Marketing your product or service and generating demand is one of the biggest challenges new businesses face. Resources are slim, budgets are low, and paid marketing channels are usually too expensive. So you’ve got to get scrappy!

Often the first place a person asks a question is on Google. If your business is one of the first to answer those questions, those readers will begin to trust you and might come back for more of your helpful content. Now you have an audience! A well-maintained blog on your website is one of the most cost-effective ways to interact with your audience, provide valuable information, and gain leads.

Good magazines and blog platforms routinely accept guest posts from industry leaders with niche expertise. In return for an article, you get exposure to their readers as well as links that direct people back to your website. There are many benefits of guest blogging, but one of the most important for new businesses is expanding your audience.

SEO and content marketing are closely related; while the former refers to the technical process of increasing and attracting quality traffic to your site, the latter focuses on using relevant content to drive profitable action from visitors or clients.

The first step of SEO relates to finding relevant keywords and using them on your website so it can rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Take a look at your competitor’s websites and see what keywords they’re using. Ideally, you should be targeting the same or similar ones. Put these keywords in the headings, body text, and URL’s of your landing pages and blog content.