Month: October 2024

“If you build it, they will come” may have worked for Kevin Costner, but I think we all know that marketing a cornfield baseball diamond would take just a little more work.

Websites are no different. Even the best content needs readers, and if you’ve struggled to increase your website traffic, you're in good company.

According to 2024 research from Content Marketing Institute, more than half of B2B content marketers say it’s a challenge to consistently create the right content for their audience.

We’ve got a list of 33 ways to increase website traffic, generate more leads, and improve ROI (and none of them involve waiting in a cornfield for ghost baseball players).

Table of Contents

• Free Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website
• Paid Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Website

1. Content Creation

Inbound marketing focuses on attracting the right people to your company. One of the best ways to do this is by creating content through blogging.

To brainstorm content that will attract the right visitors to your website, you must first understand the buyer persona you’re targeting. Once you know your audience, you can create content that naturally attracts them to your website.

But how do you write a good blog post that will draw in the right audience? Follow these five steps:

• Identify your buyer persona: Find out more about your target market. Understand everything from job title to pain points.
• Conduct keyword research: Learn what your audience is searching for on search engines so you can provide the best content.
• Ideate topics: Identify topics that appeal to your audience’s pain points and experience high search volumes. Tools like our Blog Ideas Generator can help with the brainstorming process.
• Write a draft: Begin by drafting a post that answers your audience's questions. Use interesting angles to make your post stand out.
• Publish: Publish your post on your blog site. Use SEO tools to optimize your content.
• Promote: Promote your blog post on social media and email newsletters to generate traffic. The more traffic your post generates, the higher it will rank in search engines.

Pro tip: Learn how to implement a blogging strategy with our step-by-step guide and templates.

Want to take your blogging to the next level? Explore our Free AI Blog Writer to streamline your content creation process with the power of artificial intelligence.

2. Topic Expertise

Ranking higher in Google will increase your site's organic traffic. At HubSpot, we do this by using the pillar/topic cluster model. Google favors sites known to be topic experts on the subject matter they're writing about.

To be seen as an expert, you can create a pillar page, which is essentially a longer blog post that broadly covers all aspects of a topic.

Then, you write “cluster content,” or supporting blog posts, targeting long tail keywords that show you've covered a topic exhaustively. Focusing on long-term traffic will help you rank higher on search engines.

Christina Perricone, a former senior blog manager at HubSpot, says, "The pillar cluster model organizes content on your site around a single topic and search term through internal linking. This organization helps search engines easily crawl and categorize all of the content that you have on a particular topic, thereby making it easier for you to rank for that search term."

She continues, "When the model is done right, it also helps visitors navigate your site and move through related pages, boosting traffic for all of the pages in your topic cluster."

3. Organic Social Media

Organic social media is not a new strategy, but it's still something marketers should pay attention to. Besides posting on social media platforms, you can also use Instagram Stories, live video on Instagram or TikTok, or Facebook Messenger.

It's important to have a diverse social media strategy and use the right social media platforms — not just Facebook, Instagram, and X. Platforms like YouTube and even Pinterest can generate a lot of traffic to your site.

And as we saw during the transformation of Twitter into X, users can jump ship during major platform changes — so don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Henry Franco, a former HubSpot marketing manager, recommends two things regarding organic social media.

“First, don't spam your audience — it costs a user nothing to scroll past your post, and if you don't offer them any value, that's exactly what they'll do. Know your audience, and craft content that speaks directly to them,” Franco says.

“Second, stay active with community management. People love when brands like and reply to them — it'll humanize your business, and keep people coming back for more content.”

For instance, HubSpot uses fun carousels on Instagram about your office personality, a lighthearted way of engaging our audience (I am a bi-coastal baddie only by virtue of constantly mixing up time zones.)

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Pro tip: Check out our social media marketing guide to learn more.

4. Website Analysis

Let‘s do a little reverse-engineering of our thought process. Before you drive traffic to your website, it’s important to learn about your audience.

To do this, analyze your website to see where you're losing and gaining visitors. There are plenty of third-party tools, like Crazy Egg, and HubSpot has a free website grader you can use.

With this information at your disposal, you can create the right content to drive the right traffic to your website.

5. Influencers

We know that customers are more likely to buy from organizations with excellent word of mouth, but how do you create great word of mouth marketing?

First, delight your customers. Second, work with influencers.

Influencer marketing isn‘t a passing fad. In fact, it’s a budget-friendly option to drive traffic to your website. When influencers post discount codes, links, reviews, or giveaways, you are tapping into their audience to drive traffic to your website.

6. Email List Building

Using your current readers and customers is a great way to drive traffic to your website. When you post a new blog or content offer, you can promote it to your followers/subscribers for a quick traffic boost. With content-heavy websites, repeat readership is helpful for traffic goals, conversions, and lead generation.

To get started, build an email list or grow your current list. Below are a few strategies you can use:

• Content offers: Publish content that requires visitors to share their email to access it. Include CTAs for content offers on your website.
• Easy-access newsletter sign-up: Include sign-up forms on your website, from your homepage to your about page. If a visitor has a delightful experience on your site, they’re more likely to sign up for your newsletter.

Use HubSpot’s free forms tool to easily add a form to your site and start growing your email list.

• Social media: Promoting your email newsletter on social media, whether through a post or contest/giveaway, is a great way to convert your current followers into subscribers.

Pro tip: Learn how to build an email list from scratch or grow your email list.

7. Community Engagement

The more brand recognition you have, the more traffic you will drive to your website. One way to achieve brand recognition is to be active and engaged within the market.

You can implement an engagement strategy today by participating in Facebook group discussions in your industry, answering questions on public forum websites, and interacting with your followers on social media.

One of my favorite brands on social media is Taco Bell. Taco Bell delights its customers on social media just about every day. See a couple of examples from the company’s X account below.

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In the example above, Taco Bell uses a simple tweet from a customer to engage with them and build community organically. The brand also just likes to have fun:

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Just remember to be helpful and human. No one likes spammy links or self-serving rhetoric when they're asking a quick question online.

8. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO can help your website rank higher in search engines and bring in more traffic. Some on-page SEO elements include the page title, header, meta description, image alt-text, and the URL (plus more). Showing up in search engines will generate more traffic for your site.

Pro tip: To get started, check out our ultimate guide to on-page SEO.

9. Quality Backlinks

In order to drive traffic to your site, you need to rank high in search engines. In order to rank higher in search engines, you need to be an authority in your industry.

One way to do that, besides the topic/cluster model described above, is by acquiring quality backlinks. If websites with high authority link to your site, that gives you more credibility.

Irina Nica, senior product marketing manager at HubSpot says, "There are two main ways in which high-quality backlinks can help drive more traffic to a website: boosting ranking and driving referral traffic."

She continues, "Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for every major search engine out there. By constantly earning high-quality backlinks from relevant websites, you'll improve your rankings in SERP and, as a result, see a lift in your organic traffic."

Nica adds, "Backlinks can also drive a substantial amount of referral traffic. That‘s something to be expected if you get mentioned on a popular news website. You can also see referral traffic coming through if you’re mentioned (and linked to) in an article that's already ranking well for high search volume keywords and is getting a constant flow of traffic.”

Pro tip: Want to learn how to earn backlinks? We’ve got 10 creative ways.

10. Video Marketing

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If video marketing isn’t already part of your content strategy, you’re missing out on a huge potential audience. Statista reports that Google Sites, which owns YouTube, reaches 258 million U.S. viewers.

It’s predicted that by 2028, digital video advertising spending will increase to nearly $90 million, up from $59 million in 2024. And those numbers are just for mobile.

You can create videos for Instagram Stories or Reels, do live videos, start a YouTube channel, etc. Want to get started today? Learn everything you need to know in our ultimate guide to video marketing.

11. Content Repurposing

Need content to drive traffic to your site but struggling to come up with ideas? I get it. A great way to overcome this hurdle is to repurpose old content. Take a well-performing blog post and repurpose that into a video.

