Online Business Marketing Strategies: 5 Strategies That Actually Work

Most people trying to grow an online business do not have a traffic problem. They have a consistency problem. They post once, get discouraged when the numbers are flat, and stop before any of the compounding effects kick in. The five marketing strategies in this post are specifically designed to solve that – not by working harder, but by working in ways that multiply the effort you are already putting in.

Alston Godbolt has been building income as an affiliate marketer and internet entrepreneur across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest simultaneously. In this breakdown, he shares the five approaches that make that possible without spending every hour of every day on content creation.

What You’ll Walk Out With

A clear explanation of what “riding the wave” means at both the micro and macro level, with real platform examples you can act on today
Why creating a $3 digital product can turn a stranger into a repeat buyer faster than months of free content alone
A step-by-step look at how one YouTube video can be sliced into content for five or six different platforms without recording anything new
The Saturday batch session method that keeps your channels active throughout the week without burning you out
How to set up a basic email autoresponder that follows up with leads automatically, even while you sleep
An honest look at the drawbacks of each strategy so you can pick the right ones for where you are right now
A shortcut to figuring out which strategy fits your specific situation at finder.platformproof.com

Strategy 1: Ride the Wave

The first strategy Alston covers is called “riding the wave,” and it operates on two distinct levels: micro and macro. Understanding the difference between the two determines how fast you can grow, and how much of that growth comes from pure timing rather than talent.

On the micro level, riding the wave means spotting small shifts within platforms you are already using. YouTube Shorts is the clearest example from this video. When YouTube launched Shorts, the algorithm gave that format a significant push because YouTube needed the feature to succeed. Early creators who jumped in during that window got outsized distribution – not because their content was necessarily better than everyone else’s, but because the platform was actively rewarding adoption. The same pattern played out with Instagram Reels and with Facebook Spaces. These are small internal shifts inside platforms that were already established, and they create temporary windows where new creators can gain ground fast.

The move on the micro level is straightforward: keep your eyes open for new features on the platforms where you already have some presence, jump in early, and work toward becoming a subject matter expert in that format before the window closes. You do not need a large existing audience to benefit from this. What you need is the willingness to act while most people are still in a “wait and see” mode.

On the macro level, riding the wave means watching for platform-scale shifts that change how the entire industry operates. TikTok is the example Alston uses. When TikTok began pulling serious attention away from YouTube and Instagram, the creators and brands who were already there had a head start that translated into real business results. Alston notes in this video that it is still not too late to jump on TikTok – but the broader principle is that you want to be scanning for the next shift constantly. What new platform, format, or technology is about to change the way people consume content? Getting there even a few months early can translate into years of compounding audience growth.

The skill this strategy builds is what Alston calls “seeing around corners.” That does not mean chasing every shiny object that launches. It means having a framework for evaluating which shifts are real and sustainable, and then moving decisively on the ones that are. A platform that pulls a billion hours of watch time in its first year is worth your attention. A feature that gets added quietly and goes unchanged six months later probably is not.

Strategy 2: Create a Digital Product to Sell

The second strategy is one Alston says he is “huge on”: creating a digital product to sell. The reason he feels strongly about this is that it solves a problem that trips up almost every new online marketer – the gap between building an audience and making actual money from it.

Here is the logic. When someone buys a $3 checklist from you, they become a buyer. A buyer is a fundamentally different kind of person than a free subscriber. They have already demonstrated that they are willing to exchange money for something you offer. That makes them much easier to sell to again compared to someone who has only ever consumed your free content. So even a very low-cost digital product – a simple checklist, a planner, a short reference guide – functions as a buyer-qualification step. You are not just making $3. You are identifying the people in your audience who are ready to pay, and that information is worth far more than the sale itself.

In the video, Alston walks through Canva as the tool for creating these products. You go to canva.com, search for a template that fits your niche (he uses “planner” as the example, noting it could sell on Etsy), and start customizing the template to make it your own. He is clear about one important rule: you cannot download a Canva template and sell it as-is. You have to modify it, personalize it, and make it genuinely your own creation. Canva’s free plan gives you access to drag-in elements, color scheme changes, and layout reworks that are enough to get a product built in an hour or two.

Once the product exists, delivering it is simple. You can store the file in Google Drive and set up automatic delivery through your landing page or checkout tool. You can sell it on Etsy, through your own site, via a direct link in your social media bio, or through a simple landing page. Traffic can come from free organic content on YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok – or from paid ads once you have some budget to work with.

Alston makes a specific recommendation for affiliate marketers who are struggling to get commissions moving: create a simple $5 digital product, sell it, and reinvest that money into paid ads or better equipment. The product becomes a funding mechanism for the rest of the business. And because digital products have no inventory, no shipping, and no cap on units, that $5 product can scale without you doing more work every time a new sale comes in.

Not sure which of these strategies fits your current situation?

Take the free assessment at finder.platformproof.com and find your best starting point based on what you already have – your skills, your time, and your current platform.

Strategy 3: Repurpose All Your Content

The third strategy is content repurposing, and it is the reason Alston can maintain a visible presence on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn at the same time without spending all day creating content. The core idea is not complicated: instead of building original content for every platform from scratch, you take one piece of content and adapt it across all of them.

