13 Marketing Ideas For Online Business Owners Who Don’t Love Marketing

If you’re anything like us, when you hear the word “Marketing,” it feels vague and a bit overwhelming.

If you run an online business, sure, you know marketing is important, but how can you improve your marketing efforts unless you break down that big word into more actionable pieces?

In this article, we want to share with your how we break down the broad idea of marketing into more digestible parts, plus we want to give you our proven marketing strategies that you can experiment with to boost revenue for your business.

Before we go any further, we want to make sure this article can actually benefit you. These are three critical pieces of the puzzle you need to have in place right now:

1. You have a product or service you sell and someone has purchased it before.
2. You have some traffic coming to your website or some audience on social media.
3. You are willing to have an experimenter’s mindset and you aren’t looking for silver bullets.

Did you say HELL YES! 💪🏼 to all three of those things? Awesome, then let’s keep going.

👉 Improving your marketing leads to more revenue

Before we dive into what marketing is and how we’re going to help you feel less overwhelmed by it, let’s start with what you WANT:

You want more MONEY, right?

We don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, especially if you’re intentional about defining how much money is enough for you and why you want it in the first place. More money = more freedom. It means more breathing room, more time for the things you value, less stress, and hopefully whatever makes you money is also helping the person who is buying from you.

In order for your business to make more money, you need more clients or customers—it’s as simple as that. And you’re likely in one of these two categories:

#1: You have a service offering that has been validated (meaning someone has paid for it) but you DON’T have a steady stream of clients knocking on your door to hire you.

#2: You have a product that some people like, but sales aren’t as great as you expected and you’re not sure why.

This is the big mystery every business owner is trying to solve: why aren’t I getting more clients or customers?

This is where the all-powerful marketing comes in. We need to figure out the gaps in your marketing strategy to understand why you aren’t getting the number of clients or customers you want. And maybe you’re like hmmm, “I don’t think I have a market strategy,” in which case GOOD because this article will help you come up with one (or two, or three, etc!)

Okay, so let’s take our big term Marketing and break it down a bit…

Let’s paint the scene for you. Cozy up for some storytime and metaphors!

Your online business is an island 🏝

Your offering is a castle on your island 🏰

Your potential customers are over on the “mainland” 🏜

Your goal as a business owner is to get some of these people—-the RIGHT people (that’s very key)–from the mainland all the way over to your castle.

Not only do these people have to be willing to leave the mainland and venture over to your island, but they also need to build enough trust with you that they’re willing to hand over their hard-earned mainland dollars to enter your castle.

How does someone move from the mainland to your island?

Your marketing strategy is the BRIDGE between the MAINLAND and your ISLAND 🌉

You need a GUIDED PATH for interested people to get from where they are in all those mainland neighborhoods, over to where your product lives (your island). Now, is it as easy as just dropping your website link everywhere you can think you’re ideal peeps are hanging out? Is that a marketing bridge? No ma’am. Because if it was that easy, you wouldn’t be reading this article right now.

A great marketing bridge that gets people from the mainland to your island requires a step-by-step path, one that constantly invites your audience to deepen the connection with you aka go farther and farther across your bridge until they’re ready to enter your castle. We call these invitations throughout your marketing efforts “guideposts.”

But, just because the marketing bridge exists, doesn’t mean people KNOW it’s there. You need to point them in the right direction and guide them down a well-lit path from the mainland, across your bridge, and to your island and eventually into your wondrous castle. These guideposts represent things like your content marketing, maybe some paid marketing, or anything that can get in front of someone and say, Hey! This thing exists!

Let’s recap the marketing metaphors we’ve laid out for you:

• 🏝 Your website is your island
• 🏰 What you sell is the castle on your island
• 🏜 Your potential customers are over on the “mainland” (this is where everyone’s hanging out on the internet (social media apps, popular sites, etc.)
• 🌉 Your marketing efforts form the bridge between the mainland and your island
• 🚏 The steps along the way in your marketing efforts (to build trust and make the sale) are guideposts to get people across the bridge from the mainland to your island and castle

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The Biggest Mistakes You Can Make With Your Marketing

Now that we’ve broken this big vague idea of “Marketing” into its parts, we can more clearly see where people often fall short. In our experience, there are three mistakes people often make related to their marketing bridge.