Or if you have a podcast that did really well, write up a blog post on that topic. Using content that has already performed well will continue to drive traffic to your site.

You can also repurpose written content by taking advantage of industry trends. If you have a handful of older content about AI, for instance, you could freshen them up with recent statistics and quotes, package the blog posts together, and promote it as an ultimate topic guide.

12. LinkedIn Creator

LinkedIn is actually more popular with millennials than other social networks. And with millennials now in their 30s and early 40s, there’s a good chance they form a significant part of your target market.

Unlike LinkedIn Influencers, anybody can become a LinkedIn creator. You can repurpose blog posts (or write new ones!), host live audio events, and even start on-platform newsletters.

LinkedIn has great resources for anybody looking to boost their reach, like its content best practices, which suggest that you post at least four times per week and treat each post as the start of a conversation.

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13. SEO Tools

To drive traffic to your website, it's important to be a student of SEO. Learning how to use SEO tools like Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and SEMrush will help you develop a strategy to generate traffic to your website.

These tools will help you learn and analyze what‘s working on your site and what isn’t. Plus, these help you come up with ideas for content that has the potential to generate high traffic. Check out our roundup of the best SEO tools to monitor your website.

14. Historical Optimization

Historical optimization is the process we use at HubSpot to update old blog content and generate more traffic and leads. If you're anything like us, a majority of your monthly blog views and leads come from older posts.

Pamela Vaughan, a marketing fellow who works on web strategy at HubSpot — and the person who introduced us to the concept of historical optimization — has written about this extensively.

She says, “Historical optimization is a tactic best-suited for a blog that's been around for several years because you need to 1) be generating a significant amount of organic search traffic, 2) have built up a critical mass of blog subscribers and social media followers, and 3) have a sizable repository of old posts at your disposal.”

Vaughan adds, “Historical optimization should be a piece of your overall blogging strategy — not the whole strategy.”

Pro tip: Follow her step-by-step process for historical optimization.

15. Voice Search Optimization

Remember in “The Little Mermaid” when Ariel wanted to go where the people were? That same principle applies to digital marketing. In order to drive traffic to your website, it's important to show up where people are searching.

Voice search is an increasingly important area in which to rank, especially with the advancements in AI we’ve seen in just the last year or two. According to eMarketer, the number of U.S. users who use voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant will grow from 145.1 million in 2023 to 170.3 million in 2028.

Here are a few tips to get started:

• Research long-tail keywords: When people use voice search, they speak in full sentences rather than short phrases. To optimize for voice search, start researching longer-tail keywords.
• Write answer-focused content: The content you write should answer your audience's questions.
• Optimize for snippets: Smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home look for short, concise answers. Writing quick summaries in your posts makes it easier for search engines and smart speakers to find the answer they need.

16. Local SEO

If your company is a brick-and-mortar store, local SEO is an important factor to consider. In her comprehensive guide to local SEO, former HubSpotter Kelsey Smith wrote that search engines gather information for local search by “[relying] on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results."

For example, when someone types in “best soul food restaurant” on Google, the results are generated by the user's location. Tools like Google My Business and Moz Local help businesses manage their directory listings and citations so they show up in local searches.

Here’s a restaurant that shows up for that search in Chicago:

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To rank for local search:

• Ensure your name, address, and phone number (NAP) is consistent on your Google My Business and social media pages.
• Use a directory management tool to monitor directories like Yelp, Foursquare, Best of the Web, etc.
• Research and use location-based search terms on sites like Google Trends, which analyzes popular search terms across various regions.

17. QR Codes

Marketers love a good QR code. And now that smartphones can natively scan them, so do consumers.

QR codes can drive trackable traffic to your website, but you have to give the user a reason to scan them.

Think of it as creating a real-life CTA button. If you make it enticing and accessible enough, people will scan it, and you’ll get to assess the success of that QR code’s placement in real-time.

When you use a dynamic QR code generator, your QR code will remain the same and still be accessible even if your web address changes later.

18. A/B Testing

You know you're a marketer when your motto is “Test, test, and test again.”

A/B testing is a split test that helps you determine what version of a campaign performs best. These tests can give you key information about your audience so you can create tailored content and offers that drive traffic to your site. There are a lot of tools you can use to get started.

Pro tip: Check out our roundup of the best A/B testing tools.

19. Internal Linking

When a visitor comes to your blog, your goal is to keep them there.

That‘s why internal links — links to other pages on your site — are very important. When visitors continue to other pages of your website, they’re more likely to convert and become brand enthusiasts.

For example, you can create an internal linking structure using the pillar/cluster model described above. Pillar and cluster pages link back and forth, which boosts your site's credibility on search engines, while also increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

20. Technical SEO

Technical SEO focuses on the backend of your website to see how the pages are technically set up and organized.

Factors include elements like page speed, crawling, indexing, and more. Matthew Howells-Barby, HubSpot's former director of acquisition, has written about how updating our technical SEO gave HubSpot more than a 50% increase in organic traffic.

To get started with your technical SEO, use some of the tips from Howells-Barby's article, including:

• Fix broken links and redirects.
• Create an XML sitemap for your subdomains.
• Set up language meta tags.
• Add custom H1 and introductions to topic pages.

21. E-E-A-T

Google has long prioritized content it deems the most helpful to users. For many years that was summed up in the acronym E-A-T, or expertise, authority, and trust.

In 2022, it added an “E” for “experience,” meaning that content should be produced by people with firsthand, real-world experience with the topic.

“E-E-A-T is hands-down one of the most underrated content SEO practices,” says Amanda Sellers, the manager of EN blog strategy at HubSpot.

If you have an established blog or large content library, take the time to audit for these E-E-A-T best practices:

• It’s helpful content.
• Experts created it.
• It’s trustworthy.
• It’s regularly updated.

Simply adding a personal perspective and expert quotes to existing content can go a long way toward boosting your content in the SERPs.

Pro tip: Here’s how adding “experience” to a HubSpot blog post increased clicks by 724%.

22. Community Building

Building a community of brand enthusiasts is a great way to continuously drive traffic to your website. You can build a Facebook group, Instagram Live events, a LinkedIn Group, or Quora Space specifically for your followers and others in your industry where you create value, while also linking back to your site.

You can even do this from your own website — think about Apple’s support community, which I have used more than a few times to diagnose something on my iPhone or laptop. Lego’s online community lets users of all ages participate in activities and challenges and even submit their ideas to Lego designers.

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23. Content Offers

Content offers, sometimes referred to as lead magnets, are a way to use content to drive traffic to your site and generate leads. Content offers vary depending on what stage of the buyer's journey your customer is in, but can include webinars, guides, reports, trials, demos, checklists, and more.

Pro tip: Learn about different types of content offers and find the best one for you and your business.

24. Media Coverage and Public Relations

Earned media coverage is a great way to drive brand awareness for your company and traffic to your website. If your marketing and public relations teams work together, you can generate traffic to your site and create excellent word of mouth.

Ellie Flanagan, a former HubSpot senior corporate communications manager, says, "Although most outlets these days try to stay away from including backlinks in their stories (it‘s usually against their editorial guidelines), that doesn’t mean that a good story won't drive folks back to your site.

Media coverage provides great third-party validation for your company. Stories about new products or services, your company culture, or even industry thought leadership can all be great drivers for a reader who maybe hadn't heard of your company before and wants to learn more."

25. Social Share Buttons

Social share buttons are links that make it easy for your readers to share your content on social media. When your readers become promoters of your content, your traffic will increase. Here's a quick cheat sheet on creating social share buttons.

Once you've created your social share buttons, how do you get people to share your content? Here are a few tips to get started:

• Ask people to share on social media.
• Create strong content.
• Include quotable content.
• Add multimedia such as images, videos, infographics, etc.

26. CTR Optimization

Once your content is posted and you begin ranking on search engines, make sure people are clicking through to read your posts.

Your click-through rate (CTR) measures who clicked on your post and read it against the number of people who viewed the link to your post (e.g., the landing page, email, or advertisement) in total.