Here is how it works using this video as the example. Alston creates a YouTube video covering five online business marketing strategies. That is the source piece. From there, he creates a TikTok overview video that hits all five strategies in a short format. Then he creates individual TikTok videos that go deeper on each strategy one at a time – that is five more pieces of content. Those TikTok clips can be uploaded to Pinterest as short-form video pins. The same clips can be posted on Facebook and Instagram. If YouTube Shorts is in the mix, the best clips go there too. One YouTube recording session generates eight to twelve pieces of content across multiple platforms.

The key insight Alston makes explicit in the video is that the audience on TikTok is largely not the same audience watching your YouTube channel. So from their perspective, the content is brand new even if you created it for a different platform first. You are not being repetitive to your audience – you are just appearing everywhere, which builds the impression of omnipresence without the workload of original creation on each platform.

Repurposing also gives you a built-in feedback loop. A clip that performs well on TikTok tells you something real about what that audience wants. You can then build more YouTube content around that topic, write a deeper guide for it, or create a digital product to sell into that interested audience. The platforms show you what is working, and repurposing lets you amplify it everywhere rather than reacting to each platform in isolation.

If you are struggling to get in front of your target audience and do not have a budget for paid ads, this is the most practical approach available. It requires a smarter workflow, not more hours in the day.

Strategy 4: Batch Your Content

The fourth strategy is batching, and it directly addresses one of the most common problems for online business owners: finding enough time to create content at a pace that actually builds momentum. Batching means setting aside one focused block of time to produce multiple pieces of content at once, rather than trying to create something new every single day.

Alston’s personal method is to sit down on a Saturday and record five or six YouTube videos back to back. While he is already set up with his camera ready, background arranged, and topics in front of him, he also creates his TikTok content in that same session. By the time Saturday is done, he has a full week of YouTube content and the corresponding TikTok videos ready to go. He does not have to touch it again until the following Saturday.

The efficiency gain is real and it comes from a specific source: setup cost. Every time you sit down to create, there is a setup tax you pay – checking your audio, adjusting lighting, getting into the right mental state, reviewing your notes and outline. When you batch, you pay that setup cost exactly once and spread it across five or six pieces of content. The per-piece time drops dramatically compared to setting up and tearing down daily.

For bloggers and writers, Alston’s version of batching looks slightly different. He recommends creating a set of outlines in the batch session rather than full drafts. You sit down and map out five or six post structures – the key sections, the main points for each, the examples you want to draw on. Then the actual writing can happen in shorter focused sessions throughout the week because the heavy thinking is already done. The blank page problem, which is the hardest part of writing, is eliminated before the writing session even starts.

Another major benefit of batching is that it enables scheduling. When you have six YouTube videos recorded on Saturday, you do not have to publish all six on Saturday. You schedule them to go live on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of the following two weeks. Your audience sees consistent, regular output. Your channel looks active and growing. But you are not scrambling to create something at the last minute before a scheduled upload window.

The specific day and time you batch matters less than picking one and protecting it. Some people do their best creative work in the morning. Others peak late at night. Find the window that works for you, block it off on your calendar, and treat it the same way you would treat a meeting you cannot cancel. The discipline of showing up to that session consistently is what separates creators who build momentum from creators who stay stuck at the same subscriber count for months.

Strategy 5: Build an Email List from Day One

The fifth strategy is email marketing, and Alston returns to it repeatedly across his content for a straightforward reason: it is the one marketing channel that does not depend on any platform’s algorithm to function. YouTube can suppress a video. TikTok can reduce your organic reach overnight. Instagram can change how posts are distributed without warning. But when someone is on your email list, you have a direct line to them that no third-party platform controls.

The basic setup works like this. You send traffic from YouTube, TikTok, paid ads, or any other source to a landing page. On that landing page, you offer something valuable in exchange for the visitor’s email address. This is called a lead magnet. It can be a free checklist, a short guide, a mini video course, a discount on one of your digital products – anything that the right person would actually want enough to hand over their email address to get it. They submit their email, receive the lead magnet, and land on your list.

From there, an autoresponder takes over. An autoresponder is a pre-written sequence of emails that go out automatically after someone joins your list – day one, day three, day seven, day fourteen, and so on depending on how you set it up. You write those emails one time. After that, every new subscriber gets that same sequence without you doing anything manually. The emails can add more value on the topic that got them to sign up, address the core problem they came to you to solve, share more of your story or experience, and introduce your products or affiliate offers at appropriate points in the sequence.

Alston says the initial autoresponder setup takes about an hour or two. That is a one-time investment. After that, every lead that comes in gets nurtured automatically. Over time, the people who are ready to buy will buy. The people who are not ready yet will stay subscribed and keep seeing your name until they are. You are not manually following up with anyone or trying to remember where you left off with a particular contact.

This is why Alston describes email as “pivotal” to online business success. Social media platforms are rented land. You build on them, but you do not own them, and the rules can change at any point. Your email list belongs to you. If every platform you currently use disappeared tomorrow, you could email your list, let them know where to find you, and keep your business running without starting over from zero.

