(Had to dig up an old book for this article haha)

The way I see it, there are two ways to do marketing.

You can either:

1. Have your leads come to you. (paid advertising, SEO, referrals, Content Marketing)
2.  Go where your leads are. (Social media, Online groups, cold emailing)

Since you’re going the organic route, that means some of your options are limited. So:

• No paid advertising (Google, Facebook, social media ads)
• No paying for lists of interested leads (For campaigns)

That leaves us with:

• SEO (Long term strategy and dependent on algorithms)
• Non-paid Content Marketing(Time consuming and can be hit or miss)
• Social Media interaction (Time-consuming, can be hit or miss AND it’s based on algorithms)
• Online Groups
• Creating your own lists from scratch to reach out to.
• Referrals

Okay, so now that you know what the battlefield is, now let’s talk strategy.

And, uhh, we kinda have to go over the obvious stuff first to do that.

Sorry :(

Because even though you’re not paying for traffic, you still have to know who are the kinds of people you want to see our stuff.

So start doing that by asking yourself these questions:

If we’re going to where our leads are:

• Who are the people who would most be interested in what I’m offering? Where would I most likely find them online? (Reddit? Pinterest? Instagram? LinkedIn? Forums? Youtube? Facebook groups? Medium? Quora?)
• What would be the best way to interact/be visible to the people here? How can I offer value to them up-front? How can I earn the right to offer them something? How can I make it hard for them to say no?

If we’re creating content that helps algorithms bring them to us:

• Who are the people who would most be interested in what I’m offering? What types of problems are they having? Can I create content that I know they would find valuable? 
• What kind of stuff are they searching up? What are their problems and worries? 
• What can I do that will make it more probable they’ll find my stuff where they’re already looking. How can I make it more eye-catching?

All of this, of course, is assuming you have something WORTH SHOWING to that organic traffic.

(Else any type of traffic won’t work. People just won’t come back, even if they end up on your page.)

Did that? Good.

Now let’s get to the non-obvious stuff. (The fun part)

The book I mentioned before is actually a marketing/business book called “Getting everything you can out of all that you got”. I had to open it back up to review the idea of “host-beneficiary relationships”.

And it’s an idea the BLEW MY MIND when I read it.

It goes something like this:

• There are people and companies out there who already have an audience.
• Those same people and companies are always looking for valuable content/offers they can give to that audience.
• You can create that valuable content/offer, go to those people and companies and ask them to introduce your service/product/content to their audience. If it’s a paid product, as a hook, you can offer a percentage of your sales generated because of them.

Now the trick to this is to find non-competitive relationships.

For example, as a landing page marketer, it probably wouldn’t be cool to offer my own services to another landing page marketer with an audience. But maybe I could to landing page designers (since copy and design go hand and hand to make a page)

In my notes on the book, I have this question that stands out that I think is valuable:

“Who has a strong relationship with people to whom I can sell to without being non-competitive”.

In the same spirit, there’s a lot of people and companies out there who have blogs or create articles weekly (like me). So offering to do a guest post in exchange for the exposure could work pretty nicely.

And then you have referrals. There’s nothing more organic than word of mouth.

So the question is, how could you leverage your own audience/people you know?

• Can you ask them for recommendations of people they think you can help?
• Can you offer them a reward for referring you to someone?
• Can you ask them if there are any communities you think your offers would be valuable to?

The basic gist of all of this (and of the book, essentially) is this:

“What opportunities can I make for myself in places nobody is looking?”

It’s the only way to do so when you choose to do things organically.