A great tool to measure your organic CTR is Google Search Console. To get more people to click through and drive traffic to your site, it's important to write compelling and apt meta descriptions and titles.

To write quality meta tags that are click-worthy, make sure your titles are short and snappy, and your description leaves visitors wanting more. This ties into on-page SEO, described above.

27. Academy and Knowledge Base Posts

One form of content that can drive traffic to your website is educational content. If you create courses, certifications, or educational posts that are helpful to your audience, you'll likely see an increase in traffic.

For example, HubSpot uses HubSpot Academy to generate content that is helpful to our audience. We provide videos, certification courses, and knowledge base articles to answer questions. See an example of a knowledge base article below.

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28. Social News Sites

Reddit is no longer a playground for internet trolls — it’s a hugely valuable resource for knowledge and information. I often use it while researching HubSpot articles to see what the hot topics are or what questions users are asking about a certain subject.

Reddit and similar sites, like Quora, are social news sites, and they can be great traffic-drivers. By nature, these platforms are similar to social media because they foster asynchronous connections between users.

The difference is that these types of sites engage people around a question or topic, and external content can be shared to help explain the users’ points of view.

Another way external sites benefit from increased traffic via social news sites is when they’re shared in popular channels. You can share your website’s content on these sites yourself if you’re just starting out, but do so carefully.

Just like on traditional social sites, too much self-promotion is frowned upon in the Reddit and Quora communities. You’ll fare best when you share your content in context of the topic and when it’s the best information to answer the user’s question.

1. Paid Advertising

You can drive traffic to your website quickly with paid advertising. With search engines, you can run pay-per-click or retargeting ads. With social media you can run display ads or sponsored posts.

Your strategy will most likely include a combination of different types of advertising like social media, display, and search ads.

The 2024 CMO Survey from Deloitte says that marketers are anticipating a 12.1% increase in social media spending in 2025.

Pro tip: Get started with our step-by-step guide on paid advertising.

2. Contests and Giveaways

A simple way to drive traffic to your website is through contests and giveaways. This can give you a quick boost, while also rewarding your followers. You can host giveaways on social media, through your email list, or both.

Perhaps start with something smaller than beverage company Liquid Death, which ran a giveaway in summer 2024 for … a jet. A real one. (Pilot not included.)

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Implementing a strategy like this can be simple. Just follow these six steps:

• Decide what platform on which to host your giveaway. (You can use multiple.)
• Choose a prize. (Free tickets, discount, etc … )
• Select the criteria. (Website comments, email sign up, etc … )
• Write the ad copy.
• Create the graphics.
• Post and promote the contest or giveaway.

3. Guest Posting

In that same vein, writing guest posts can generate traffic to your site. Guest posting shows you're active in your community, while also linking to your website (and I’ve got more on generating backlinks below).

To implement a guest posting strategy, you need to find a site that’s a good fit for your company, draft a blog post, and then write a pitch.

Caroline Forsey, a marketing manager on HubSpot’s content growth team, says, "I'm always particularly intrigued with a guest pitch if it shows me the writer has done their research ahead of time.”

“For instance, I‘d pay much closer attention to a pitch if it tells me how this piece could appeal to my readers. Additionally, I’m impressed when a writer can recognize gaps in our content and how their piece will fill those gaps, rather than competing with existing content."

As an example, here’s what HubSpot looks for in guest posts on the Marketing Blog.

4. Guest Podcasting

Similar to guest posting, being a guest on a popular podcast can raise brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.

You may already have some favorite podcasts that would be a great fit; you can also use a “matchmaking” company specifically for podcast guests, like Interview Connections and PodMatch.

Just make sure you do your own research. Listen to a few episodes to get a sense of the tone and subject matter, research the host(s), read reviews, and see if the podcast has published numbers like subscribers or downloads.

5. Thought Leadership

According to Edelman’s and LinkedIn’s research, more than half of decision-makers and C-level executives spend an hour or more each week reading thought-leadership content.

If that’s your audience, it’s time to dedicate more of your editorial calendar to thought leadership. (And even if your target audience isn’t in the C-suite yet, sharing thought-leadership content can boost your brand’s credibility and visibility — and help you create genuinely useful content.)

When choosing a thought leader, don’t limit yourself to your own industry. Influential thought leaders often have transferable knowledge that can help your readers, regardless of their industry and experience.

And although “leader” suggests somebody well-established in their career, there are lots of younger professionals who are disrupting industries, trying out new tactics, and catching the attention of their peers. More than anything, look for a good storyteller — somebody you are excited to sit down and talk to.

Website Traffic Is Waiting For You

Driving traffic is a never-ending task, but it’s one that can yield long-term results.

There are so many paths your future customers can take to reach your website — all you have to do is find the one that works best for your business.

Try one of these methods in your next quarter’s demand generation strategy to see a significant traffic boost.

You want to learn about search engine optimization (SEO), but where do you start? We were all SEO beginners once, so take heart: There’s lots to learn, but I’ve got plenty of expert advice and a step-by-step guide to get you started.

We’ll start with some basic SEO vocabulary, review a step-by-step SEO tutorial to help you get your SEO strategy off the ground, and get tips from HubSpot SEO pro Victor Pan and SEOFOMO newsletter founder (and one of the world’s best-known SEO experts) Aleyda Solís.

Table of Contents

• SEO Basics
• How to Learn SEO
• SEO Step-by-Step Tutorial

SEO Basics

Understanding the foundational SEO vocabulary is important. Let’s dive into a few key terms:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Tactics to optimize your website to provide the high-quality information searchers look for. Good SEO also helps you rank higher in search results for specific keywords so people can find your content.
• On-page SEO: Any website optimizations that improve search rankings, like the keywords used in your content or back-end elements like site structure.
• Off-page SEO: Any actions that improve your search engine rankings outside your website, like backlinks from other websites.
• Link building: Links to your website from other high-quality websites that build authority and credibility.
• SERPs: Search Engine Result Pages are the results page you see when you conduct a search on Google or another search engine.
• White-hat SEO: Optimization tactics that align with accepted and recognized best practices.
• Black-hat SEO: Optimization tactics that manipulate search engine algorithms to rank websites higher in SERPs. These tactics are often unethical.
• E-E-A-T: E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. It’s part of Google’s search quality rater guidelines and one of the factors Google uses to determine a page's relevance and authority.
• Keyword: Words or phrases users type into a search engine to find content related to their search. As an SEO, you want to include relevant keywords in your content that align with search intent so your site appears in related searches.
• Keyword research: The process of finding keywords people enter into search results related to your business to help you inform the words to use in your website pages and content.
• Organic/organic results: Any results in SERP that are unpaid and that appear because of a page’s relevance to the search query.
• Organic traffic: Organic traffic is traffic that comes from organic results.
• Rank/page ranking: Where your site falls in SERPs for a specific keyword.
• Ranking factor: A ranking factor is an element that impacts where your site may fall in search results, like your page authority.
• Search intent: Search intent is why a user conducts a search.

How to Learn SEO

Learning SEO is a big task, and because SEO best practices change over time, international SEO consultant Aleyda Solís “highly, highly recommends that you don’t go to a single source.” It’s why on her own site, LearningSEO.io, she’s compiled guides and information from many different resources.

Solís offers this pro tip: “See what works for you within your context,” because even if the information is accurate, “it might not be right for your circumstances.”

Here’s a few ways you can accomplish that:

1. Read and watch reliable resources.

There are a lot of educational resources out there to read and watch that will help you build your knowledge of SEO. Here are some of my recommendations.

• The HubSpot Marketing Blog (we cover a variety of topics for different skill levels)
• The HubSpot YouTube Channel
• Bing Webmaster Guidelines
• LearningSEO.io
• Search Engine Journal
• Search Engine Land
• SEMrush

Google still has a little more than 90% of the search market worldwide, so add its Search Central Blog and Search Quality Rater Guidelines to your list.

