Five digital marketing things you can do yourself

If you're starting out or running the brand on your own, you don't need a forty-page strategy. You need five things done consistently. These are the ones I'd tell anyone over a coffee.

1. Pick one network, not five

The classic mistake is opening a profile everywhere and maintaining none. Pick the one your customers use — not the one you like — and look after that one only. Posting twice a week in one place works; posting once a month in five doesn't.

And reply. The conversation in comments and messages is worth more than the follower count.

2. Write on your own turf

Everything you post on a platform belongs to the platform. A blog on your own domain stays with you, gets indexed by Google and can be reused for years.

You don't need to write much: four good pieces a year answering real client questions beat forty fillers. And if getting started is hard, write down what you already explain on the phone ten times a month.

3. SEO: the basics, done well

Before thinking about keywords:

• A unique title and description on every page, written for people.
• Search Console connected. It's free and it's the only source that tells you what Google really sees.
• A site that loads fast and reads well on a phone.
• Images with alt text that don't weigh three megabytes.

That alone puts you ahead of most small business sites. The rest comes later.

4. Email: the list is yours

It's the only channel that doesn't depend on anyone's algorithm. A visible form, a clear reason to subscribe and one readable email a month. Mailchimp or Brevo are more than enough to start, and setting up domain authentication properly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) is what separates the inbox from the spam folder.

5. Look at the data, even ten minutes a month

You don't need a dashboard. You need to open your analytics once a month and answer three questions: where do people come from, which pages get read, and what do they do before writing to you. That's enough to know what to repeat and what to drop.

One warning: browser analytics always sees less than what happens, because of blockers and cookie consent. If you can cross-check against server data, you'll know how much each figure is worth.

The point

None of this works if you do it for a week and drop it. One channel sustained for a year beats five for a month. Pick what you can keep up, and keep it up.