Inbound Marketing Tips for launching a side gig with limited resources [Video]

In my quest to help others achieve their goals and grow their businesses online, I reached out to my community and asked for people to submit questions for me to answer. I am excited to try this new platform and share more direct insight with all of those who follow me and my agency on a consistent basis. Our first question comes from a friend of mine, Stacy Cassio, who is starting an amazing new company call Chief of Staffer. Check out her work here. 

Here’s Stacy’s question.

What inbound marketing tips can you offer someone launching a side gig where time and resources are both limited?

This is a great question and I totally get having limited time and resources. While we could talk a lot about tactics and strategy, the first place you must start is your audience. Before you can even begin to invest time in tactics, you have to know who you are trying to reach. Your audience will dictate the best and most effect channels to reach them.

In the case of Stacy’s business, I would invest a lot of time in creating content focused on the entrepreneur looking to build a team around them. I’d address their pain points and share how I can come alongside them to alleviate their pain. I would also publish content on Medium. There is a huge audience on there and if you create great content, you can reach a ton of people. Depending on the industry they are in, I would also invest time in outreach via LinkedIn and Twitter.

Now those are a few recommendations that may apply to Stacy’s needs right now, but yours will be different, mainly because your audience is going to be different. Check out the video below as I give a broader overview of how you can use Inbound to launch your side gig with limited resources.

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Video Transcript

All right. Our first question has to do with how can you use Inbound in order to drive traffic and really grow your side gig when time and resources are a limited. The first thing you need to do before you dive into tactics is get to know who you’re talking to. You can do blogging, or social media, or email blasts all you want, but if those aren’t gonna resonate with the people you’re talking to, you’re wasting your time. We want to maximize our time, maximize our resources because they’re limited.

The first thing you need to do is do some buyer persona profiling. Understand who you’re talking to, what their pain points are, and more importantly, where they’re actually at online. If they’re more prone to search traffic where they’re gonna go on Google and answer questions and do deep dive research, maybe blogging and a link campaign might be better for you. If they’re on Twitter, having a really, really good Twitter strategy where you’re reaching out, and you’re actually being social on Twitter, and answering questions, and engaging with your followers, and building your base that way. If they’re on LinkedIn, it’s writing really, really good content, getting that content posted out, maybe boosting some of that content, but then also networking on LinkedIn. This is where some of their extra tools sometimes are actually really worth the cost where you can do a little bit deeper dive and get to know the people on your platform.

The first thing you need to know is to understand your audience, and once you understand your audience, then you can start to look at tactics. The other thing you really want to do is find an area that you’re going to excel in, enjoy doing, and willing to put that little extra hustle behind. If you really hate a certain platform and that’s really where much of your audience is, you maybe should question who your target audience is and really if what you’re doing is what you want to do. Whatever you do and wherever you go, you want to make sure that you just set a time in your day, maybe it’s early in the morning, late at night, where you can just focus and put together all of your energy into your strategy on that one area that you’re gonna focus really, really effectively on. As far as tactics go, those can really, really adjust according to your audience and who you’re going at, but the most important thing is getting to know who you’re talking to because that’s gonna help you know where to go.

Then you want to start to look for trends as well. See what people are doing on those platforms and maybe where they’re going next. Maybe you could be that first person on that new platform where you’re gonna get a ton of new leads and a ton of authority by being that early adopter on the platform. I would really, really recommend spending some time to define your audience, looking where your audience is at, and then seeing ways that you can win the game. Maybe it’s gonna take you a little bit of PPC upfront, maybe a little bit of social ads up front, to kind of get the ball moving, but everything really comes back to education. Once you find where your audience is, find a way to engage with them, educate them about your business, and help them buy into what you’re selling.

Hope this answers your question. We can’t wait for the next episode where we’ll take another question from somebody just like you. This is the SMA Marketing Minute. Thanks for watching. Hey, thanks so much for checking out this video. It really means a lot. If you like what you saw, please hit the Subscribe button below. That way, every time I post a new video, you’ll be one of the first people to know. You can also check us out on our website where I write blogs every single week, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for connecting with us and happy marketing.