AI-powered search engines are a fast-growing segment of the search landscape, so if you want to see how AI perceives your website and brand, take HubSpot’s AI Search Grader tool for a spin (it’s pretty cool).

2. Take free courses.

If you benefit from structured and guided learning, an SEO course is another option to build on your SEO skills. A bonus is that many courses offer certificates upon completion. These are some high-quality options:

• HubSpot Academy SEO Training Certification (free): Best for beginners
• Google Analytics Academy (free): Beginner and advanced learning paths
• MOZ Academy (paid): Courses for multiple levels
• Semrush Academy (free): Courses for multiple levels

3. Stay on top of the trends.

Especially with the advent of AI-powered search, SEO changes and evolves on a sometimes daily basis. Algorithms get updated, new trends surface, and consumer behaviors change.

For example, in December 2022, Google added an E for experience to the old E-A-T guidelines. Experience ensures that content is helpful, relevant, and created by someone with experience in the subject at hand.

(And it’s a key differentiator between computers and humans, as AI-generated content scrambles to get a robotic foot in the door.)

One of the most important factors in becoming an SEO expert is staying on top of the trends so you can pivot when major industry shifts happen. We cover changes in the SEO landscape on the HubSpot Blog, and Google also maintains a running list of major updates that can impact your SEO success.

4. Study your competitors.

Learning from your competitors is a great way to understand the keys to their success.

Pan suggests looking at websites that are doing well and seeing what other pages they link to, so that when you’re “thinking about creating content, it’s not just a single piece of content you’re creating, but the whole journey that a user might go through.” Your content should cover a natural progression of topics.

You can conduct a competitor analysis to uncover new keywords, where competitors get backlinks (also called inbound links) from, and other new opportunities to capitalize on.

Featured Resource: Our free Competitive Analysis Templates help you conduct a thorough analysis of competitors in your niche, and this step-by-step guide walks you through how to use the template for an SEO competitive analysis.

5. Learn by doing.

Once you feel confident, you can take a hands-on approach and enact some SEO strategies.

Solís says to adopt “a mindset of being proactive — always testing, always curious, always skeptical, and always thinking from a strategic perspective.”

If you already have a website, you can practice by doing a competitor analysis and updating your current strategy based on your findings. If you don’t have a website, consider building one, implementing your new SEO knowledge, and monitoring metrics.

One of the best things about SEO is that a wide variety of tools are available to help you along every step of the way.

6. Use SEO tools.

Considering the breadth and depth of the internet, it would be a nightmare to do some of the essential SEO functions by hand — this is where SEO tools come in to save the day. They’ve saved me significant time and energy and quickly brought me the results I’m looking for.

Here’s a list of tools I recommend:

• HubSpot’s SEO Marketing Software offers SEO recommendations to improve your site, optimize page content, and measure ROI.
• AI Search Grader, another HubSpot tool, analyzes how visible your brand is to AI search engines.
• Our Website Grader scores your site based on factors like mobile friendliness and SEO optimization.
• Google’s Search Console can help you measure your site traffic and fix SEO performance issues.
• Google Analytics helps you view important metrics to understand your SEO efforts, like the measure of organic vs non-organic traffic.
• Ahrefs is a favorite of HubSpot bloggers. It helps you conduct keyword research and stats their important stats like search volume and CTR.
• Jasper is an AI writing assistant that can help write SEO-optimized blog posts with target keywords.

Once you’re more fluent in the vocabulary of SEO, it’s time to jump in and get hands-on. Since I’ve promised you the shortest SEO tutorial ever, I’ve broken it down into three very broad categories for beginners: content, technical, and sharing.

As you get more familiar and comfortable with SEO, you can build out strategies in each of these categories using the links I’ve provided below.

1. Content SEO: Write great content.

My number one tip for content SEO is simple, if not entirely straightforward: Write really good content.

There are caveats, of course. What Google deems “really good” has changed over the years, sometimes dramatically and sometimes subtly, so this advice still requires at least a passing interest in industry trends.

And no matter how great it is, if your content covers a topic that not many people are asking questions about, you’re not going to see a flood of traffic.

So I’ve got some tools and roadmaps to help you structure your SEO — but even as you incorporate these tips, writing great content should be your north star.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a cornerstone of good content SEO. It’s a great starting point for SEO beginners, so we’ll spend the most time here.

A dedicated tool like Ahrefs or SemRush can be useful for SEOs whether you’re a newbie or a pro, but you can also begin by simply listing words and phrases relevant to your business.

For instance, if you sell roasted coffee, you might opt for “roasted coffee,” “Colombian coffee,” and “local coffee roaster.”

List these keywords in a spreadsheet or document for you to keep track of.

Then, pick one word or phrase to use on one page of your site. In other words, you don’t want to target different keywords on one page. You want to target one keyword, as well as any keywords it’s semantically related to, so that you’re capturing user intent.

Continuing with the example from above, I might create a page for “local coffee roaster.” That would be my main keyword, but I can also target semantically related terms such as “local coffee,” “coffee roaster near me,” “coffee roaster [city name],” and “locally roasted coffee.”

This begins with keyword research, but Pan says not to stress out about it too much: Start by making a list of what the natural things people would search for. Put some of those keywords into Google and see what else people search for.

I asked Google, “is Jurassic Park real,” and here are some related common search terms, heaven help us:

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You’ll do better as a beginner to try to rank higher on keywords that have a lower search volume — trying to outrank well established sites on keywords with high difficulty is not going to earn you a lot of visitors. But if you’re an expert on a somewhat more niche topic, it’s your time to shine.

Once you’ve got some keywords in hand, here’s a few ways to use them to your advantage:

1. Use the keywords in the page title
2. Use them in your URL
3. Use them in your meta description
4. Use them in your H1
5. Use them in your page content — naturally. If you’re trying to force it, you may have chosen the wrong keywords for your content.

Consider this:

“We have seen some indie publications close because of overreliance on Google traffic. More than ever, this is a good reminder for SEOs to not necessarily rely only on Google. Try to diversify through all the channels and platforms that people are now using to search.” —Aleyda Solís

Search Intent

Why a user types a specific query into Google or another search engine is as important as the term itself.

For instance, if I search for “is Jurassic Park real” because I want a job training velociraptors, I’m expecting very different results from somebody using the same query to find out whether the movies were filmed at real-life nature parks that I could go visit.

Generally speaking, users want to learn something, to investigate a brand or product, to complete an action like buying a certain product, or to find a specific website.

Media Richness

Rich media includes audio, graphics, video, polls, or other interactive features. Think like a user: Do you want to read a 4,000-word block of text, or do you want animations or graphics to help break that up?

By structuring this data in the backend, you can optimize your content to make it more appealing in the SERPs.

Internal Linking

As you build out your content library, it’s important to link to your own content, which can help boost traffic and, over time, build your page authority.

The HubSpot blogs have thousands (and thousands) of posts that predate me, so to find relevant blog content to link to, I type “site:blog.hubspot.com” into Google, followed by the term or phrase I’m looking for.

From there, I can decide what to link to based on recency and relevancy. (And thank goodness for this, because my brain is too full of old song lyrics to remember anything useful.)

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Historical Optimization

If you’re doing SEO for a property that has a large content library, chances are good that some of that content is outdated. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless — far from it.

At a previous job, I reorganized and rewrote event recaps that were no longer serving their original purpose. Because each event centered around a specific topic or theme, it was easy enough to update the titles, headings, and images. I also updated statistics, the content itself, and the publish date.

It didn’t happen overnight, but those pages crept back up in Google’s rankings once they became relevant to our audience again.

Another way to optimize older content is to add more examples and make sure any existing examples are still correct. Double-check links and anything else that may have changed, like step-by-step instructions.

2. Technical SEO: Improve the technical elements of your website.

Even the best content on the internet won’t get any readers if Google can’t find it.

I once worked on a website relaunch that began with an audit of our URL structure. We had to create a logical way of structuring our URLs before we could think about things like redesigning graphics.

