A Beginners Guide To The 4 Major Online Marketing Pillars

While venturing out into the unfamiliar waters of the world of internet marketing, it’s important to get a sound understanding of the basics, and where to get started. For many, just getting into an online venture feels a little intimidating.

However it doesn’t have to be. Once you start to understand how the different parts and pieces of the marketing world work, you can start to build your assets in a way that one starts to feed the others. I like to refer to this as your “Content Cycle”.

However, after this article, you should have at least a base understanding of the 4 Major Online Marketing Pillars, where you want to get started, and how these start to go hand in hand. Also, be sure to download the Free guide with even more resources on how to start building your marketing pillars!

How it might feel right now.

When we were first starting our online business, we quickly realized that as we were starting to produce a lot of social media content, we didn’t really have anywhere to send our audience too. We could make engaging posts, and get interaction within our following, but we had a hard time monetizing.

We realized that in order to market on social media, we needed to have SOME form of long form content to send someone too to learn more, eventually leading to a click, a lead, or hopefully a sale!

But we also KNEW that if we were going to build a consistent and sustainable business, we absolutely could not rely upon social media algorithms to get our message to everyone.

Take a minute to look through your social media analytics and you can see that organic reach is HARD! Even when building a following, you never know what post is going to make it out to the masses. We instead needed to be able to communicate DIRECTLY to our target customer.

And lastly, once you know you have a real winner on your hands, you know, something that is obviously resonating with people and getting clicks, how do you force that out into the world to get it in front of more eyeballs?

These are the problems you may be facing as you work to market yourself and your brand. So let’s focus in on the Top 4 Major Online Marketing Pillars, and I’ll even give you a 5th Bonus Pillar at the end of the article!

#1 – Social Media Marketing

While you may not be surprised to see this one on the list, especially first, it’s important to realize how MASSIVE this marketing pillar is. With several big name social media platforms to choose from, it’s important to remember that people interact with each one in a completely unique way, even if they try to steal features from each other.

Also, when you’re deciding upon your niche and your customer avatar, you need to think about WHAT platform they’ll be using the most. If you’re more comfortable on Facebook, but your target audience spends more time on TikTok, then put simply, you’re in the wrong place.

It’s also important to remember that as you’re building your social media marketing content, that you’re building it for the way the user’s see your content, not how you think you want to deliver the content. Your idea of a great post can easily be overlooked if you’re not taking the end user’s experience into consideration.

And while social media is SUPER hot in today’s world, it’s not your home. You don’t own it, you don’t control it, and you’re subject to the whims of the ever changing algorithm.

So while social media is a GREAT place to start building up an audience, you need to be able to channel them FROM social media to YOUR home online, which brings us to the second Pillar of Marketing

#2 – Content Marketing

I like to think of the Content Marketing Pillar as your “long form content”. Just like you’re reading this article right now, your content marketing is SEARCHABLE and SHAREABLE content. This allows people on search engines to FIND you! But along with that, it also gives you content to market THROUGH your social media, giving you more authority in your space.

In today’s space, there are 3 main platforms that you can focus in on to create your longform content that people can find and discover you. Those three are:

• Building your own Website/Blog
• Starting a YouTube Channel
• Creating a Podcast

Building your Own Website/Blog

Regardless of what it is you’re trying to accomplish online, it’s important to have your own piece of real estate online and that really is YOUR own website. This is the place where you create the rules, you curate the content, and you can house your own video library, digital products, store and so much more.

Along with that, as you build your audience, you can also start to earn ad revenue from each visit to your site with embedded ads, and it’s a great place to recommend products for your audience as well.

When it comes to how and where to build your website, it really comes down to 3 types of platforms to build your home on.

• Hosted WordPress Website
• Using A Website Builder Services
• Complete All-in-one Online Solution Services

Hosted WordPress Website:

Over 40% of ALL websites on the planet are wordpress sites. Including THIS one and websites of some pretty major brands.

The benefits of using WordPress to build your site is the amount of flexibility you have when building your website. WordPress is an open source platform and there are thousands of companies out there making plugins specifically designed for that “cool thing” you want your website to be able to do.

The other benefit, is it’s the CHEAPEST way to build a website online and there’s no monthly recurring fees. You buy your domain up front, pay for your hosting for a year or two, and you’re on your way.

f the major hosting platforms, the one I recommend the most is HostGator, simply for the fact that while inexpensive, their technical support is incredible. They take care of any of the tech issues for you and a customer service rep can dive in and help you fix something if your site goes down.

The downside to WordPress is it does have a little bit of a longer learning curve, but there are amazing resources out there to help teach how to build and customize a WordPress website. My favorite resource is a YouTube Channel from Darrel Wilson who teaches how to build several types of customer WordPress websites.

Using A Website Builder Service:

Two of the most popular, and I’m sure you’ve seen an ad or two from them is SquareSpace and Wix.

These website builders are popular for their ease of use and drag and drop website builders that are a little easier to figure out for beginners.

You don’t have to know anything about HTML or coding and each of the services has options for being able to sell your products and services on your own website.