Honest Drawbacks

These five strategies are effective, but each one has a real downside worth knowing before you commit your time to it.

Riding the wave requires fast decisions. The algorithmic push that platforms give to new features does not stay open forever. Spending two months evaluating whether YouTube Shorts is worth your time means the early-mover window has already closed and someone else has captured that advantage.
Digital products require real upfront effort. Creating something worth paying for, even at $3, takes focused time. You also need a delivery mechanism and a way to process payments, which adds technical setup that can feel overwhelming if you are just starting out.
Repurposing only amplifies content that is already working. Distributing weak content to six platforms makes weak content more visible. If your source YouTube video is not getting traction, repurposing it to TikTok and Pinterest will not fix that problem. The strategy multiplies what is working, not what you hope might work.
Batching requires showing up on schedule without immediate pressure. It is easier to cancel a Saturday batch session than it would be to skip a daily post, because the consequence of missing the batch is not visible until days later. The discipline has to be self-imposed rather than deadline-driven.
Email marketing has a real learning curve. Alston acknowledges in the video that it “can be confusing and frustrating.” Autoresponder tools, landing page builders, list segmentation, and deliverability best practices take time to understand well enough to use effectively. Most people underestimate this going in.

Find Your X

These five strategies do not all need to be running at the same time. The question is which one to start with given your specific situation – your current platform, the time you have available, what you are trying to sell, and where you are in the process of building an online income. The Platform Proof Finder at finder.platformproof.com is a free tool built to answer that question for you. You put in where you are and it gives you a clear starting point, whether that is a digital product to create, a content repurposing system to set up, or an email list you should have started building six months ago.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “riding the wave” actually mean for someone just starting out?

It means paying close attention to what platforms are actively promoting right now. When a platform launches a new feature – like Shorts, Reels, or Spaces – they push it through the algorithm because they want it to succeed. Beginners can benefit from that push by creating content in those formats early, before the feature becomes saturated. The algorithm does some of the distribution work for you during that adoption window, which is something you cannot buy.

What kind of digital product should I create first?

Start with whatever you can create in one or two focused sessions and that directly solves a problem your target audience already has. A checklist or simple reference guide in your niche is the lowest barrier to entry. Canva has free templates you can customize. The goal is not to create something perfect – it is to get your first paying customer and validate that the market exists. A $3 to $10 product that sells ten copies tells you more about your audience than a free guide that gets a thousand downloads.

Do I need a website to sell a digital product?

Not at the start. Etsy handles the storefront, product listing, and payment processing for you with no upfront cost. You can also use simple landing page tools to set up a single-page checkout without building a full website. For delivery, a Google Doc link that goes out automatically when someone purchases is often enough in the beginning. You can add more infrastructure as the product gains traction.

How do I repurpose content without it feeling repetitive to my audience?

The audience on TikTok and the audience on YouTube are usually different people. Content that already lives on one platform is genuinely new to people discovering you on another. Even for the portion of your audience that follows you in multiple places, different formats serve different purposes. A 60-second TikTok clip and a 12-minute YouTube deep-dive on the same topic are not the same product – they work differently and get watched in different contexts. Repurposing is not redundancy. It is reach expansion.

How many pieces of content can I realistically get from one YouTube video?

Based on what Alston describes in this video, one YouTube video can generate: a TikTok overview covering the full topic, individual TikTok videos for each sub-point or strategy, Pinterest short-form video pins from those clips, Facebook posts or Reels, Instagram posts or Stories, and YouTube Shorts clips from the strongest moments. For a five-strategy video like this one, that realistically adds up to eight to twelve pieces of distinct content from a single recording session – without going back to the camera.

What is the best batching schedule if I still work a full-time job?

Alston’s Saturday approach works well because it uses a day most people have some control over. But the specific day matters less than protecting it from other commitments. Block two to three hours, have your topic list ready before you sit down, and aim to produce enough content for the next one to two weeks. Start with that volume and adjust based on how the session actually goes. It takes a few weeks to find the rhythm that produces your best output consistently.

What autoresponder tool should I start with for email marketing?

The video does not name a specific tool, but Alston references a dedicated email marketing course linked in the video description for anyone who wants a deeper walkthrough. Popular options that work well for online business owners at the beginning include GetResponse, ConvertKit, AWeber, and Mailchimp. Most have free tiers that are functional enough to get your first autoresponder sequence running. The setup process is similar across all of them: create your account, build a list, write a short welcome sequence, and connect it to a landing page that captures emails in exchange for your lead magnet.

How long before email marketing starts producing consistent income?

There is no single answer because it depends on how fast your list grows, how well your lead magnet attracts the right people, and how closely your offers match what subscribers signed up to solve. The mechanism works – an autoresponder that nurtures new leads over time does convert them to buyers at a higher rate than one-time pitches do. The timeline varies based on traffic volume and offer relevance. The practical takeaway is that the list you build now is what generates income six to twelve months from now. Starting earlier always wins.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “Online Business Marketing Strategies – 5 Strategies That Actually Work,” YouTube, 2021
Canva design and template platform: canva.com
Platform Proof Finder: finder.platformproof.com