Technical SEO can seem complicated if you don’t have a lot of technical experience. Don’t try to do everything at once — the goal here is to set a strong technical foundation so that Google and other search engines can easily find and crawl your website so that it shows up in search results.

Pro tip: Choose a good CMS — like, ahem, HubSpot — that will take care of the more technical aspects so you don’t have to.

Go deeper into technical SEO with our technical SEO guide, which begins with the fundamentals you’ll need to run an audit. It also takes you through crawlability, indexability, renderability, rankability, and clickability.

3. Sharing and Backlinking: Make sure that users can find your website.

Because your content is great, people want to share it. Congratulations! Now let’s talk about how to build those backlinks.

Pan says to ask yourself, “Why do people want to share what you created?”

He identifies three simple answers to that question. “One, you’re super local, so it’s very relevant. You might even be the only person talking about it.”

“Two, you could have data or a perspective that only your site can share, because of access that you have,” like original research or other proprietary data.

And lastly, “your content triggers an emotional response.”

One simple thing I do for HubSpot articles is provide quote cards to the subject matter experts I’ve talked to. It’s an easy way to encourage link sharing beyond your own network, and it doesn’t take much time.

It’s also important to understand the different types of backlinks — for instance, you might be able to write a guest blog on another high-quality website and link back to your own.

We’ve got a complete guide on backlinking when you’re ready to give it a shot.

This SEO Step-by-Step Tutorial is Just the Beginning

Your learning doesn’t have to stop here. With the SEO 101 vocabulary I mentioned above and the step-by-step tutorial, you can easily start creating an effective search engine optimization strategy.

Our starter pack, linked below, will help you ramp up your SEO plans and boost the likelihood of your website ranking on the first page of SERPs.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in March 2013 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Add a gritty, textured feel to your designs with our collection of dust brushes and effects for Photoshop.

Whether you’re aiming to create a vintage look, enhance your artwork with subtle imperfections, or add a layer of realism to your designs, dust textures and effects can make all the difference. These elements bring depth, character, and a raw, weathered quality that elevates everything from photo edits to poster designs.

In this post, we bring you some of the best dust brushes and textures for Photoshop, perfect for creating everything from cinematic photo effects to distressed typography. Have a look.

Dust Photoshop Actions & Effects

Dust Explosion Photoshop Action

This is a dust explosion Photoshop action for designers and photographers needing a fresh and appealing approach to their creations. It can enhance various projects, including CD covers, posters, flyers, and advertising campaigns. Compatible with Photoshop CS3 and newer versions, the action lets you create a non-destructive effect.

Sand Dust Powder Explosion Photoshop Action

This is a high-quality Photoshop action that adds a unique sand dust animation effect to your images. Developed with great care and precision, it’s compatible with Photoshop CC+ and is most effective in its English version.

Dust Storm Animation Photoshop Action

This is a high-quality Photoshop dust storm action that can transform your images instantly. Easy to use, it adds an animated dust storm effect and works only with the English version of Photoshop CC+. A handy video tutorial is included with the download for set-up and customization pointers.

Color Dust Photoshop Action

This Photoshop action can instantly add a vibrant burst of color dust to your images. It works best with photos of figures and models. In addition to creating eye-catching effects, the action also includes 10 color presets for quick customization. Final compositions are fully layered for further editing.

Dust Powder Explosion Effect PSD

This is a Photoshop template designed to add drama to your images with a dynamic, explosive dust powder effect. It can convert photos into caricature effects with an energetic, oily, painting oil, glamour oil, portrait oil, or cartoon feel. Best used with photos of 1000px to 3000px resolution, the filters work well with a range of images, including fashion, lifestyle, and product shots.

Dust and Scratch Photo Effect PSD

Another Photoshop template that facilitates high-quality dust and scratches visual effects with just a few clicks. With a 4500 x 3000 resolution and 300 DPI, it ensures sharp, well-organized layers for easy editing. This tool involves a simple process of a double click on the smart object, editing, and saving.

Stardust Glitter Dust Transparent Overlay

This pack offers 20 high-resolution celestial dust overlays compatible with Photoshop. Perfect for enhancing outdoor photography, studio photoshoots, and social media images, these overlays come in both PNG and JPG files.

30 Vintage Film Grain Dust Photo Overlays

This is a professional overlay collection for adding a dreamy, vintage effect to your photos. With 30 high-quality overlays offered, simply place these on your photo and tweak the blending mode. It’s compatible with mobile and desktop platforms, including Adobe Photoshop, Gimp, Snapseed, and Picsart, and more.

Dust Photoshop Brushes

15 Real Dust Photoshop Brushes

Explore the artistic potential offered by this collection of unique dust Photoshop brushes. Of high quality and 5000px, these brushes provide realistic dust and hair textures, enhancing any digital art or design project. Conveniently provided in ABR format, the collection is skillfully crafted and sure to enrich your Photoshop toolkit.

Dust Particles Brushes for Photoshop

A creative set of Photoshop brushes featuring 8 distinctive dust particle brushes for adding a touch of magic to your digital works. This carefully crafted tool comes with an ABR file and comprehensive instructions. It works best when used with the “Screen” or “Color Dodge” blend mode.

45 Ash Dust Photoshop Stamp Brushes

Check out this set of 45 ash dust photoshop brushes, compatible with Photoshop CS6 – CC. The high-resolution texture brushes, with over 3000 pixels size, elevate your digital projects with their versatility. Great for photo overlays, digital manipulation, adding special effects in games, or enhancing your artwork, these brushes can transform your creations, injecting a unique aesthetic quality into them.

60 Grunge Dust Photoshop Stamp Brushes

Looking for a unique finishing touch for your digital project? Then this grunge dust brushes collection is perfect for you. It’s compatible with all Photoshop versions from CS2 to CC. With 60 high-resolution brushes up to 2500 pixels, you can add intriguing texture to your photos, create eye-catching visual effects for games or artwork, or simply add some grungy charm to your designs.

Dust Explosion Brushes for Photoshop

This collection of Photoshop brushes can help you design splendid dust and powder explosion effects with ease. This high-resolution set includes eight distinct brush styles, with pixel dimensions ranging from 3805 – 4968 px. The brushes are user-friendly and compatible with numerous CS6 to CC 2023+ Photoshop versions.

Stardust Brushes for Photoshop

Stardust brushes for Photoshop is a brush pack designed to add sparkly celestial dust effects to your work. This pack features 20 high-resolution (4096 x 4096 px) brushes that are simple to use. The brushes are perfect for various types of creative digital design projects.

90 Fractal Dust Stamp Brushes

Fractal dust brushes is an expansive brush collection of intricate fractal shapes and textures specifically crafted for Photoshop CS6 – CC. Housing a robust eruption of 90 high-resolution brushes, this universal pack allows compatibility with any application that opens .ABR files. Its distinctive designs can add an instant flair to web constructs, art pieces, presentation design, and various print essentials like cards, covers, and posters.

Flour Dust Brushes for Photoshop

This is a unique brush pack that breathes life into your designs with incredible powder, explosion, and dispersion effects. This set includes eight high-quality, high-resolution brushes, all simple and user-friendly. Compatible with multiple Photoshop versions (CS6 and all CC versions).

Dust Textures & Backgrounds

10 Dust Texture Overlays

Add a touch of nostalgia with this dust texture overlays pack, which offers ten unique vintage dust textures in high resolution (6000 x 4500 px, 600 dpi). Compatible with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and any graphics program that can read JPG files, this asset is a fantastic tool for breathing life into your creative projects with a vintage touch.

Light Bokeh Dust Textures

This is a set of 20 distinct model overlays designed to add an artistic touch to your visuals. Each model is available in a 6000x4000px size with 300 DPI, packaged in a JPG format. Ideal for any creative project, these textures, full of fine detail and depth, are sure to elevate your imagery.

