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Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business (That Actually Work in 2026)
Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business (That Actually Work in 2026)
I burned $1,500 on Facebook ads and got three email signups. One was my mum. After six years of trying every channel as a bootstrapped founder, I can finally tell you which ones are worth your time.
My first real attempt at marketing was Facebook ads. Some online course, I want to say it was called Digital Marketer Pro? Something like that, $97, told me to spend $50/day "testing my market." So I did. For an entire month. $1,500 down the drain and I got three email signups. Not customers. Signups. One was my mum. She clicked it because she "wanted to support my little project." Her words.
That wiped out a full month of revenue. My SaaS was pulling maybe $400/month at the time. I still remember sitting there eating two-minute noodles for the second time that day, doing the maths in my head. Four weeks of income. Sent to Meta. For three email addresses. And one of those was a family member who felt sorry for me.
After that disaster I went all-in on "organic marketing." Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Reddit. Every. Single. Day. Plus two blog posts a week. I was putting in twenty hours a week minimum on marketing alone. Did that for six months and got about 40 customers out of it.
Which sounds... fine? Until you actually calculate it. Fifteen hours per customer. At $29/month each. I was basically earning $2/hour for my marketing time. I could've made more money picking up shifts at Woolworths.
One night around 1am, I couldn't sleep. Brain wouldn't shut up about money. So I got up, opened a Google Sheet, and started listing every marketing channel next to how many paying customers it had actually produced. Not followers. Not email opens. Not "engagement." People who gave me their credit card number.
The spreadsheet was brutal. Instagram stories? I'd been doing those for six months, an hour a day. Zero customers. Not a few. Zero. Twitter was the same story. All those reply-guy threads and "hot takes" I'd been crafting? Didn't produce a single sale. But down at the bottom of my spreadsheet, almost as an afterthought, were three blog posts I'd barely thought about when I wrote them. They'd landed on page two of Google for some random long-tail searches and had been quietly converting a customer or two per week. For months. While I was busy "building my brand" on Instagram. I felt genuinely dumb.
That spreadsheet night changed everything for me. What you'll find below is the ranking I've been refining ever since. I give each channel a 1-5 score on cost, time before results show up, difficulty, and long-term ROI. Some of this will annoy people. I can live with that.
SEO and content marketing
Cost: 1/5 | Time to results: 4/5 | Difficulty: 3/5 | ROI at scale: 5/5
I'll say it upfront: SEO saved my business. So yes, I'm biased here. Take that into account.
Almost quit before it worked, though. Three months in, nothing. Absolute flatline. I had this depressing little morning routine where I'd make coffee, open Search Console, stare at a graph that hadn't moved, close my laptop, and go do literally anything else. That went on for weeks. Felt like I was talking to a wall.
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Eventually I worked out the problem. I'd been targeting keywords like "marketing tips" and "business growth strategies" because they looked amazing in Ahrefs. Huge search volume. Very exciting until you realise that HubSpot, Forbes, Neil Patel, and like 200 other sites with ten-plus years of authority already own those results completely. I could've written the greatest article in human history about "marketing tips" and Google would've buried it on page six.
The fix turned out to be embarrassingly simple. Wrote one post targeting "CRM for freelance photographers." Microscopic keyword, maybe 50 searches a month. But those 50 people weren't window shopping. They were ready to buy. Eight converted within a month. One tiny niche post outperformed 15 generic ones I'd spent way more time on.
Why I think the wait is worth it
I have posts from 2023, over two years old now, that still pull in 30-40 visits a day. Haven't touched them. Haven't shared them anywhere. They just sit on page one doing their thing.
Name another marketing channel that does this. Seriously. Turn off your ads and traffic drops to zero that afternoon. A tweet or LinkedIn post gets maybe 18 hours before it's gone. But a blog post sitting on page one of Google? That's basically a free billboard running around the clock. No rent. No maintenance. Just... there.
