“Hope this helps someone — I wrote this as a reply to a few people in /r/SEO and had good DM’s about it, so decided to just make it a post. The list is table stakes for any online marketing, and certainly isn’t exhaustive — hopefully others can add their suggested tasks to it, too.”

1.Get yourself Google Tag Manager (tagmanager.google.com) and install that pixel on the  page

2.Get all your tracking pixels in the tag container — so your Facebook Tracking Pixel, then Twitter, Quora, Adwords, LinkedIn, Reddit — they all have tracking pixels mate. Get all of them! Also get hotjar.com or crazyegg.com so you have some actual visibility on your site as to what people are actually doing — every swipe, tap, mouse movement and click — all recorded for you to see what people are ACTUALLY doing on your site versus what you THINK they’re doing!

3.Get your Google Search Console hooked up with your Google Analytics hooked up with your Adwords — there’s heaps to this, and it’s a pain in the arse, won’t lie. I can help you remotely on this if you need a hand or someone else in r/forhire.

4.Setup your conversion pixel events in all the ones I mentioned in (2) — these are different to the standard page tracking pixels, as they track who comes to which of your pages: What a CONVERSION pixel does though, is to track when someone purchases, or where they sign up to your newsletter or call you etc — actual things that make you money there and then, as opposed to just tracking.

5.Create custom audiences in Facebook, Twitter, Adwords and all the ones in (2). A custom audience is where you take your existing emails and upload them into each platform, where the platform then matches the emails to accounts on that platform. Now you may only have 100–200 emails for example, and these WON’T be enough to then run an advert to, BUTTTTT you can then create “lookalike audiences” in the platforms where each platform goes off and finds people that very closely match the qualities, aspirations, hopes, dreams, desires and marketing demographics of the millions of available people it has data on (see why Facebook is under massive PR scrutiny now?) and then gives you that audience to then market to.

6.Create a newsletter opt-in that pops up on the site after a set scroll period and/or time on site. Also set the popup to appear when someone is exiting the site — this is literally called an “exit intent” popup. They were going to leave anyway, so might as well try and get their details.

7.Create further custom audiences of people that visit specific pages or click specific buttons or who add to shopping cart but then don’t purchase — as well as one for purchasers too! These custom audiences will be great for what we call “retargeting” or “remarketing” — they’re where people come to your site, and do some shit but don’t buy anything for example, but the tracking pixels “fire” and when they go back into their social media platform of choice — well, there is the retargeting advert for the product they were looking at or the category they were choosing from. You will have seen this yourself when looking at a piece of clothing or wallet or whatever — when you don’t buy it, the product then seems to follow you around the internet no matter where you go (if the marketer is skilled enough!)

8.MAKE SURE you have your Google Analytics setup with your ecommerce package too — so when people start to buy, you know where they are, what device, what time best converts, how many times they came back to the site before purchasing — and then be able to break down which product(s) are selling best based on actual data rather than gut feels.

9.Make sure you have your Instagram account setup for business use, and make sure you apply for shopping tags usage — these will be invaluable for you to have people tap on your item picture in your feed WITHOUT ads (sometimes!) for people to then tap and buy there and then. Powerful stuff but you have to get your instagram account verified as a business.

10.Speaking of business verification — get your Google My Business all setup too. We’ve talked about Analytics + Search Console etc here already, but when you get your Google My Business all setup with address on the map that gets verified, phone number, web address and open hours etc — that then leads to great things: Review extensions, location extensions and call extensions and basically ALL the Adwords Ad Extensions can then be used to trounce your competitors. All can be setup free, apart from the PPC obviously!

11.Get cracking with video content! Show some products being made, show them in use from customers who tell how happy they are, show kids with your patches — really pull at heart strings and invest someone’s emotion watching the videos. Yes, even for patches.

12.Setup your YouTube channel, too — get those videos up there on YouTube and Facebook on your business page AND ON YOUR PERSONAL FB Profile too! Do business from your personal profiles and treat all the social networks as business avenues now, rather than post family and friends shit — still DO that, but keep it to a minimum so you can show people some transparency on the person BEHIND the company.

13.Get ALL your videos you post, transcribed with captions from rev.com — $1 per video minute, and it helps in getting your video watched and ranked.

14.If you’re hooked up in your Google Search Console, feel free to then activate your YouTube cards with the link back to your site that can be sprung at any time during the video. Here’s the kicker though — YT recent f*cked everyone in small business just starting out, by saying you can’t have that feature unless you have a load of subscribers and watch time. Buy them. Don’t worry about it — you’re not giving a flying f*ck about these fake subscribers as you’re ONLY doing this to get the YT Cards with Link feature unlocked. Don’t feel bad or fake — YT brought this on themselves.

15.Live stream your heart out. Live stream the devices being made and again, show viewers some genuine heartstring tugging stories. That shit gets shared. A LOT.

16.Instagram influencer marketing is good when it works — but check their account for number of fake followers Vs genuine followers. There’s heaps of free tools around, but at time of writing Facebook (who own instagram) are cracking down on their API so a lot of the tools will stop working soon. Find one. Rape it for info as much as you can for as long as you can, and then DM these account holders offering them a referral fee — you’ll need a UTM tracking URL for that Influencer to give out so you can track any sales back to them. OR you can agree to a set fee — say 4c per genuine follower for a shout. Results will vary, but at least you know you got tools to analyze an Insta account now.

17.I can’t help but think that Facebook, Instagram and Youtube ads for visibility and traffic, with MAYBE Adwords for retargeting (retargeting traffic is way cheaper than “cold” traffic, by the way) would be the way to go for this. Just a hunch.

18.See if you can get some PR by using SourceBottle or HelpAReporter and being featured in blogs, magazines, TV etc as a “feel good” story. Free to do, just your time.

19.Run a search on your competitors sites using WhatRunsWhere and see what keywords they’re using on their site — you then use that info to write blogs around those keywords and also to run better ads than them on Adwords!

20.MAKE SURE you have your telephone number on the site, too — a lot of times people just want to talk to someone. At the top of your page, put the number and the “Message Us” too — this could be a Facebook Messenger widget button that will then message your page, or if could be using something like the billions of website instant messaging SaaS out there

21.If you’re going to have the traditional “Get Newsletter” snoozefest, then make sure you have a great CRM that you’re going to USE to send those cool as f*ck and interesting newsletters — start with MailChimp or Active Campaign or wowtools.io (AC or WOW!Tools better as you can “tag” your contacts. These tags allow you to automate sending based on those tags existing or not — another conversation about all this as it’s more complex than to write here, about audience segmentation and marketing automation etc). There’s a cool as f*ck WordPress plugin to use called wowq.io — this can ask them all questions on a popup quiz or questionnaire and then tag each answer they give, which then “talks” to your CRM and then auto sends out your email content based on their answer(s). Useful. Paid.

22.Try and use Reddit iAmA — you’ll be selling without selling, as you answer (hopefully!) a bajillion questions about your industry. It’s a bit outside the norm of what you do, so Reddit will love it. Don’t hard sell — just answer questions and be transparent and yes, even give your links where appropriate.

Hopefully this is some cool info to get you going in the right direction (or anyone else reading this).