Vintage Dust Texture Pack

Explore the charm of bygone eras with this vintage dust texture pack. This creative asset brings authenticity to your designs with high-resolution texture images featuring subtle dust particles and delicate scratches—hallmarks of classic photos and memorabilia. Easily integrated into a range of design projects, it’s perfect for photo overlays, digital artworks, or evocative backgrounds. The pack includes 10 textures in both JPG and PNG format.

10 Dust & Scratches Textures

A versatile collection of high-resolution JPG files with dust textures, perfect for enhancing your design projects. Ideal for use as overlays, backgrounds, masks, and more, these 4000x4000px files can be adapted for any creative work. Compatible with Photoshop or any program capable of reading JPG files, these textures offer endless possibilities for bringing your ideas to life.

Colorful Dust Explosion Backgrounds

A collection of high-quality, dynamic backgrounds featuring colorful dust explosions. With a variety of 10 colors available in a 3000×2000 pixel JPG format, these backgrounds offer a vibrant explosion of dust reminiscent of India’s Holi Festival. Suitable for use in numerous settings, ranging from yoga studios to social media platforms, these textures can inject life into a dull design or enhance a presentation.

10 Dust & Grunge Textures

This pack offers a collection of high-resolution dirty wall textures featuring dust, grains, speckles, and more. Ideal for digital artworks, these textures can be used as backgrounds for graphics, texts, business cards, websites, and social media banners among others. Available in both JPG and PNG formats, they are compatible with Adobe Photoshop CC or higher versions.

Free Dust Photoshop Brushes & Effects

Free Dust Photoshop Text Effect

This is a text effect template you can download for free to craft cool titles for your design projects. It features a stylish dust dispersion-style effect. The text is easily customizable as well.

Free Dust Dispersion Photoshop Effect

This PSD template is also free to download and it comes with a creative dispersion effect that you can instantly apply to your photos. The template features smart object layers for easy editing as well.

Free 68 Dust Brushes for Photoshop

This is a big collection of dust brushes for Photoshop. You can download it for free to use in your personal projects. The brushes come in both Photoshop and Affinity Photo formats.

Free Sand Dust Photoshop Brushes

Another collection of dust-themed Photoshop brushes. This pack includes 15 brushes that feature sand dust-style brush designs. They are perfect for adding grain and texture to your designs.

Free Powder Dust Photoshop Brushes

This free Photoshop brush pack also includes 15 different high-quality brushes in 2500px size. The brushes feature powder dust-style brush designs with a realistic look and feel.

April Sunshine Hawkins is a StoryBrand workshop facilitator, keynote speaker, and co-host of the Marketing Made Simple podcast (which has 2M downloads). 

She helps businesses streamline their messaging, and loves teaching business leaders to leverage the StoryBrand framework to simplify what they're trying to say. 

Keep reading to learn her three tips when it comes to storytelling, selling what you love, and making the customer the hero. 

1. Lead with what you love.

If this sounds a little too similar to the preachings of Liz Gilbert in Eat Pray Love, bear with me; it connects to marketing.

Don’t "do what brings you the most money"... Just do something for the joy of it. Plain and simple. 

"You need to be selling the products that bring you the most joy. Why are you pushing something you hate doing? Don't do that," Hawkins tells me. 

"I know so many people, especially in the SMB space, who are in a rut because they've backed themselves into selling something they don't actually like selling," she says. 

That doesn’t mean you need to stop offering those products entirely, especially if they’re keeping the lights on. 

But when you care about what you’re selling, Hawkins says, your customers can feel it. Lean into the stories or values that matter most to you, and you'll find yourself connecting more deeply with your audience.

Now how do I make a career out of reading rom-coms and drinking frozen margs? 

2. Your customer is the hero. Not you. 

Hawkins sees too many marketers position their brand as the heroes, and she says it's one of the biggest mistakes marketers can make.

"Everybody wakes up the hero of their own story. Your customers, the people you're trying to draw in… The story needs to be about them."

In other words, you’re not Batman — you’re Alfred.

Take a recent example: Hawkins was working with a jewelry brand that creates products in Malawi and pays their workers 3-5X the minimum wage. Naturally, they wanted to shout that from the rooftops. Who wouldn't?

But Hawkins stepped in and pointed out that the brand isn't supposed to be the hero. The customer is. 

"We rewrote the campaign to ask, 'How can these pieces help people celebrate a milestone — like a promotion, an anniversary, a birthday?" 

Suddenly, the jewelry wasn’t just jewelry; it became a badge of a customer's big (and small) life moments.

Have you ever landed on a website and read the first few sentences and thought, Wow, is this person in my head? That's the end-game: For your customers to feel like you get them. 

"When we can position our products to align with what our customers are feeling, it creates that 'ding, ding, ding' moment — 'That's me! This is for me!'" Hawkins says. "That's what we're looking for." 

3. Marketing is just storytelling. 

April Sunshine Hawkins is, as it turns out, exactly what you'd expect — bright, warm, and exceptionally joyful. 

She also loves a good story, which is why she works for a company (StoryBrand) that helps businesses sharpen their messaging through a provided framework. 

"It's just nice to have a framework to go to, so when you're like, 'Oh no, there's a blinking cursor again. What am I supposed to say?' You have a framework to work off of," she tells me. 

Here's the nugget of wisdom: As marketers, we don't always have to reinvent the wheel. If marketing is really just storytelling, then it's vital to treat your messaging the same way you'd write a novel — with a hero, a surmountable challenge, and a triumphant ending. 

Greetings, I'm having an issue, I want to set my form to display at the very top right hand side corner of a screen, I've achieved this in vb.net using this code

Location = New Point(Screen.PrimaryScreen.WorkingArea.Width - Width, 0)

Does anyone know how I can do this in VC++?

Creating a professional, visually captivating presentation is essential when promoting a hotel or hospitality business. Whether you’re pitching to investors, presenting to potential clients, or showcasing your brand to partners, the right presentation can make all the difference.

In this blog post, we’ve curated a collection of the best hotel presentation templates designed to help you deliver stunning and polished presentations with ease.

Whether you’re showcasing room amenities, event spaces, or the overall guest experience, these templates provide a structured, easy-to-edit framework to bring your vision to life. They offer everything you need to highlight key features of your hotel—beautiful imagery, engaging content layouts, and professional design elements that will impress any audience.

Hotellia – Hotel PowerPoint Template

Hotellia is a stylish hotel PowerPoint template with a versatile and elegant design created for a variety of business needs. It features 30 unique, clean slides in HD widescreen format and offers a range of customizable infographics such as bar charts and circles. Its user-friendly nature requires no additional image editing software and allows for fully editable text, fitting any business’s style and need.

Hotel – PowerPoint Presentation Template

This is a superbly organized pitch deck template ideal for professionals intending to create an impressive presentation. It comprises 30 easily adjustable slides and a craft infographic feature. The asset is remarkable for its customization ability; you can change colors, resize, recolor, and more.

Hotel & Resort PowerPoint Template

This hotel PowerPoint template offers a professional, contemporary design with a focus on detail. Perfectly suited for diverse presentations, from business and branding to advertising, it features over 38 unique slides, easy color change, and full HD quality. Its strength lies in its carefully crafted typography, usability, and extensive mockup capabilities.

California Hotel – PowerPoint Presentation Template

This hotel PowerPoint template is ideal for those in the hospitality and travel sectors. Boasting a clean, minimalist design, this template includes 100 uniquely creative slides, fully animated with resizable vector elements. The template supports retina and full HD display, and supports a variety of file types including pdf.

Travotel – Travel & Hotel PowerPoint Template

The Travotel is a comprehensive and professionally designed template ideal for a visual representation of offerings within the hotel or travel industry. With 20 modifiable slides and easy drag and drop features, it allows for captivating and customizable presentations. Designed to fit in a 16:9 Wide Screen Ratio and needing only free web fonts, its user-friendliness is commendable.

Hotel & Villa – PowerPoint Template

This is a sleek and modern hotel PowerPoint template, designed with detail and professionalism. It includes 10 completely customizable slides, featuring resizable and editable graphics, free recommended web fonts, and a widescreen ratio. The template is based on master slides and has a convenient drag-and-drop picture placeholder.