The catch is real though, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Those first three to six months are genuinely awful. You publish post after post and Google acts like you don't exist. I've described it to friends as shouting in an empty car park. Some people have the patience for that kind of ambiguity. I barely did. What kept me going was pure stubbornness, honestly, plus the fact that I'd already burned through every other option and none of those worked either. Might as well stick with the one channel where the maths at least made sense long-term.
What actually made a difference
Everyone says "create quality content." What does that even mean? Quality relative to what? The stuff I read when I was starting out was full of that kind of non-advice. Here's what specifically changed my results:
Go after buyer keywords, not educational ones. I spent months writing "what is" posts and getting traffic that never converted. Then wrote "[competitor name] alternative" and "[my service] pricing" pages and the conversion rate jumped something like 8x. People searching those terms already have their credit card out. I went deeper on this in our SEO for small business guide.
Pick one topic and go absurdly deep. Google rewards obsessive coverage of a single topic way more than shallow coverage of ten topics. If you're a bookkeeper who works with restaurants, write everything there is to know about restaurant bookkeeping. 15 posts. Every angle. Google will start treating you as the authority on that specific thing.
Fix the boring stuff. Site speed, mobile experience, heading structure, schema markup. Nobody wants to do this work. But I've seen sites jump 10-15 positions just by fixing load times and adding proper meta descriptions. Takes an afternoon. Our SEO audit checklist has the full rundown.
The part about backlinks nobody wants to hear
You can do everything I just described perfectly. Beautiful content. Perfect on-page SEO. Fast site. Won't matter if nobody links to you.
Google still weighs backlinks heavily when deciding who ranks where. Sites getting linked from Wikipedia, news outlets, universities, major industry publications — those are the ones on page one. That's just how it works.
Building those links the normal way means months of cold outreach. Or paying $500-1,000 per guest post placement, which honestly feels like it gets riskier every year as Google gets better at detecting paid links.
We built Revised because of this exact problem. We find contextual backlinks from places like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Hacker News by acquiring expired domains that already have those links, then redirect them properly. Not spam. Not PBN nonsense. Legitimate authority transfer that Google explicitly supports through 301 redirects.
Bottom line on SEO
Start now. Even though results are months away. It's the only marketing channel I know of where your work compounds for years. Just please target realistic keywords from day one. Don't do what I did and waste half a year trying to rank for things you'll never rank for.
Email marketing
Cost: 1/5 | Time to results: 2/5 | Difficulty: 2/5 | ROI at scale: 5/5
I feel genuinely stupid about how long I ignored email. Two full years I treated it as something for old-school businesses and newsletter bros. Meanwhile? My email subscribers were converting at 4x the rate of organic search traffic. Social media traffic? 8x worse. I was literally ignoring my best channel because it didn't feel cool enough.
What makes email different from everything else
I sat down one day and tried to think of a single other marketing channel where you write something and the people on the other end actually receive it. Like, reliably. Couldn't think of one. Instagram shows your posts to maybe 5% of your own followers — the people who explicitly said they wanted to see your stuff. Social Insider's 2025 benchmarks put Facebook engagement at 0.15% and Instagram at 0.48%, down 24% year-over-year. Facebook organic reach is basically a rounding error at this point.
Email? You hit send. People get it. Small business open rates are sitting around 30-40% right now. Click-through is like 3-5%. Compare that to social media where engagement hovers below 1%. It's almost not worth comparing.
But here's the thing that really sold me. In 2023 I'd spent months building a decent LinkedIn following. Was pretty happy about it. Then LinkedIn changed something in their algorithm, still don't know exactly what, and my reach tanked about 70% overnight. Gone. Just like that. Months of daily posting, mostly thrown away because the whole time I'd been building on rented land. LinkedIn could change the rules whenever they felt like it, and they did.