Mistake #1: You go hard on SELLING in your social media content and content marketing.

This is the equivalent of putting up billboards over on the mainland saying “Pay $100 to come to my castle!” when people are just hearing about you for the first time. There’s no bridge there, no journey for them to go on to understand what your business is, how it can help them, and why they should pay you money.

Mistake #2: You have a marketing bridge, but you don’t put up any signs on the mainland so no one knows it exists.

Let’s say you’ve spent time and energy building out a robust, helpful free email course on branding as a lead in to sell your branding course (ps. this is one of our Bridge Blueprints below!) You know it works because a few people have converted to sales. The problem is that no one is finding it! Unless you’re creating helpful content in the form of things like social posts, videos, podcasts or articles, then people who could be your potential customers have no way to stumble across you. Your bridge might as well not exist because it’s not connecting with the wealth of people already hanging out over on mainland/the internet!

Mistake #3: You have a bridge, but you rush the journey.

It’s not enough to simply build the bridge; as we mentioned, you need guideposts throughout your bridge so that people can gradually get to know your business and build trust.

Imagine this: Someone stumbles across your podcast that’s all about how to plan and run big business events. They WERE listening to the latest true crime podcast, but they decided it’s time to up-level their business knowledge and they’re thinking of running an event in the future so they find you in their favorite podcast app. Woohoo! That’s like someone wandering around the mainland and seeing your billboard that says “Hello! I’m a business and I exist!” Great.

Now imagine if you encourage listeners at the end of your podcast to sign up for your email newsletter. Plus 12 points for you! That’s a guidepost—-and invitation for them to step foot on your marketing bridge. Things are looking good for you. But NOW imagine this ideal customer of yours hops on your newsletter and immediately gets pitched your $1,000 course on how to plan your own large-scale event. She’s like WHOA, I just started listening to your podcast. I’m not ready for this level of commitment!

People *most* often need multiple touchpoints to build trust with you before they buy. Instead of pitching up front, maybe you deliver info-packed, valuable newsletters every week to your customers. Maybe you invite the most engaged subscribers to live workshops or a targeted free video series so they can learn more from you first and really get to know you before they buy.

The same goes for a service-based business, instead of closing the deal on the first consultation call, maybe you want to send a proposal first with ideas about how you plan to help them. With each interaction, you want those peeps coming from the mainland to fall deeper and deeper in love with your brand and to move farther and farther down the bridge.

Now that you know the mistakes to avoid, let’s give you some ideas to help you up-level your marketing bridge.

We want to share with you 13 different ways to build a marketing bridge between your audience and your offering. One quick thing we should note though:

👉👉 We’re going to use the term “traffic” in these marketing bridges as a shorthand to say you have already created SOME ways for people on the mainland to see your “Hello, I exist!” signs up.

As we talked about at the very beginning of this section, we’re assuming you already have a traffic source or two for your business. Traffic sources can be, but are not limited to:

1. Organic traffic (people finding your website, blog, articles, etc from Google search)
2. Social media traffic (people who follow you on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc)
3. Direct traffic (people who subscribe to your email newsletter, listen to your podcast, etc)

Okay, now that you understand how we think about marketing, we want to share 13 different marketing bridges and their blueprints that you can experiment with in your business. We’ve ordered the 13 blueprints from easiest to implement to more in-depth.

Important note: Just because a marketing bridge is harder to implement does not mean it will land more sales. In fact, we’ve found some of the simplest marketing bridges are the most effective! Remember to use an experimenter’s mindset as you plan your marketing calendar and try these marketing bridges on for size in your business. 

 

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Marketing Bridge #1

The “Newsletter” Blueprint

Our 👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍🦲 Favorite

The concept: The “Newsletter” Blueprint is the most basic marketing bridge for an online business owner but is also one of the most powerful. As amazing as social media platforms can be, they are always changing. However, people’s use of email has stayed steady and the experience of reading email is a lot more focused than quickly scrolling/swiping through posts in a social feed.

