Startup founders and small business owners have no shortage of passion.

 

For most, however, time and money are a scarce resource. If you’re on the same boat, perhaps you’ve ignored other areas of your business – such as marketing – in favor of cold calling, solving technical issues, and other administrative tasks.

 

But what if you could simplify your digital marketing, go DIY, and cut your costs? Not only that, but you also get to save time for other business-building pursuits.

 

If that sounds like a good idea, this walkthrough will show you a minimum viable marketing plan for your business. Read on!

 

SEO And Link Building

The appeal of SEO is easy to understand. Ranking at the top spot for your “money” keywords can bring a lot of targeted traffic to your business. Traffic which you can convert to high-quality leads and paying customers.

 

And once you get to the top:

 

You can stay there for months even without significant work from your part, especially if you’re in an industry that’s not too competitive.

 

The downside, however:

 

SEO, link building in particular, is tedious and time-consuming (if done the white hat way). Just about any tactic – from guest posting, resource pages, to broken link building – require a piece of content tailored to the type of link you’re trying to earn.

 

Fortunately, exceptions to the rule always exist. Here are two link building methods that don’t need content to work and are doable even if you only have 15 minutes/day for SEO.

Link Reclamation

Link reclamation is a technique where you find places online that mention your brand, company, or website but without the proper link. Once you have gathered a dozen or so such URLs, you then reach out and ask the webmasters and editors to add your link.

 

Simple, isn’t it?

 

And the best part:

 

Conversion rates for link reclamation are high.

 

Someone has already mentioned your business. They recognize your company and, chances are, they have a positive brand sentiment for you. You only need to nudge them a bit to convince them to link back.

 

So how do you find link reclamation opportunities?

 

• Use Your Favorite SEO Tool: Ahrefs and Moz are two of the most popular SEO tools today, and both can help you find link reclamation opportunities. Both Ahrefs Alerts tool and the Fresh Web can find blogs, forums, news portals, websites, and other places that mention you – and will even alert you when new mentions come up.

 

• Google Search: You can find unlinked brand mentions using Google and a few advanced search operators. A decent working knowledge of search operators also lets you tailor your search depending on your site. Learning these advanced queries take time, however, so start with the template below.

 

Use a general search query like:

 

“Brand name” -site:ownwebsite.com -site:twitter.com -site:facebook.com -site:google.com

 

The query will look for specific mentions of your brand outside of your website and social media accounts. You can also filter the results to bring up only the most recent mentions by going to to Tools > Any Time.

 

• Reverse Image Search: If you have, say, a gallery of high-quality pictures and graphics on your site, you may find that some people use them without proper attribution. You can use tools like Image Raider, TinEye, or Google Images to help you find these opportunities.

 

Citation Building

A citation is any mention of your brand on the web – often a combination of your business name, address, phone number, and a link to your homepage.

 

If you want to rank at the top of local search, building local citations is an effective way to get you there. So much so that a survey by Brighton Local found that 76% of SEOs use citations to build links to their clients.

 

Note, though:

 

Citations don’t always link back to your website. And most of the time, most citation sources will nofollow your backlink anyway.

 

Fortunately, a citation is still valuable from a local SEO perspective nonetheless. Google’s algorithm can identify your business information and credits you with the mention even without a link. Not only do citations boost your ranking and presence on the web. But they also help boost your business’ trustworthiness in the eyes of Google.

 

Local business and industry-specific directories are the go-to resources when building citations. You can use Google to search for these directories. But finding them can be tedious so using a service like WhiteSpark makes perfect sense if you have the budget.

Social Media Marketing

We’re in 2018. Social media is now a part of every business’ marketing arsenal.

 

The problem, however:

 

The world of social media is full of distractions. You may log into Twitter one afternoon with the intention of engaging with industry influencers – then find yourself catching up on celebrity gossip five minutes later.

 

To make sure you have this area of marketing covered without wasting time, you need a simple daily plan. Below are four essential activities to include in your everyday marketing. Spend 10 minutes on each of these activities and you will make steady progress on the social media front.

 

Listen To Social Mentions

Social listening is the process of tracking the conversations happening about your brand and industry. Listening lets you learn more about your potential customers, competitors, and the trends in your industry.

 

Plenty of free and freemium monitoring and listening tools out there let you track keywords, hashtags, and mentions. And they do so at a level that’s good enough for small business owners and entrepreneurs.

 

When setting up for social listening, you will want to pay special attention to:

 

• Mentions of your brand or product (with and without @)
• Mentions of branded hashtags
• Industry-relevant hashtags
• Competitors and publications in your space

 

Of course, you don’t want to listen for listenings sake. The following steps will help you make good use of the insights you gain from social listening.

 

Engage With Followers And Influencers

Engagement is king in social media. People want to have meaningful conversations and interactions with other users and brands alike. And if you have set up social listening properly, you will know when to step into a conversation.

 

Here are a few things to focus on for this stretch of 10 minutes:

 

• Replying to mentions. If you’re providing social customer service, you will get plenty of mentions, and you will want to respond to these as soon as possible. Take the conversation to email or another private channel, especially if solving the issue personal information.

