11 Proven Ways to Get Customers in 30 Days Without Spending Any Money

Source: Neil Patel

Getting a new business off the ground can be incredibly difficult.

You’re already slammed. You’re strapped for time as it is.

But then you also don’t have any extra cash lying around, either.

It’s one thing if you can hire a PR company or an extra employee to help do your dirty work. But when those resources don’t exist, you’re going to need to figure out a way to do it yourself.

Thankfully, there are several ways to bring in new customers without spending any money out of pocket at all.

And you want to know the best part? It will only take a month to conquer them all.

Here is a cheat sheet featuring 11 steps to gaining new customers for free.

1. Fix Your ‘Low-Hanging SEO Fruit’

In time, search engines will almost always be your primary source of website traffic.

That is if you’re not falling victim to one of these mistakes.

The good news is that even though SEO continues to become more nuanced and complicated, there is still some ‘low-hanging fruit’ you can quickly fix to give your site an upgrade (instead of getting lost in the crowd).

Here’s where to start.

Step #1. Repair broken links.

Screaming Frog or Moz can help you find and repair broken links that have popped up on your site over years of changes, modifications, and redesigns.

For example, maybe you used to have a product and have since sunsetted it into the horizon. The problem is that all those old pages and blog posts referencing that product (when you were trying to promote it) still exist. It’s likely you haven’t touched them in months (or years).

Both tools can quickly help you find which links are broken (or showing 404 errors) and which pages on your site (or others) are still trying to link to it. So now you can go in and clean up those old links to remove the broken link with the least amount of hassle (and work).

Step #2. Speed up your site.

Google recently released a new benchmark report and found that on average, most websites are way slower than they should be.

That’s a problem because slow page loading times can now affect both traffic and conversions.

The good news is that they’ve given us amazing tools in Google’s PageSpeed or even Pingdom (paid) that can help identify what is slowing down your page loading times (and how to fix it ASAP so you can keep traffic from bouncing).

Step #3. Identify who isn’t linking to you but should be.

People are probably already talking about you online. The first trick is to find them and the second is to make sure they’re linking to you when mentioned by name.

Simply pull up Moz’s Fresh Web Explorer to find out who is mentioning your company without actually linking your website into the conversation. (Think of it as being mentioned on Twitter without officially being tagged.)

You can drop in different brand names, and they’ll turn up a list of results. For example, the image below is for a quick search on “Neil Patel.”

You can quickly see that some of those are irrelevant. But there are a few golden opportunities where you can follow up with whoever just wrote about you to increase your chances at getting a link before it’s too late.

Step #4. Upgrade old content.

Most people think that their latest blog posts are the most popular on their website. However, when you pull up Google Analytics you’ll quickly find a much different picture.

Many times, your oldest posts are the most popular. Go ahead and try it right now!

So instead of just publishing new stuff, you should go back to these oldies-but-goodies and continue to make them relevant by adding new stats, facts, figures, examples, etc.

Upgrading old content is one of the easiest ways to quickly squeeze out more search traffic over the next few weeks and months to come.

2. Shortcut Your Keyword Research

Old keyword strategies simply can’t be applied the way they used to be ten years ago.

Google now tries to decode what the words actually mean, which can get really confusing really quickly.

The context surrounding key phrases is what Google wants, rather than only the specific word itself. And many times, the trusty Keyword Planner that they give you could be causing you even more problems than you realize.

For example, Ross Hudgens of Siege Media analyzed the Keyword Planner in a Moz post, saying that the program’s pitfalls can be used to get ahead of the competition (if you have the time to go through the grueling process):

Instead of letting Google Keyword Planner’s problems get in the way of your keyword research, use it to your advantage. Look for the edge cases where a keyword has a ton of misspellings mapped to the correct version, but not combined into the volume score. This could be a great win that your competitors are overlooking because the head term looks smaller than it really is.

Otherwise, cross-reference suggested keywords on SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz’s Keyword Explorer instead to triangulate the most accurate data set.

Related keyword suggestions will appear so that you can peek into what your competition is using.

Then the full results give opportunity and potential in addition to the standard volume and difficult metrics you normally see.

Layering in these extra metrics helps give your keyword research more context. This way you will better understand how you can prioritize them to find the best possible long tail searches you have a shot at ranking for in the near future.

3. Combine Marketing Campaigns and Link Building

Let’s be honest: Manual building takes forever.

You honestly could have someone do it full-time for your company. That is, of course, if you could afford another salary.

But if you can’t, the good news is that you can 80/20 your link building by combining it with the other marketing campaigns you might be running.

For example, let’s say you have a hotel or some other product where holiday promotions are big business. Putting together ‘packages’ for each is…

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