Where to market your business online

Bedrock

Bedrock is slowly building your own elevator to the top. You’ll never be able to make it to the top on the first day or even the first month, but each day, you make it that much closer.

When you do eventually make it up there, it’s reliable and you can even build a home up there. More importantly, you can depend on it every single day.

Every so often, there may be a natural disaster (ex: a major Google algorithm update) that is out of your control, but even then, you can take measures to make your elevator to be more earthquake proof.

→ Bedrock channels are your websites and your SEO efforts. These are channels that operate like building blocks. They tend to take the longest to grow, but each investment is additive to your foundation and can have outsized returns over the long run.

Viral

Viral platforms are like entering into a lottery to get a helicopter ride to the top. Sometimes you win that lotto, but sometimes you don’t.

The win feels great, but you have little control over the outcome. Even if you win, you’ll be returning to the bottom after your ride.

→ Viral platforms are established channels where you pay to get featured in. Unlike bedrock channels, viral platforms tend to be targeted by new marketers, because they can give you a quick dopamine hit and accelerate your growth. However, they’re often not dependable and you can’t build upon them over time.

Social

Social channels parallel the viral lottery, but one that gets better over time. At first, the prize money is just ₱300 and you’ve got a 1% chance of winning.

But as you invest in learning about the lottery, you find ways to not only increase your chance of winning, but you increase the pot each time. Eventually, you can cash in your winnings to buy a helicopter ride up each time.

But you can never build on top of that mountain (ie: you cannot depend on being on top of that mountain every single day). In fact, sometimes your helicopter trip will even get “cancelled”, despite you doing your best.

→ Popular social channels, like Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn tend to feel pretty familiar, but each channel has its own quirks that if you hone in on, can result in much more success. Social channels have an element of bedrock in building up a following, but your content lives on the social platform and you are at the whim of an algorithm that you don’t own.

Syndicate

Syndicate channels are like using your toolset to build up a different mountain.

Each one has its quirks, but if you use the same principles from your bedrock channels, these can also be sizeable mountains that you can depend on.

→ For these purposes, syndication just means that you repost your content, whether in full or adjusted, on another platform. These channels range from Medium, where you republish your entire article, to Pinterest or Youtube, where you would need to repurpose the content in a new form. Similar to social, each of these requires specific channel knowledge to be successful.

Targeted

Targeted channels is like reaching out to people and convincing them that they should lend you their helicopter. If you’re not trusted yet, most people will not be willing to lend you their helicopter.

If you try to force yourself into using the helicopter, they’ll ban you. But, if you can gain trust, it can be a great way to borrow a helicopter, even if it can only fly to a certain altitude.

→ Targeted platforms are essentially niche communities. These communities are unlikely to drive significant growth, but can be a great way to get started and develop superfans. These include Slack, Telegram, Viber, Facebook groups, independent forums, or partnerships with other businesses that make content.

Paid

Paid channels are like knowing what it will cost to build parts of your elevator and paying people to build it for you, knowing that you can rent out the elevator to others in order to make the system profitable. In order for this to work, you need to know how much people would be willing to pay to get up this mountain.

→ This channel is pretty self-explanatory—channels that you spend money on to distribute your content. The scale of these is based on your budget and ability to grow the lifetime value of your customers (allowing you to acquire more).