 

• Like and comment on relevant content. Pressing the <3 button is a good start. But leaving a relevant comment is even better as it puts you in the radar of target prospects and influencers.

 

• Repost other people’s content. Posting only about your company and its products will fatigue your followers and can lead to unfollows. Focus instead on sharing valuable pieces of content from experts in your space.

 

Analyze Your Results

To make sure you’re getting the most out of your social posts and updates, use a social analytics tool to find which content performs best in your chosen networks.

 

For example:

 

A tool like Hootsuite Analytics can give you a comprehensive overview of your Twitter account. It lets you track your number of tweets, follower growth, changes in engagement levels, as well as the traffic you’re getting from the network.

 

Whether your number of followers are dropping or engagement levels are skyrocketing, you will know at a glance. From here, you can pull up the tweets you published for, say, the past 7 to 14 days to find what triggered the trend.

 

Schedule Posts And Updates

You probably don’t have the time to visit your Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram accounts multiple times a day. So schedule posts and updates instead.

 

When you should publish your posts depend on your audience. You will need to monitor your followers’ activity and adjust your posting schedule accordingly.

 

If your social following is too small (insufficient sample size), you can check out the latest research from CoSchedule and Quicksprout on the best posting times. Use that as a starting point and tweak as you go.

 

Related Reading: How to schedule Instagram Posts like a boss

 

Participating In Community Conversations

Marketing is all about finding and attracting the right people to your products and services. So why not meet your target audience where they stay online?

 

Just about any topic, niche, or industry has online communities dedicated to it, and getting into one is often free. Become a valued part of the group and you might just turn other users into fans of your brand.

 

If you want to add community building as part of your online marketing efforts (which you should), here are three places you will want to look into.

 

 

Reddit

“The front page of the internet” gets more than billions of visits from users every year and has more than one million engaged communities. If Reddit seems like an excellent source of traffic and followers for your brand, you are correct.

 

But do note:

 

You need to follow certain rules of etiquette if you are going to succeed in Reddit.

 

Among many things, blatant self-promotion and spamming your links are frowned upon. You will also want to grow familiar with how users rate other posts – upvoting and downvoting – as well as how a post’s score affects its visibility in the platform.

 

Instead of jumping the gun, spend a few weeks participating in the subreddit most relevant to your business. Answer questions from other users, comment on posts (in a nice way, of course), and share informative content that’s relevant to the subreddit.

 

Once you’ve built up your karma, you can now submit your first link and eventually run your own “Ask Me Anything” (AMA).

 

 

Quora

Quora is a community-driven Q&A site, which is getting a lot of attention from marketers and small business owners in the recent years.

 

As you may have expected, hustling and hard-selling on Quora isn’t recommended. But the Q&A site still has a lot of value to offer even if you only have five minutes a day.

 

For starters, the site lets you get in touch with your target audience and build your authority by sharing your knowledge. Answer a question, make sure you add a lot of valuable details, and your influence on the site will only soar.

 

Even better:

 

Quora shows the first 50 characters of your profile (name and bio) above your answer. Meaning each time you answer a question is an opportunity to boost brand recognition.

 

Online Forums And Message Boards

First things first:

 

Forum marketing should not involve building profiles across 10,000 online message boards and adding a link to your site in the signature. That’s not marketing. That’s spamming!

 

But when done right, establishing your presence and marketing your business on forums can help you:

 

• Find new customers
• Gain insight about your target audience
• And even develop strategic partnerships

 

But just like the previous community building platforms we looked into, marketing on forums requires that you let go of the “numbers game” mindset. Blasting marketing messages at every opportunity is likely to get you banned.

 

Instead, you want to be a part of the community. One who’s enthusiastic about the forum’s topic and generous when sharing expertise.

 

Start by registering and building your forum profile. Add an appropriate photo. Fill out the bio. And add a link to your website if possible. You may also want to contact the forum admin and ask how their advertising and sponsorship packages work if they’re available.

 

With your forum account now up and running, you can now introduce yourself to other users. Most forums have a thread or even an entire subforum dedicated to welcoming new members.

 

Next, you will want to contribute by starting discussions and replying to questions.

 

Rinse and repeat the above steps enough times and you’ll be a respected member of the community. From here, you can start marketing your business. A good rule of thumb is to always provide value even in your marketing posts.

 

For example:

 

Post a summary of an informative guide you published with a link back to the original post. Or, post sections from your infographic, preferably those full of interesting stats and actionable takeaways.

 

Such posts not only get your website in front of prospective customers. But they also further cement your reputation as knowledgeable and helpful community member!

 

I’ve handpicked a few guides for you to read next:

How to Choose the Best Social Media Platform for your Business

7 Tips to get started with social media for your small business

5 Important Elements of a successful Social Media Strategy

 

 

Guest Blogger: Nathan Sharpe is the entrepreneur behind Biznas, a blog where he serves practical business advice and tips to readers. Learning and helping others learn is his passion.