That can't happen with email. Your list sits in your Mailchimp or ConvertKit or whatever you use. No algorithm decides who sees your stuff. No product manager at some tech company tweaking "engagement signals" in a way that accidentally kills your reach. The list is yours. Like, genuinely yours.
Getting subscribers when you're a nobody
This is the hard part. Chicken-and-egg problem. You need subscribers for email to work, but you need other marketing to get subscribers.
What worked for me, in order of how well it worked:
A tool, not an ebook. I cannot stress this enough. Nobody downloads ebooks anymore. But I built a simple ROI calculator in Google Sheets — took maybe 15 hours — and it's generated over 2,000 email signups. People want things they can USE, not things they can read and forget.
Content upgrades. Your best blog post gets decent traffic? Create a bonus resource specifically for that post. A checklist version, a spreadsheet template, whatever. "Download the complete checklist" on a high-traffic post converts 5-8x better than a generic "subscribe to our newsletter" popup.
Exit-intent popups. Yeah, they're slightly annoying. They also work. A popup that fires when someone moves their cursor toward the browser's close button adds about 2-3% to your conversion rate. On a post getting 500 visits a month that's 10-15 extra subscribers. Adds up.
The email sequence I set up three years ago and never touched
I wrote a 5-email welcome sequence in 2023. It still runs today and has generated dozens of paying customers while I was doing other things entirely.
Here's the structure:
Deliver the thing. Whatever they signed up for. Send it immediately, not "check your inbox in 5 minutes."
Your absolute best content. The post or resource that makes people think "okay, this person knows what they're talking about."
A story with some weight to it. A customer win with real numbers. Your origin story if it's interesting. Something that feels human.
What you actually sell. Not a sales pitch. Just: here's the problem, here's how we solve it, here's what it costs.
A real offer. Free trial, discount, consultation. Don't be coy. Just ask.
Fourteen days, five emails, set it and forget it. Genuinely one of the best time investments I've ever made.
Bottom line on email
If you run a small business and don't have an email list, start one today. Mailchimp and Brevo are both free for small lists. Get one good lead magnet. Set up a welcome sequence. Everything beyond that is optimization. The bar to get started is incredibly low and the payoff is the best of any channel I've used. I wrote a more detailed email marketing starter guide if you want the step-by-step.
Social media marketing
Cost: 1/5 | Time to results: 3/5 | Difficulty: 2/5 | ROI at scale: 3/5
My relationship with social media is... complicated.
Best month of customer acquisition I ever had came from a single LinkedIn post that got picked up and shared around. Felt amazing. Also kind of random. I've written hundreds of posts that went nowhere. Hundreds. The inconsistency drives me a bit crazy.
But here's what I've noticed after six years: the people who do well on social aren't better writers or more charismatic. They're just more focused.
Seriously, pick one platform
I keep coming back to this because it's the most common mistake I see. One platform. Not two. Not "primarily this one with a side of that one." One.
A friend of mine was posting on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Three times a week on each. She was drowning. Eighty hours a month on social content. Twelve customers in six months.
She killed everything except LinkedIn. Just that one feed. Started actually replying to comments, having back-and-forth conversations instead of broadcasting into the void. Twenty-eight customers in three months. Five platforms over six months had gotten her twelve. One platform in half the time got her more than double.
I know at least four other people with almost identical stories on different platforms. The pattern is weirdly consistent.
Which platform, though?
This decision matters way more than whatever content strategy you end up using.
Selling to other businesses? LinkedIn. Yeah, I know. The posts are often painfully earnest. "Thrilled to announce..." and all that performative stuff. But the B2B conversion rates are genuinely good. The algorithm still favours personal accounts over company pages too, which is nice because company pages get basically zero organic reach. I've personally watched two consultants build six-figure pipelines from LinkedIn alone. One of them posts maybe three times a week. That's it.
