How to promote a business online starting from zero

Almost every guide to promoting a business online is a list of channels. Search, social, email, ads, content, directories, partnerships. The list is not wrong, and it is close to useless, because it answers a question nobody is asking. You do not need to know that email marketing exists. You need to know what to do on Monday.

The organising question that actually helps is this: how long can you afford to wait before this produces a customer?

That single constraint rules most of the list in or out before you have compared anything else. A business with nine months of runway and a business with six weeks of runway should do almost nothing in common, even if they are in the same industry selling the same thing. Advice that ignores this is advice written for whoever has the longest patience.

We should say plainly where we stand. Outranked.me is a marketplace where businesses pay to hold a position on a public leaderboard. That makes us one of the options below, and it gives us an obvious incentive to talk up paid placement. Read the section about us with that in mind — and note that it ends by naming the businesses it is wrong for.

Two questions before any channel

How long until you need a customer?

Be honest rather than optimistic. If the business needs revenue within eight weeks, everything that compounds slowly is a distraction, however good it is. You can start it, but you cannot depend on it.

| Runway | What this changes | |---|---| | Under 8 weeks | Only fast channels count. Anything slow is a side project, not a plan | | 3–6 months | A mix: something fast for cash, something slow that starts paying later | | 9 months or more | The slow, compounding routes are genuinely available to you |

Are you renting attention or building an asset?

Every route falls into one of two categories, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake in this whole subject.

Rented attention stops the moment you stop paying. Advertising, marketplace placement, sponsorships. The tap closes and the visitors stop the same day.

Owned assets keep working after you stop actively feeding them. Your own pages that rank, an email list, a reputation, a body of work people link to. They take much longer to build and they do not disappear when you look away.

Neither is better. A business with no customers and no cash needs rented attention, because owned assets do not pay this month's bills. A business that only ever rents attention has built nothing and will be renting forever at whatever price the market sets. Most businesses need both, started in that order.

The routes, by time to first customer

What follows is ordered by how quickly each can produce a first enquiry, not by how good it is.

Days: paid advertising

You can be visible this afternoon. That is the entire argument for it, and it is a strong one.

The costs are equally clear. You pay per click or per impression whether or not anyone buys, the price is set by whoever else wants the same audience, and it ends when your card stops working. For a business that has never sold anything online, ads also have a hidden risk: they will faithfully deliver traffic to an offer that does not convert, and you will conclude that the channel failed when the page was the problem.

Do this if you have something to sell that you know converts, and you need volume now.

Days: marketplaces and directories

Listing on a platform that already has an audience — a marketplace, an industry directory, a comparison site — borrows someone else's traffic. Some are free, some charge per lead, some charge for position.

This is our own category, so here is the honest shape of it. You get in front of people who are already looking, without waiting to build anything. You do not own the relationship, the platform sets the rules, and you are competing with everyone else on the same page. It is renting, and it should be judged as renting.

There is more on how a visibility marketplace works in what a pay-to-rank marketplace is, and a deliberately unflattering account of the limits in what pay-to-rank cannot do.

Do this if you need enquiries before you have an audience of your own.

Weeks: your existing relationships

The most under-used channel, and the only one that is free and fast at the same time.

Suppliers, past customers, partners, the trade body you already pay to belong to, the accountant who sends you work. These people already know you exist, which is the expensive part of every other channel. Most new businesses will get their first five customers here, and most guides skip it because it does not scale and nothing can be sold to you alongside it.

Do this always. It is the highest-return hour you will spend this month.

Weeks to months: local search

If you serve a place, this is the shortest route to steady enquiries that you actually own.

A Google Business Profile is free, appears in the map results, and often outperforms a website for local intent. It can start producing calls within weeks, which puts it in a different bracket from the rest of search.

Do this if customers could plausibly search for what you do plus a place name.

Months: search

The route everyone means by "SEO". It is slow, it compounds, and it is the one most misrepresented to people buying it.

Realistically, a new site is indexed within weeks, starts collecting impressions on very specific queries within a couple of months, and sees meaningful traffic somewhere past six months — if the content is good and the competition is not brutal. We have set out the reasoning behind those ranges in how long SEO actually takes, and the month-by-month sequence in the realistic timeline for a new website.

If the mechanism itself is unfamiliar, how Google ranking works explains it without jargon.

Do this if you have nine months and can start now. Starting late is the only mistake that cannot be undone later.

Months: content and email

Publishing useful things and collecting the addresses of people who read them. Slow, unglamorous, and the only asset on this list that no platform can take away from you.

The reason it is worth starting early despite the delay: an email list is the only channel where you decide when the message goes out.

Slowest, highest ceiling: reputation

Being the business people recommend. It cannot be bought and it cannot be rushed. It is mentioned here only so that the fast routes are not mistaken for a substitute.

What to do in month one

Concretely, for a business with a website nobody visits:

1. Contact everyone who already knows you. One afternoon. Ask directly whether they need what you sell, or know someone who does.
2. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile, if you serve a place. An hour. The fields most people skip — service areas, hours, categories, photos — are the ones that matter.
3. Fix the page people land on. Before any channel sends traffic. If a stranger cannot tell within five seconds what you do, who it is for and what to do next, every pound spent on traffic is wasted.
4. Pick one fast channel and one slow one. Not five. The fast one pays the bills; the slow one is the asset.
5. Decide how you will know it is working. Enquiries, not visits. Write the number down now, while you still have no reason to flatter yourself.

By month six the emphasis has moved: the slow channel should be producing its first signs of life, and the fast one should be evaluated honestly on cost per enquiry rather than continued out of habit.

The mistakes that cost the most

Doing five things badly. The commonest failure. Five channels each getting a tenth of the attention they need will all underperform, and you will learn nothing about any of them.

Buying traffic to a page that does not convert. Fix the destination first. Traffic is the expensive part; the page is the cheap part.

Treating rented attention as a strategy. If every customer comes from a channel you do not own, your business is a tenant. That is survivable and sometimes correct — but it should be a decision, not an accident.

Judging slow channels on fast timelines. Abandoning search at month three is the single most common way businesses waste the work they have already done. The cost is already sunk at exactly the point most people quit.

Measuring visits. Visits are not customers. A channel producing 2,000 visits and no enquiries is worse than one producing 40 visits and three enquiries.

When a marketplace listing is wrong for you

We sell placement, so this is the part to weigh most carefully.

A visibility marketplace is a poor purchase if:

• Your offer is not converting yet. Placement sends people to the same page that is already failing. Fix that first — it is cheaper and it improves every other channel too.
• You have no way to answer enquiries quickly. Rented attention is perishable.
• You need something that compounds. Placement stops when payment stops. If you have nine months, the same money spent on building something you own is usually the better bet.
• Your margin cannot carry the cost per customer. Work out what you can afford to pay for a customer before you look at any price list. There is a method for that in how to set a budget.

It is a reasonable purchase when you need enquiries sooner than any owned asset can deliver, your offer already converts, and you have decided deliberately to rent while you build. If you want to see what positions actually cost before deciding, the current figures are on the rankings board and the Outranked Index.

Common questions

How much should a new business spend? Start from what a customer is worth to you, work back to what you can afford to pay to acquire one, and spend under that. Not from a percentage of revenue you read somewhere.

Can I do this without spending anything? Yes, more slowly. Existing relationships, a Business Profile and publishing genuinely useful things cost time rather than money. Time is the price.

Should I hire someone? Not until you can tell whether they are doing a good job. Run one channel yourself first, badly, so you know what competent looks like.

How long before I stop worrying? Longer than anyone selling you a service will say. Most businesses that succeed at this were still uncertain at month six.