build it and offered it for free. Originally we launched to email list, with around 10k signups. Then we gave people an incentive to refer friends, which boosted it up. Some PR came through with about 12k signups as a result of some crazy press in Taiwan (just happened randomly). The rest has come as a result of content marketing (we already have around 50k traffic/month to our blog, so this was the lead magnet).

It required some resources, though. If you're looking to increase growth and engagement, I think it's absolutely necessary to spend a few hours handwriting some letters to journalists at large magazines who typically write about your field. You never know.

I think it's also critical to install some sort of referral setup or platform to encourage people to invite friends. Make it as easy as possible for them to do so.

1: Explosively viral content marketing, giving away a lot of value in each post and asking people to comment - meaning their followers are exposed to it.
2: A lot of new customers, enterprise leads, huge awareness for service.
3: no software? LinkedIn Pulse is LinkedIn's native article creation platform.
4: How someone uses videos? Aim to provide value in all posts on LinkedIn. Record yourself talking for 2-3 minutes at your specific target audience solving a problem they have. Encourage engagement and always include subtitles.

A few comments: don't make two blogs. Keep it simple for yourself and stick to one blog, and that way the content of that blog will be stronger and can promote better. As soon as you make two blogs, you'll have to work twice as hard to building the domain authority. Better to stick to one.

THat's good regarding photography forums. And yes, definitely try to get featured on photography sites. Use clearbit (google it) as a Gmail extension to find the right people to email for an article or feature. Keep it personal (never copy paste a PR pitch).

I'd rephrase your tagline. Right now your tag line is focusing on the tool, not the outcome. What does the view enable? Confidence when presenting their photography? A personalised viewing experience? Figure that out, and then base your tagline (and rest of content) around that.

In other words, you're not selling the hammer or nail (tool), you're selling the ability to hang something on the wall.

Hope that helps!

Autopilot :)