Visual products or services? Instagram. Food, fitness, beauty, local retail, real estate. Reels still get the most organic reach. My one gripe: proving Instagram actually drives revenue is absurdly hard. Customers will say "oh I found you on Insta!" but try getting clean attribution data? Good luck with that.
TikTok can work if your buyers are under 35 or your product is something you can demonstrate. The organic reach is still wild compared to everything else. Gap between "cool video" and "let me buy this" is pretty wide though. Lots of views, not a lot of purchases, at least from what I've seen.
X is good for tech, developer tools, SaaS, media people. If your audience hangs out there, great for name recognition. Most local businesses should skip it entirely. Your dentist's office doesn't need a presence on X. Sorry.
Facebook, the main feed is basically dead for organic reach. Page posts are a waste of your time. But Facebook Groups are still surprisingly effective for local businesses and communities with older demographics. My mate runs a landscaping business and gets most of his leads from a local Facebook Group. Go figure.
What I've seen actually work (and what's a waste)
Motivational quotes: complete waste of time. Engagement pods: sugar rush that fades in a week. Buying followers: I genuinely cannot believe people still do this in 2026.
The stuff that actually converts? Sharing work-in-progress, lessons from screw-ups, behind-the-scenes posts. A post about "here's how I lost a client" will outperform "just hit $100k MRR!" every single time. People want to see process. Nobody cares about your wins as much as you think they do.
Also, and this sounds tedious but it matters: reply to every comment for your first year. Every single one. Treat commenters like potential customers because some of them literally will be. When someone keeps showing up on your posts, send them a DM. Not a sales pitch. An actual conversation. "Hey, noticed you commenting a lot, what industry are you in?" I've gotten more customers from DM conversations than from any individual post I've ever published.
Bottom line on social
Go deep on one platform or don't bother. Spreading thin across three or four is worse than doing nothing because at least doing nothing doesn't eat twenty hours of your week. Put 70% of your social time into your primary platform. Repurpose bits of it for a secondary one if you have the energy. Done.
Paid advertising (Google Ads, Meta, etc.)
Cost: 5/5 | Time to results: 1/5 | Difficulty: 4/5 | ROI at scale: 2/5
Full disclosure: I've managed six-figure ad budgets for clients. I understand how ads work. And I still think they're wrong for most small businesses. Customer acquisition costs have risen 222% over the past 8 years according to First Page Sage, with a 40-60% jump between 2023 and 2025 alone. Let me show you why that matters.
Pull up a calculator. Google Ads CPC averages $2-4 across all industries. Sounds manageable, right? But for the keywords small businesses actually need — the ones lawyers, plumbers, and dentists are bidding on — you're looking at $10 to $50 per click. Per click. Most of those clicks don't convert. If you're converting 3% of clicks into leads (which is optimistic), you're paying somewhere between $65 and $1,600 for a single lead. And a lead isn't a customer. You still need to close them.
I've talked to probably 50 small business owners about their ad spend at this point. The typical story: they spend $2,000-5,000 before figuring out whether ads can even work for their business model. Sometimes the answer turns out to be no. That money is just... gone.
When ads DO make sense (because sometimes they do)
I'm not saying never run ads. There are a few scenarios where the math works.
Emergency and urgent services. If someone's googling "emergency plumber near me" at 2am, they're hiring whoever shows up first. They're not comparison shopping. They need help NOW. High intent, high margins, immediate decision. Ads absolutely crush it for this kind of demand.
Retargeting. This is probably the one exception where I'd tell almost any business to run ads. Someone lands on your pricing page, reads about your service, and leaves without buying? A tiny retargeting budget ($5-10/day) follows them around the internet reminding them you exist. These people already know who you are — they convert at 3-5x the rate of someone seeing you for the first time.
Launches with a hard deadline. Launching a new product next Tuesday and can't wait half a year for blog posts to rank? Pay for speed. That's a legitimate use of ads.