Of the two, I personally would recommend SquareSpace as they have more options available for whatever kind of website you want to build, however the downside, is each of these services have a monthly recurring fee.

Complete All In One Services:

Another option to build your ecosystem is using an all in one service provider. My absolute go to for this type of solution is Kajabi.

Kajabi offers the ability to build your website, blog, membership site, online courses AND includes tools like email marketing, sales funnels AND your own affiliate program. They even just launched Podcast hosting as well!

These all in one services are ROBUST and you can truly launch and monetize a business in less than 30 days and have all the tools you’ll need build into just one solution.

We used Kajabi when we build our Academy and we house all of our major courses through it.

Starting your Own YouTube Channel

YouTube is POWERFUL! And if you’re going to be marketing online, you need to be on there. Period.

Video is the most powerful communication tool when you’re building up your authority online, and it gives you a great place to be FOUND!

It’s important to remember that YouTube is a SEARCH ENGINE, in fact, behind Google, who owns it, it’s the second largest search engine on the planet.

Now it takes a lot of time and dedication to build and grow a YouTube channel, but there are plenty of amazing resources out there to help you get started right away.

The best place to start is with the book YouTube Secrets by Sean Cannel and Benji Travis and gives an incredible starting point for anyone wanting to get the channel started the RIGHT WAY!

Creating Your Own Podcast

There are a ton of advantages of launching a podcast in today’s world. While video is powerful, there are over 37 MILLION active YouTube Channels out there today.

Yet podcasts JUST passed the 1 Million mark, showing there is still huge growth opportunity in this space. And with big names like Joe Rogan signing BILLION dollar podcast deals, it shows that this is a medium that is growing like a weed!

Getting in early has a ton of advantages, and there’s some awesome formats that you can create a show in.

Additionally, there’s a certain level of authority that comes from hosting a podcast in your niche, and everyone LOVES to be featured on a podcast making guests actually fairly easy to line up.

One tool that I’m using to work on launching MY own podcast is the “The Podcast Journal: Idea to Launch In 50 Days”

This awesome little tool walks you through EVERYTHING in workbook form to get you from idea to launch in less than two months, and it’s been huge for dialing myself in on my upcoming show.

Now I know that was a lot on the Content Marketing side, but let’s jump into the #3 Pillar!

#3- Email Marketing

If there is one pillar that is more important than the others, it’s THIS ONE!

Email marketing is still the absolute best way to communicate your message with your audience because it’s directly delivered to them.

No worrying about an algorithm, no hoping that they’ll be on before your post or video is buried. Just sent directly to their inbox.

It’s said that for each person you have on your email list, you can equate that to $1 of income per month. Meaning if you can grow your list to 1000 people, you should be able to monetize that for $1000 a month. Continue to grow to 5000 subscribers, 10,000 subscribers… and you can see the importance right?

Where it starts to tie back together, is when you launch new content!

Anytime you have a new blog post, a new YouTube video, or a new podcast episode, it’s important that your most loyal followers (the ones on your email list) know about it right away!

This helps pop the algorithm in your favor and shows that you carry some authority in your space as well.

There are a ton of email providers to choose from and I’ve personally used several of them, however the one I recommend the most is ConvertKit.

From the low cost of startup to incredible automations and landing pages, ConvertKit was the most comprehensive and easy to use email provider of the 4 that I’ve tried.

Also right now, through Sept 1st of 20201, they are doing an awesome challenge to help creators start growing their list and even giving CASH bonus.

The other beautiful thing about email marketing, is getting people back to your social channels. If you’re running a live video on Facebook for example, delivering an email right before you start can get a good audience set up for you, sparking Facebook to go notify more people of your event.

Now that we have the most important one out of the way, let’s talk about #4

#4 – Paid Advertising

Of the 4 major pillars, this is the one that you probably want to wait on until you have a major product that you’re about to launch, or you have a small product that you’ve been able to convert very well!

The beauty of paid advertising is it leverages your social media marketing, but you are paying to boost it out to the world, putting it in front of the right eyeballs at the right time.

While paid ads are important, you don’t want to use paid ads to just get someone into a facebook group or to watch your next YouTube Video.

Instead, this is a tool for CONVERSION. Once you’ve monetized and you have something ready to really sell, paid ads is kind of like putting gasoline on an already healthy flame.

You can run paid ads on all your major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, or you can also run paid ads through google to show up at the top of the search for your specific keywords.

Summing It All Up

I hope that this article helped to clarify the importance of each of the 4 Major Online Marketing Pillars:

• #1 – Social Media Marketing
• #2 – Content Marketing
• #3 – Email Marketing
• #4 – Paid Advertising

However it’s important to understand how these 4 pillars go hand in hand with each other and should be a part of your business “ecosystem”.

Having a social media post that leads your new audience member to a YouTube video where you provide a freebie that gets someone onto your email list IS the goal.

By rinsing and repeating that simple concept, you can build up a loyal audience of forever fans that will be waiting on your next piece of content AND your next product!