The Neuville – Luxury Hotel PowerPoint Template

The Neuville is a versatile template—ideal for a range of uses from real estate or hotel presentations to company profiles or personal portfolios. With 30 slides, over 500 icons, and handy features like easy-to-edit graphics and simple drag and drop, creating an engaging, professional presentation is a breeze.

Hotel Management PowerPoint Template

This is an excellent hotel PowerPoint template for hotel industry professionals looking to highlight strategies for optimizing operations and service. With its pleasing aesthetics and organized design, the template provides 20 slides with master slides and image placeholders included.

Hoteliano – Luxury Hotel PowerPoint Template

The Hoteliano is an elegantly designed tool for any presentation purpose, particularly within the luxury hospitality industry. The template features over 40 unique slides, all designed with careful attention to detail, usable typography, and modern aesthetics. The template package includes easy-to-use PPTX and PDF files.

Solace – Hotel & Travel PowerPoint Template

Solace is a multipurpose, professional presentation tool ideal for various sectors like business, creative agencies, and portfolio presentations. The clean, modern design is easy to edit and customize. With over 30 slides, an HD aspect ratio, and a high resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, this template is adaptable and user-friendly.

Gracia – Luxury Hotel PowerPoint Template

Gracia hotel PowerPoint template offers a professional, ultra-modern design ideal for any presentation purpose. With over 40 unique slides, this template promises attention to detail, usability, and strong typography. The set includes PowerPoint PPT & PPTX files and PDF documentation, editable on master slides.

Holux – Hotel Marketing Presentation

Holux is a brilliant tool designed to elevate your hotel’s marketing strategy. It’s developed as a PowerPoint presentation template equipped with unique layouts, high resolution, and easy customization for showcasing your brand and services.

De Luna – Hotel Marketing Presentation

The De Luna is a versatile PowerPoint template ideal for creating engaging and professional marketing presentations. Its clean, modern design offers ample room for creativity, with 50+ unique slides and various features such as easy-to-edit vector icons, drag-and-drop placeholders, and a selection of world map vectors.

Luxury Hotel Marketing PowerPoint Template

This is a user-friendly, highly customizable hotel PowerPoint template perfect for showcasing your luxury hotel. It’s versatile, suitable for various businesses and promotional purposes. The template includes 20 pages in 1920px x 1080px size, with 72 DPI in RGB color, and utilizes free fonts.

Luxury Hotel & Resort PowerPoint Template

This is a versatile, creatively designed hotel PowerPoint template perfect for businesses, corporate bodies, and agencies. Easy to use and fully customizable, its highlights include a size of 1920px x 1080px, 72 DPI, RGB color, and 16 pages. Free fonts are utilized and it comes with a Powerpoint PPTX file and a readme text.

D’Lux – Luxury Hotel Presentation Template

D’Lux  is an exquisite asset that provides a sleek and modern design for presenting your luxury hotel brand. Containing flexible and fully editable elements – from infographics to vector icons, it’s suited for various business purposes, be it financial reviews, marketing strategies or training sessions. Its wide 16:9 screen ratio and free recommended fonts contribute to functionality, creating a visually compelling tool for your hotel’s success.

Toproom – Luxury Hotel PowerPoint

Toproom is a stylish yet professional hotel PowerPoint template for crafting compelling presentations. With 30 customizable slides, easy-to-use picture placeholders, and free recommended web fonts, it offers a multitude of options to highlight your unique designs. And don’t forget, mastering the art of visually striking and engaging presentations is made simple with its drag-and-drop feature and a 16:9 widescreen ratio.

Gold Hotel – PowerPoint Presentation Template

This hotel PowerPoint template is ideal for a range of uses from corporate business to digital marketing. It features 22 master slides, all resizable and customizable, with a picture placeholder. This user-friendly template makes editing a breeze – simply drag and drop. It uses and recommends free web fonts.

Free Hotel Presentations Templates (Google Slides)

Free Hotel Pitch Deck Google Slides Template

A beautifully elegant and stylish pitch deck template for your hotel presentations. This template is completely free to download and use. It comes with 31 slides and in both Google Slides and PowerPoint formats.

Free Hotel Marketing Plan Presentation

You can use this free hotel marketing plan presentation to create an effective slideshow to plan a campaign for your hotel marketing efforts. The template includes 27 editable slides and it comes in Google Slides format.

Free Luxury Hotel Company Profile Presentation

This free Google Slides template is ideal for crafting an elegant and high-end presentation for promoting your luxury hotel. It’s designed for making company profile slideshows and includes 28 slides.

Free Hotel Business Plan Presentation

Create an effective business plan for your hotel and resort business using this free Google Slides template. It comes with a colorful design with 35 customizable slide layouts.

Free Resort Hotel Marketing Plan Presentation

This Google Slides template is also free to download. It’s designed specifically for making hotel marketing plan presentations. The template includes highly visual slide layouts with fully customizable design elements.

More companies than ever are using Instagram for business — over 200 million businesses, to be exact. 

Instagram has proven to be a worthwhile investment for marketing purposes. We surveyed 650+ global marketers in Jan. 2024, and they were more likely to rate Instagram as having high ROI than any other platform, and it’s the platform that will get the most investment from them in 2024. 

If you’ve only ever used Instagram for personal use, it might seem daunting to start using it for business purposes. Here, we’re going to explore how you can be using Instagram for business to promote your business on Instagram. 

Table of Contents

• How to Use Instagram for Business
• What is a business profile?
• How to Create a Business Profile on Instagram
• How to Switch to Your Business Profile
• Top Instagram Promotion Tactics of 2024 [Data]

How to Use Instagram for Business

Let's delve into the six strategies you'll need to employ to get the most out of Instagram.

1. Add value with your content.

First and foremost, Instagram is a visual platform. To attract an audience, it's critical you spend time delivering high-quality, thoughtful content.

To succeed on Instagram, it's essential you create valuable content that attracts an audience and encourages them to engage with your business. Consider how you can delight your customers while staying true to your brand.

For instance, Hot Pockets sells microwaveable pocket sandwiches. Admittedly, I wasn't much of a fan of Hot Pockets — until I began following their business's Instagram account.

There are only so many times you can post a picture of a sandwich. Hot Pockets goes in a different direction. Instead, it appeals to its audience through humor, often posting relevant memes or funny quotes.

For instance, in response to @ShallowDivers' claim that Hot Pockets aren't sandwiches, Hot Pockets responded with this:

Ultimately, it might take trial and error to find the content that works best for your business.

While Hot Pockets relies on humor, other brands like The North Face use impressive adventure images to appeal to its demographic.

The point is, brands need to add value to Instagram's community rather than using the platform for advertisements alone. This is critical for your long-term success.

Looking for a few more tips on how to use Instagram to positively impact your business? Check out these Instagram hacks in the video below.

Put these tips to work, and update your marketing mantra from "content is king" to "valuable content is king."

2. Maintain a consistent theme.

Imagine each Instagram post as an individual page of your website.

While each post should be good on its own, ideally, you'll need to create a cohesive theme to maintain an audience's loyalty. In fact, using a consistent voice and aesthetic across your Instagram page is the #3 strategy Instagram marketers are leveraging this year. 

It's important to note, I mean "theme" in the broad sense, as it relates to everything from hashtags and captions to pictures and videos. You'll need to create a consistent tone of voice and a unified feed aesthetic.

Ultimately, the more specific and consistent you are with your posts, the more likely you are to attract your most authentic audience.

You might think it's better to appeal to more people through various themes, but ultimately, staking your claim in a specific niche will help you create stronger, more genuine connections.

For instance, consider MVMT. Its feed is undoubtedly consistent, with similar filters and color palette, and an emphasis on darker, edgier images:

Its consistency is equally obvious in its captions, with phrases like "Create a life you can't wait to wake up to," and "Unexplored paths lead to undiscovered stories." In every post, you'll see the same hashtag: #jointhemvmt.