How the “Newsletter” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• You add multiple email opt-in forms to your website →
• (Your opt-in form copy should be compelling and enticing!) →
• You send consistent emails to folks who subscribe →
• (Your emails should be helpful trust-building pieces of content) →
• Eventually, you send pitch emails to buy your product →
• Your newsletter is the bridge and the consistent emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: We’ve successfully used the “Newsletter” blueprint to generate over $2,000,000 in business revenue over the past decade. Over 90% of our business revenue continues to come from our email newsletter and that’s why we are listing it as the first, and what we think should be, a foundational marketing bridge you have in place.

 

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Marketing Bridge #2

The “Consultation” Blueprint

The concept: The “Consultation” Blueprint is the most direct and 1-on-1 marketing bridge we’ll talk about. This blueprint is almost a must-have if you are a freelancer and are trying to get more clients but we’ve even used this blueprint to sell higher-priced digital products. Speaking of which, it’s not a good idea to use this blueprint for lower-cost offerings (the time isn’t worth the money).

How the “Consultation” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• You have a contact form or calendar scheduler on your website →
• (You have the 1-on-1 consultation call) →
• You send follow-up pitch emails →
• Your consultation call is the bridge and the pitch emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: As we just mentioned, we’ve actually used consultation calls to sell digital products in the $1,000 – $2,000 range. When we used to offer client services, consultation calls were a critical part of the marketing process. The key with this blueprint is to have the consultation call sign-up process as efficient and straightforward as possible. And while the call itself is important, the follow-up pitch emails are where the final move across the marketing bridge and into your offering castle will happen!

 

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Marketing Bridge #3

The “Lead Magnet” Blueprint

The concept: The “Lead Magnet” Blueprint is like an upgrade to the Newsletter Blueprint. You offer a freebie or downloadable item (PDF, checklist, etc) that someone has to give their email address to receive. Lead magnets are a marketing win-win if the freebie/downloadable thing delivers extra value based on what your potential customer was already interested in.

How the “Lead Magnet” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• (Most often this is an article or a specific landing page) →
• You have a freebie or downloadable item that requires an email address →
• Their email gets added to your email list/newsletter →
• You send consistent emails and eventually pitch emails →
• (Bonus step: You have a dedicated email sequence around the lead magnet) →
• Your lead magnet is the bridge and your emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: Over the years we’ve found that some of our most interested and qualified potential customers come from some sort of lead magnet. Because they are willing to enter their email to learn more about something and invest time doing so, they are usually more ready to purchase from (especially if the lead magnet delivers on its promise!)

 

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Marketing Bridge #4

The “Email Course” Blueprint

The concept: The “Email Course” Blueprint is simple in concept but can take a good amount of experimentation (read: trial and a good amount of error) to get it converting people to paying customers. You send a series of emails around your offering topic and you soft sell in those emails, along with emails at the end of the sequence that are a sales pitch.

How the “Email Course” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• You offer a free email course to teach someone how to solve a problem →
• The email course gets sent out over a series of days →
• (The individual email course emails can pitch your offering) →
• You pitch your offering at the end of the email course →
• (Additionally: The potential customer gets added to your email newsletter) →
• Your email course is the bridge and your emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: We absolutely love free email courses and think they are a solid way to build a lot of trust with your potential customers (from the mainland!) Over a few days you can help your potential customer solve problems around your email course topic and then show them how your offering speeds that process up or does some/all of the work for them. Email courses are great because they tend to be a great way to generate passive income (once you’ve tested out different emails, pitches, sales pages, etc).

 

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Marketing Bridge #5

The “Epic Post to E-Book” Blueprint

The concept: The “Epic Post to E-Book” Blueprint is not for everyone but it can be the BEST way to create consistent organic traffic and email signups. This article you’re reading right now could be considered an “epic post” with exception to the e-book part (which we’ll talk about in the experience section below). The goal is to create a piece of content that really nails a topic and then offer the reader an e-book version to download, which puts them in your “newsletter blueprint” (or “lead magnet/email course” blueprints).

