Autopilot marketing has got to be the best kind of marketing for small or online business owners. But what does it mean to “autopilot” your marketing for a business and how can you get started?
There’s lot of ways to use online marketing for a business. In this article I’m going to cover some methods and strategies which can be set up to run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on complete autopilot.
Let’s start with a great free strategy which every small business owner should implement to get free customers for their business.
Autopilot Marketing – Google My Business
Google My Business is a free service for locally based businesses run by, you guessed it, Google! With Google My Business, you can set up a profile and list your business just by entering some details and verifying your listing. Google will send out a PIN number in the post for you to verify your business. Once you’ve filled out your profile and confirmed your postal address, you get a free listing which can bring in customers, for free, for years to come.
To see just how powerful this listing can be, just do a local search for plumbers or handymen in your area. You should see a listing with maps for your nearest tradesmen. These listings are absolutely free and offered as a service by Google. Although some listings or adverts appear in the listings above these at times, it’s worth the hour or so of your time it takes to create a listing, if you have a locally based business.
Cheap Automated Marketing – Building A Niche Website
Here’s another top cheap strategy for locally based businesses especially. If you haven’t already got a website, or, even if you have, you can build a site around your main keywords to get free traffic from Google organic searches. I’ve implemented this strategy for a number of clients with great success. This works particularly well for local businesses because you can target your location and business keywords in your domain name.
Start out by using the Google keyword planner to search for your business keywords and location. This can give you an idea of the most searched for terms in your location which relate to your business. For example “Handyman In Bingley”, or “Bingley Handyman”. Then go to Google search and type in that same keyword in “quotes”.
As you can see, this brings up a number at the top which relates to the competing pages for this particular keyword phrase. Some towns and businesses will have more competition than others. But in many cases, it’s worth building a site around these keywords. You’ll have a very good chance of ranking a website on the first page and getting some free customers. Just make sure to build a good site too as this will help. See Create Free Website And Make Money for more on this strategy and How To Build A Niche Website And Get Free Traffic.
Google Adwords, Bing, Yahoo
The fastest and arguably easiest way to build your business is with paid for marketing strategies. The first platform you can look at is Google’s Adwords. Adwords lets you create adverts specific to keyword searches which are targeted towards your business, or a business like it. When you create an advert through Google Adwords, your advert pops up only for the keywords you specify.
So, if you have a shoe repair shop in Manchester, you can specify your advert to only show when people search for those exact keywords. There will also be a number of other relevant searches which you can use to find customers for your business. Use the keyword planner to find keywords relevant to your business and then ‘plug’ them into your advertising campaign.
Be aware though that you can inadvertently show your advert for keywords which don’t directly relate to your business. So you should learn how this platform works by starting with a low daily marketing budget which you can afford to lose. As you get better at it, you’ll know which adverts bring in business and which ones you should shut down. Eventually you’ll be able to autopilot marketing based on what you’ve learned. Once you have a number of profitable adverts running on one platform, such as Adwords, you’ll be able to move on and do the same on Bing or Yahoo which offer a similar service.
Autopilot Marketing – Testing And Measuring
There’s many more marketing platforms too including Instagram, Facebook and YouTube for example. But it’s worth learning one platform well before moving on to another one. Ultimately, once you learn how to market with one platform, you can leave your profitable adverts running, and move on to another to repeat the process.
To learn which adverts are profitable takes a little getting used to. You’ll need to track your adverts and know where your new customers come from. Otherwise, you won’t know which adverts work and which ones don’t. Tracking adverts is the key to learning from the data you get. Unless you do this, you’ll be unable to make better decisions and scale up successfully once you find the right adverts. For more on this see The Ultimate Guide To Online Marketing.
Autopilot Marketing – Blogging
Although blogging takes more time and effort than most of the methods mentioned here, it still has a huge potential to generate free traffic and attract customers. If you have a passion for your business and what you offer, you should definitely consider building a blog to extend your reach from organic traffic from the internet. Even if you only wrote a few specifically titled articles, targeting specific keywords and phrases in your niche, it can have a great effect; especially in an uncompetitive business niche.
Start out by using Google’s keyword planner as in the case for building a niche site (see above). Type in your main keywords and the planner will bring up all the related keywords which are already being searched for in your business niche. Compare the amount of monthly searches for these keywords with a quick “phrase” match (in quotes) on Google search.
Depending on your business, and the relative competition, you can find long tail keywords to write about. If you create some good content, these articles can find their way to the top of Google’s search results and bring in some free business. This takes some time and research but once you’ve built some quality content around some good uncompetitive keywords, it can bring in business for years to come – another autopilot marketing strategy to add to your collection!
For more information on this strategy, download my free ebook Niche Blogging For Profit.