Undoubtedly, its followers both expect and prefer this type of content, or they wouldn't have followed in the first place. To continue delighting customers, it's essential MVMT keeps true to its theme.

3. Engage with your audience.

Engaging with your audience helps your followers feel valued and, as a result, more connected to your business.

There are plenty of ways to engage with your audience. You might reply to comments on your posts, participate in comment threads, run contests or giveaways, use Instagram Stories polls feature, or give shout-outs to followers on your Stories, particularly if they post something relevant to your brand.

Halo Top Creamery does a fantastic job of engaging with its audience.

It frequently posts cute ice cream pictures with the caption "Ice cream is better with friends. Tag a friend you'd like to eat this with."

A simple "tag a friend" caption is an effective strategy for growing your audience since your followers will then tag friends who might not know about you yet.

Additionally, Halo Top often does contests and giveaways, like this one:

By tagging winners in its posts, Halo Top incentivizes other followers to engage with the brand in the future. Additionally, Halo Top's giveaways demonstrate genuine commitment to connecting with its audience.

4. Consider influencer marketing.

As a consumer, you've likely seen the recent influx of influencer marketers on Instagram — and for good reason.

Social media marketers we surveyed in 2024 said that Instagram offers the second-highest ROI of all platforms when working with influencers/creators. 

By leveraging the power of an influencer, who is already authentically connected with her audience and seen as a trusted source of information, you're able to spread brand awareness and drive sales.

Micro-influencing in particular is a strong opportunity for brand endorsement.

You could use your budget and resources to invest in traditional advertising, but it's often easier to create a more targeted, effective marketing campaign through influencer marketing.

Ultimately, influencers have already cultivated an engaged, loyal following — by identifying the right influencers for your niche, you're much more likely to find followers who will truly enjoy and support your products or services.

5. Build an ad campaign.

There are two reasons you might use Instagram ads: to spread brand awareness or to increase sales.

It's critical you focus on one goal when creating an effective ad campaign. An Instagram ad aiming to sell a product will look vastly different from one intending to attract followers.

For instance, consider this Greenchef ad that showed up on my Instagram feed.

With various images of delicious food and an enticing "$40 OFF" discount, it's likely a high-converting ad. It's very clear what Greenchef's goal is: to get people to buy their product.

YouTube, on the other hand, invested in Instagram ads for an entirely different reason.

Its advertisements, featuring well-known singers like Camila Cabello, entice followers to simply follow YouTube Music's Instagram channel (and, ideally, YouTube's music channel itself).

To implement an effective campaign, it's essential you decide what you're hoping to achieve before you begin creating it.

Once you've chosen a goal, you'll want to create the ad creative. Similar to what we discussed in strategy one, you'll need to create high-value visual content if you want your ad to be successful. Take a look at other ads on Instagram and consider how you might emulate them.

Additionally, A/B test multiple variations of the same ad (changing the copy, image, or targeted audience for each version), to figure out what works best for your business.

When you're ready to create your ad, you'll need to use Facebook Ads Manager. Among other things, Ads Manager lets you narrow in on your target audience (including location, age, and various interests of your ideal demographic), choose your ad objective, and analyze ad performance.

6. Utilize shoppable posts.

If you’re using Instagram for business, then, Shoppable Posts is one feature you’ll want to know well.

It allows you to create posts and tag your products and/services to create a seamless shopping experience directly on the platform. It creates less friction for your followers, increasing the odds of turning them into customers.

Before you begin executing these strategies, you’ll need one thing: an Instagram Business Profile.

A business profile legitimizes your Instagram account and enables you to add critical information like your company's business hours, location, and phone number.

Pros and Cons of an Instagram Business Profile

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might be thinking. “I don’t know how I feel about committing to all that.”

Here are some helpful pros and cons so you can determine if a business profile is right for you before jumping in:

Pros

• Access to metrics on how your posts and stories perform.
• Ability to track how your followers engage with your content.
• Access to features necessary to run ad campaigns.
• Gain feature for adding URLs to Stories so you can send warm traffic to your site.

Cons

• Being labeled as a business.
• May experience less organic reach and visibility.
• Must also have a Facebook account to access ad features.

For most brands, the benefits of a business profile outweigh the cons due to the additional features and analytics. However, it’s important to consider your goals before taking action.

How to Create a Business Instagram Profile

In order to create a business profile on Instagram, you must first create a personal Instagram account and then switch it to a business profile.

If you already have an Instagram account, skip to the next section for instructions on making the switch.

If you don’t already have an Instagram account, there are two ways to get one:

• From the computer
• From a mobile device (IOS and Android)

For detailed steps, check out our comprehensive article on how to create a business account on Instagram.

How to Switch to Your Business Profile

When you have an Instagram set up, follow these easy steps when you’re ready to make the switch:

1. Go to your profile on the mobile app and select the hamburger menu (three stacked horizontal bars) in the top right corner.

2. Scroll down to “Your insights and tools” and tap “Account type and tools.”

3. Under “Account type,” select “Switch to a professional account.”

4. Click “Continue” in the pop-up menu.

5. Select the best category descriptor for your account, like blogger or digital creator, then click “Done.”

You can also toggle the “Display on profile” button so the category you choose is visible to your profile visitors. The button is pictured below. 

And here’s what the button looks like on a profile:

6. Next, choose whether you’re a creator or a business. 

The descriptions under each type let you know what’s most applicable to you based on the category you chose. Once selected, click “Next.”

If you do not have a Facebook Business Page, you will need to create one before completing this step. If your Facebook page is already linked, move on to the next step.

7. Follow the prompts to continue setting up your account and customizing your profile. 

8. Select Done.

You’re now ready to begin implementing your social media strategy on Instagram.

From here, you’ll want to determine the audience you want to target, the aesthetic and tone you want to convey, and the content you want to create.

Top Instagram Promotion Tactics of 2024 [Data]

Here, we’ll review some of the top Instagram promotion tactics gleaned from our 2024 Instagram Engagement Report report.

Audience Interaction

Marketers' primary goal on Instagram in 2024 is increasing engagement, so it makes sense that the most popular Instagram marketing strategy is interacting with audiences. 

Interacting with your audience offers so much more than just engagement. It helps build a sense of community with your followers and allows you to get to know them better.

Content Engagement

Audience interaction takes the #1 spot for the most popular strategy, but survey respondents say they plan to invest the most money in creating content that encourages engagement on the platform. 

What’s more is that 44% of marketers say that creating content that encourages engagement offers the highest ROI. 

Engagement on social media signals that your content is resonating with your audience. Whether it’s an in-feed post, a Story, or a live stream, engagement can be a great indicator of your page’s health.

Wondering how to make your content more engaging? Try creating content that champions your products/services. Our research shows that this type of content performs the best on the platform. 

You can also try the funny route. It offers the second-highest performance, which adds up because funny content tends to be relatable and usually gets someone to stop scrolling and pay attention. 

The format also influences engagement, with most marketers posting images more than anything else. Seventy percent of marketers surveyed post Images on the platform saying it has the highest ROI of all content formats. 

Videos are another effective tool, and the data shows that sharing video content brings in the most reach/impressions of all other formats.

Product Advertising

As Instagram shopping continues to grow, it’s no surprise that marketers' #2 goal for 2024 is advertising their products/services. 

Our research shows that running advertisement campaigns is among the top five Instagram strategies, getting the most investment in 2024. And, as mentioned above, sharing content that showcases products/services offers the highest ROI of any content type 

Instagram shopping tools are still evolving, but 71% of social media marketers who sell products in the Instagram app say the features have high ROI. Most survey respondents also say that 25-50% of clicks on shoppable and linked posts lead to purchases. 

Over to You

Whatever your goal is, whether it's increasing brand awareness or generating more revenue, using Instagram for business gets you one step closer to achieving it. While not all of Instagram's tools will offer a high ROI, they are all worth trying to see what works best for your audience. 

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in May 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.