After you've figured out your numbers. If you've been in business long enough to know a customer is worth $2,000 over their lifetime and you can reliably acquire one for under $200, scale away. But I've had this conversation with a lot of people and most of them are guessing at those figures. "I think our LTV is around..." is not the same as knowing. And running ads based on guesses gets expensive fast.
When it'll burn your money
Running ads before product-market fit. I did this. It's like pouring gasoline on wet wood.
Running ads in a competitive market where you look identical to everyone else. The companies with deeper pockets will outbid you forever. You need some kind of angle.
Running ads without conversion tracking set up. If you can't trace which ad led to which customer, you're gambling. Don't spend a dollar until tracking works.
Bottom line on ads
Not a first channel for most small businesses. Build SEO, email, and organic social first. Come back to ads when you have proven economics and want to accelerate. The one exception: high-intent local services where the search query basically IS the sale.
Partnerships and collaborations
Cost: 1/5 | Time to results: 2/5 | Difficulty: 2/5 | ROI at scale: 4/5
Genuinely underrated. Maybe the most underrated thing on this list.
I co-hosted a webinar once with a business that served the same audience but sold completely different services. Five hours of total work. Got more customers from it than from three months of blog posts. I remember sitting there afterwards thinking "why didn't I do this sooner?"
The basic idea
Find businesses that serve your same customers but don't compete with you. A web designer who doesn't offer SEO services. An accountant who doesn't do financial planning. A personal trainer who doesn't sell supplements.
Then suggest doing something together. Options:
Joint content. Webinar, podcast episode, co-written blog post. Both of you promote to your respective lists.
Cross-referrals. "My clients always need X. Yours always need Y. Let's send them to each other."
Bundle deals. Package complementary services at a discount.
Shared events. Split the cost, combine the audience.
The outreach email that gets replies
I've sent a lot of these. The ones that work are short:
"Hey [name], I run [business] and we work with [audience]. Noticed you serve the same people but on the [complementary thing] side. Would you be up for a quick call to see if there's something we could do together? Was thinking maybe [specific idea]."
Short. Direct. No pitch decks. No three-paragraph emails explaining your "synergy." I get about a 30% response rate on emails like this. Half of those turn into actual collaborations. That's roughly 15% from outreach to outcome, which I think is excellent considering the total time investment is maybe 20 minutes per email.
Bottom line on partnerships
Just start emailing people. Five to ten businesses this month. Free to try, low downside, and when it hits it really hits. I've found this especially true in smaller towns or tight-knit industries where everybody already kind of knows each other.
Referral programs
Cost: 1/5 | Time to results: 2/5 | Difficulty: 1/5 | ROI at scale: 4/5
This is the one I kick myself for not starting sooner.
My referral conversion rate over 18 months: 67%. Let me say that again. Sixty-seven percent. Organic search converts at maybe 2%. Email at 4%. Referrals blew everything else out of the water and it's not even a contest. When someone's friend says "use this thing," they just... use it. Trust is already there.
The strategy is almost insultingly simple: ask people who like your product if they know anyone else who'd benefit. That's literally it. After a customer says something nice, after they leave a review, just go "hey, know anybody who might need this too?" Most people are happy to help if you just ask. We're weirdly bad at asking.
For eight months I ran my referral program out of a Google Sheet. No software. No referral platform. A spreadsheet with names and emails and a "give $50, get $50" offer. Worked brilliantly.
If you want to get a bit more systematic: set up an automated email that goes out 30 days after purchase. Something like "how's everything going? know anybody who might need this?" Stick a referral link on your invoices. Mention it at the end of project deliveries. One small thing I started doing that made a surprising difference: handwritten thank-you cards when someone sends a referral my way. Costs maybe $3 and five minutes. But people remember it, and they refer again.
Bottom line on referrals
Start this from day one even if you only have a handful of customers. Five referrals a month at a 50% close rate, that's 30 new customers a year from basically zero effort. I genuinely can't think of a reason not to do this.