How the “Epic Post to E-Book” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• You have an “epic post” that is better than most on the topic →
• (More on how to create an “epic post” below) →
• You offer an e-book version of the epic post that can be downloaded →
• You have a dedicated email sequence around the epic post e-book with a sales pitch →
• Their email gets added to your email list/newsletter →
• You send consistent emails and eventually more pitch emails →
• Your “epic post and e-book” are the bridges and your emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: We thoroughly enjoy writing in-depth “epic posts” based on what we’ve learned and what we’ve experienced. We find that our “epic posts” are the ones that rank most often and end up on the first page of Google which brings us organic traffic over time. While writing these marketing bridges we realized we had YET to do the e-book portion of this bridge and we’d really only pitched our email newsletter as the guidepost to get someone to our castle.

 

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Marketing Bridge #6

The “Fly On The Wall” Blueprint

Our 👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍🦲 Favorite

The concept: The “Fly On The Wall” Blueprint let’s your potential customer watch you work on a project or experimenting with something. You could be building via blog post updates, video updates, or simply via emails. The idea is to share the behind the scenes of how the sausage gets made and let someone join you on the journey.

How the “Fly On The Wall” blueprint works:

• You build something in public (with updates via blog, video, or email) →
• You have traffic coming to your blog, videos, or email list →
• You have a call to action to subscribe or get on your email list for project updates →
• Their email gets added to your email list/newsletter →
• You send consistent emails and eventually more pitch emails →
• Your “fly on the wall” project is the bridge and your emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: This is one of our FAVORITE marketing bridges. Not only is it a great way to showcase how you work and your personality while you work, people simply love to watch how things get made. When we built this site (Wandering Aimfully) we used this exact marketing bridge tactic and it helped us get a bunch of new email subscribers which turned into customers when we were ready to sell our offering. We continue to use this marketing bridge over and over as we thoroughly enjoy sharing our processes and ALL the behind the scenes goodness.

 

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Marketing Bridge #7

The “Quiz” Blueprint

The concept: The “Quiz” Blueprint is a way to figure out what your potential customer needs and identify ways to help them based on their answers. Quizzes are great at segmenting people and then sending them down paths to further solve their problems.

How the “Quiz” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to a quiz landing page →
• At the end of the quiz you ask for their email to get results/etc →
• You send them an email sequence about their quiz results and how you can help →
• You send a more personalized sales pitch via email after the quiz results sequence →
• (Bonus: You grow your email list with the quiz and can pitch these folks again later) →
• Your “quiz” is the bridge and your emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: This is actually the next marketing bridge we’re going to be exploring! We’ve never tried a quiz before but we finally feel like we have a good idea for one that will lead people through our helpful content and possibly become customers. We love this email provider quiz from the Growth Tools team.

 

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Marketing Bridge #8

The “Partnership” Blueprint

The concept: The “Partnership” Blueprint is all about teamwork making the dream work! Ideally, you’re partnering with another person so you can attract some of their audience to you (and vice versa for the partner). Partnerships can include co-hosted video workshops, guest blog posts, limited edition product bundles, or simple co-branded experiences.

How the “Partnership” blueprint works:

• Your PARTNER has traffic coming to a dedicated signup page, post, etc →
• There is something to sign up for or register for where emails are collected →
• You deliver the partnership offering (workshop, post, etc) →
• (You may: Have a live sales pitch with your partner) →
• You send a sales pitch email sequence →
• (Bonus: You grow your email list with qualified people from your partner’s audience) →
• Your “partnership” is the bridge and your live sales pitch and sales emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: Partnerships are such a great way to tap into audiences that have already been vetted and are hungry to learn and improve. We’ve done partner video workshops, partner “fly on the wall” project builds (whoa, marketing bridge crossover!), partner podcasts, partner guest posts, and they all are a great way to grow your email list, but more importantly, put up a new bridge and guideposts from someone else’s island/castle to your island/castle.