The one channel I'd skip
Influencer marketing. I know it's trendy. I think it's mostly a waste for small businesses.
Here's why: a micro-influencer with 10,000 followers charges $200-2,000 per post. Of those 10,000 followers, how many live in your area? How many are actively in-market for what you sell? How many even noticed the sponsored post between the selfies and food pics? You can't track any of this reliably.
I've seen it work exactly once in my direct experience — a D2C skincare brand with broad appeal and high margins. For service businesses? SaaS? Local shops? B2B? I wouldn't bother.
The one exception: if someone genuinely uses and loves your product and they happen to have an audience. But that's not influencer marketing. That's just having a customer who talks about you to more people than usual.
So what should YOUR business actually do?
People ask me this all the time and I always start with "it depends" which is annoying but true. Still, after watching enough of these play out I can narrow it down by business type.
Local service businesses (plumber, dentist, salon): I know this sounds counterintuitive but your Google Business Profile is probably more important than your actual website right now. Optimize that first. Then go after local SEO keywords and get a referral program running. Google Ads can be worth it if your margins are healthy enough — a plumber charging $300 for a callout can afford $30-50 per click in a way that a coffee shop charging $5 per order simply can't.
SaaS and digital products: go hard on content and SEO. Nothing else compounds the same way for software. Layer email on top. Pick one social platform, LinkedIn for B2B or X if you're selling to developers, and find complementary tools to co-promote with.
E-commerce and D2C: your product pages and category pages probably have terrible SEO and that's actually good news because it means there's easy wins sitting right there. Email is non-negotiable. Honestly even if you only used email for abandoned cart recovery flows and nothing else, it'd still pay for your entire email platform. Instagram or TikTok depending on who your customers are. And a referral program, obviously.
Consultants and professional services: LinkedIn. Personal profile, not a company page. Nobody follows company pages and you already know that. Back it up with email, content that addresses the specific problems your clients actually have (not generic thought leadership), and partnerships with other professionals who serve the same clients but do different work.
A realistic 90-day plan if you can do 10 hours a week
This is the plan I wish someone had given me. It's not aggressive. It assumes you're one person running everything yourself between product work, customer support, and actually living your life.
Month 1
Week one: get Google Analytics 4 and Search Console set up. Spend an evening auditing your site for dumb technical problems — slow pages, broken links, meta descriptions that say "Home" on every page. You'd be surprised how many issues you can find and fix in a single sitting.
Rest of the month: research about 20 keywords that are realistic for you (low competition, some commercial intent). Write two pages targeting the most promising ones. Set up an email tool — Mailchimp free tier works fine. Build one lead magnet. Write two more blog posts. Email five businesses about potential partnerships.
That's month one. Not glamorous. Just groundwork.
Month 2
Write and publish two more blog posts (six total now). Start asking customers for referrals — you don't need to formalize it, just ask. Choose your one social platform and commit to posting 3-5 times a week. Write your welcome email sequence.
Then: create one piece of content that's actually original — a case study with real numbers, a small data analysis, a free tool. Follow up with anyone who replied to your partnership emails. Spend 15-20 minutes a day engaging on social. Look at which of your pages is getting the most visits and make sure it has a clear path to conversion.
Month 3
You have data now. Imperfect data, but data. Look at what generated leads — real leads, not just traffic — and pour more fuel on those fires.
Write more content around topics that converted. Launch a partnership with one of the businesses you've been talking to. Build some email automations for people who browse but don't buy. And the hardest part: kill the stuff that isn't working. Even if you spent a lot of time on it. Especially if you spent a lot of time on it.
Mistakes I keep watching people make
Spreading across five channels and doing none of them well. I know I've said this three times already. That's because I watch it happen three times a week. Someone with 10 hours a week to spend on marketing splits it evenly across five platforms. Two hours each. Doesn't do any of them justice. Wonders why nothing is working.