 

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Marketing Bridge #9

The “Group Challenge” Blueprint

The concept: The “Group Challenge” Blueprint is a great way to harness the power of word of mouth marketing. The idea is to get a group of people excited about doing a challenge together and working closely with one another. Challenges are perfect for social media as people can quickly connect, stay in touch, and there’s built-in discoverability using hashtags (and leveraging the individual group member’s audience).

How the “Group Challenge” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• You have a dedicated landing signup page for a group challenge →
• Your group works together on a specific challenge →
• You keep in contact with the group via email (and on social media) →
• You send a sales pitch email sequence during or after the challenge →
• (Bonus: Your group members help bring traffic to the challenge and grow the group) →
• Your “group challenge” is the bridge and your group members and your pitch emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: We’ve had great success with group challenges on Instagram, especially with Caroline’s Hand-Lettering Course which used to run monthly hand-lettering challenges. Giving people a list of to-do items and a common goal gets them excited to share and attract other people to the group. We’ve also enjoyed issuing small group challenges to our email list where they can share the challenge with their friends!

 

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Marketing Bridge #10

The “Workshop” (aka Webinar) Blueprint

Our 👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍🦲 Favorite

The concept: The “Workshop” Blueprint is something you’ve probably seen time and time again. There’s no denying that a live atmosphere is a great way to engage with an audience, help teach them something, and then sell your offering to them. The great thing about workshops (hosted live or recorded on-demand) is that not only do you have the opportunity to sell during the workshop, but the follow-up sales email series is also a natural fit.

How the “Workshop” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• You have a dedicated landing signup page for a live workshop →
• Your run the workshop and teach the attendees how to accomplish something →
• You have a live pitch of your offering during the live workshop →
• You send a follow-up sales pitch email sequence after the workshop →
• (Bonus: Your workshops can help you grow your email list) →
• Your “workshop” is the bridge and follow-up sales emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: The idea of hosting a live workshop (or even recording one to be watched on-demand) can be daunting for some but it’s truly one of our favorite marketing bridges. Not only do we love to share knowledge and teach on a topic but it’s also a great way to genuinely connect with people. It’s never been easier to host a workshop (or webinar) and we run all of ours using Crowdcast (aff link) these days as they make much of this blueprint easy for you!

 

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Marketing Bridge #11

The “Video Series” Blueprint

The concept: The “Video Series” Blueprint is extremely similar to the “Email Course” blueprint in that the videos are delivered via… well… email! The main difference with this blueprint is that video is a much more engaging media and you can share your personality and build a rapport with a potential customer faster. Plus, video can be a much better medium for teaching with all the extra bells and whistles you can add in the editing process.

How the “Video Series” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• You offer a free video series that gets delivered via email →
• The video series gets emailed out over a series of days →
• (The individual videos in the series can pitch your offering) →
• You pitch your offering at the end of the video series with an email pitch sequence →
• Your “video series” is the bridge and your videos and emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: We’ve used video to our advantage quite a bit over the years but only on a few occasions have we followed this blueprint. Mostly that’s because we’ve been spending time using other marketing bridges and we simply forget about the video series as a marketing bridge (yep, even we miss out on our own marketing opportunities!) If you have the chops to record and edit videos, a video series blueprint could work wonders for ya.

 

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Marketing Bridge #12

The “Free Trial” Blueprint

The concept: The “Free Trial” Blueprint is definitely one of the most complex marketing bridges to create but if you’re selling a recurring product (like a membership, coaching, or software) a free trial can be one of the highest converting marketing efforts. The idea with a free trial is to give your customers enough access to show them how your product or service can be useful enough for them to want to purchase from you.

How the “Free Trial” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your website →
• You have a free trial of your offering →
• (Immediately after joining the trial there’s an onboarding experience into your offering) →
• During the free trial period you send an email series about your offering →
• (You’ll likely have a visual reminder of the trial while experiencing your product) →
• You pitch your offering heavily as the trial period comes to a close →
• Your “free trial” is the bridge and your onboarding and emails are the guideposts!