Tracking the wrong numbers. I met a woman last year with 50,000 Instagram followers. She was making less money than a guy I know with 500 email subscribers. Followers, impressions, pageviews — these are vanity metrics. They make you feel good and they don't pay rent. Track how many paying customers came from each channel and ignore everything else. More on this in our guide on measuring SEO success.
Playing pretend at being Nike. You're not Nike. You don't have their budget or their team. That content calendar template you downloaded was designed for a 10-person marketing department. Take the principles, sure, but scale them to your actual situation.
Bailing at the three-month mark. This one makes me want to scream. Most online marketing strategies for small business need 4-8 months before they really kick in. But here's what I watch happen over and over: someone tries SEO for two months. Gets antsy. Switches to Google Ads. Burns $500. Panics. Jumps to social media. Does that for six weeks, nothing much happening. Next thing you know they're googling "marketing agency near me." Four different strategies, none of them given enough runway to actually produce results. It's like planting seeds and digging them up every few weeks to check if they're growing.
Ignoring the customers you already have. Probably the most expensive mistake on this list in raw dollar terms. The easiest person to sell to, by a mile, is someone who's already bought from you once. Upsells. Add-ons. Higher tiers. Referrals. There's a Bain & Company study that gets cited a lot saying a 5% improvement in retention can boost profits somewhere between 25% and 95%. That's a huge range, sure, but even the low end is significant. And yet almost every small business owner I talk to spends 95% of their marketing energy chasing new customers and basically ignores the ones already paying them money every month.
What's different in 2026
A few things I've noticed this year that affect strategy.
AI search is eating informational queries. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity. These aren't experiments anymore. People ask a question, get an answer, never click through to your site. I've watched my "what is" posts lose like 30% of their clicks since last year. But here's the flip side: commercial keywords are more valuable than they've ever been because AI can't really answer "which CRM should I buy" without sending people somewhere. And if Google's AI cites you as a source? That trust signal is wild. I wrote more about ranking in AI search results.
Email authentication isn't optional anymore. Gmail and Yahoo started cracking down in 2024 and they've only gotten stricter. SPF, DKIM, DMARC, if those letters mean nothing to you, Google them today. Without proper authentication your emails are landing in spam. I've seen businesses invest months in email strategy only to discover half their list never received anything. Fix this first.
Short video reach is coming back to earth. TikTok and Reels still work but that period where you could post a mediocre 30-second video and get 100k views? That's done. Organic reach is trending down toward what every other platform already looks like. Don't build your entire marketing strategy around short-form video unless you're genuinely good at it.
Google is rewarding authority harder than ever. They're drowning in AI-generated spam and their main defence is to lean harder on authority signals. Backlinks from Wikipedia, major news sites, .gov domains, established industry publications, those links carry more weight now than at any point I can remember. This is why services like Revised exist. Getting those authority signals through traditional outreach, cold emailing journalists and editors, takes months of grinding work. Domain acquisition and proper 301 redirects can shortcut that process pretty dramatically.
What it comes down to
There's no magic channel. I really wish there were. Nobody is going to hand you a growth hack that transforms your business overnight, and if someone promises that they're selling you a $97 course. Trust me on this one.
What works is boring. Pick 2-3 channels that fit your business. Commit to them for six months. Track which ones produce paying customers, not impressions, not followers, not "engagement." Cut what's not working. Double down on what is.
The businesses I've watched actually succeed over the years? They weren't the ones with clever strategies. They were the ones that picked reasonable strategies and stuck with them long enough for compounding to kick in. That's really it. Consistency beats cleverness every time.
SEO and email. That's your foundation. Add one social platform or try some partnerships. Run a simple referral program from day one.
Not complicated. Just hard to do consistently when you're also handling sales, support, product, accounting, and whatever else lands on your desk that week.
But six months from now you'll either have built something that compounds, or you'll still be jumping between tactics hoping one of them sticks. Up to you.