Our experience with this bridge: Free trials are simply a no-brainer if you’re selling a software product. Our other business (an online course software called Teachery) has been built entirely on the free trial marketing bridge. Zero other bridges have been constructed and Teachery has generated over $500,000 in revenue as a side project. But, it’s not just software, Wandering Aimfully used to be sold as a membership community and we tested a 1-month and 7-day free trial with some success. Truthfully, we didn’t put a lot of effort into the free trial marketing bridge with Wandering Aimfully but it still worked!

 

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Marketing Bridge #13

The “Cool Microsite” Blueprint

The concept: The “Cool Microsite” Blueprint is last on our marketing bridge list because it typically takes the most effort to create. Putting together a cool microsite takes planning, technical know-how, great copywriting, and more often than not needs to leave the microsite visitor saying, “wow, I’ve never seen anything like that before!” The cool microsite marketing bridge is a great one if you can spin up unique share-worthy experiences that people will pass around and help generic buzz for your offering.

How the “Cool Microsite” blueprint works:

• You have traffic coming to your cool microsite →
• (You can also direct existing website traffic to a cool microsite) →
• You ask for the microsite visitor to enter their email for future similar experiences →
• (If the microsite is good enough you can sell your offering directly on it!) →
• You could start an email series with a pitch here or simply add to your email newsletter →
• Your “cool microsite” is the bridge and your emails are the guideposts!

The “Cool Microsite” Blueprint – Traffic → Microsite experience → Email signup to get notified → email pitch

Our experience with this bridge: This marketing bridge has eluded us because of our technical limitations but one we absolutely love is from Growth.Design (this one on Tesla is awesome). A microsite doesn’t have to be a huge technical undertaking but more often than not to make a big impact you do need to do more than just slap a page together with a standard website page builder.

 

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Conclusion: What Are Your Next Marketing Steps?

Our hope is that the 13 marketing bridges we’ve shared with you in this article have given you a TON of ideas for your online business. We realize you may have tried a few of the marketing bridges already but we’re fairly certain you haven’t tried them all because we haven’t tried them all (and we do a lot of stuff!)

Do you have a marketing calendar in place?

It may sound like a very simple step for your business but are you actually planning out your marketing? Are you taking the time to set up a marketing bridge, gather the data from it, and review the entire experiment to see how things went?

Shameless plug: We’ve created a done-for-you marketing calendar that we’re giving to all our 6-Month Un-Boring Group Coaching customers. Not only will our calendar help you plan and prioritize your marketing for the next 12 months but we’re also including Marketing Bridge Review Sheets. These review sheets will help take the guesswork out of analyzing and reviewing each marketing bridge! You can sign up for our Un-Boring Group Coaching right here if your interest is piqued and you want us to help you streamline your marketing.

Are your marketing bridges in place but the sales don’t seem to be coming in?

Anytime you feel like you’re not getting the number of sales or clients you want, it’s important to reevaluate the other parts of your sales picture.

• Does your offering look professional and welcoming?
• Is your sales page easy to find? Is the buy button easy to find?
• Does your sales page clearly speak to who your ideal audience is, what their pain points are?
• Does the price of your offering match with the kind of person you’re welcoming and the look of the castle?
• Have you tested your own checkout process for your offering?
• Have you gotten feedback from potential customers on your offering? Do they get it? Does it make sense?
• Does your offering look professional and welcoming?
• Does your offering look professional and welcoming?

Remember, as consumer behavior and business trends evolve, your marketing bridges and guideposts need to evolve as well. We reevaluate all our plans every 6 months or so, but it’s usually every 2-3 months where shaking up our marketing focus.

No amount of great marketing is going to cover up for a broken-down castle or an island that’s impossible to get to.

We’ve been guilty of focusing too much on a marketing strategy before and not enough on the core offering (the product or service). You definitely want to make sure your castle and your island are in tip-top shape before you start trying to get customers from the mainland to find you.