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NAP stands for “Name, Address, Phone Number.”

NAP is the core element of local business citations (aka listings) across the Internet.

So you want to promote your website online…for free, preferably.

By now, you probably know from experience that the “build it and they will come” philosophy is flawed. You can have great content — in fact, you need at least “good” content — but unless you know how to promote it, your site is a ghost town. But you also don’t have the budget to go straight to advertising online.

You don’t need a grab bag of tips and tricks. You don’t need best practices to “go viral”. What you need is an actual process to follow consistently to create a “flywheel effect“.

Here is an exact, step-by-step strategy that I recommend to anyone who wants to promote their website online. The specific details vary, but it’s a pretty tried and true path for anyone who wants to promote their website.

Traditional keyword research has a tragedy of the commons problem. The more people that use a common keyword research sources, the less valuable those sources become.

So you have a rapidly growing local business, and you are looking to expand. You have the brand, the capital, and the processes to open a second or even third location.

You’re in a growing metro area with lots of opportunity and open real estate.

And yet, you know that every real estate agent and business analyst will tell you that long-term success depends on “location, location, location.”

Now, if you were a national retail chain or a franchise owner, you could hire a location consultant to comb through census data and expensive proprietary business intelligence.

But you aren’t sure it’s truly worth the price. After all, your local real estate agent knows most of the metro market. And you generally know what the Census data says…even though the Census data is almost 10 years old.

So what can you use to gather hard data about what locations are most likely to succeed?

Creating content for your website requires a ton of time, money & resources to do well. But when it doesn’t generate visitors or sales – it’s a huge waste.

There are a lot of reasons why a piece of content might not perform well, but you can dramatically increase your odds of success by prequalifying your content idea.

In the offline world, companies use focus groups or sampling to prequalify the market. They use resumes and cover letters to prequalify candidates before committing to an interview (or much less a hire).

And the incredible beauty of the Internet is that you can prequalify your content ideas as well with the right tools and a bit of research.

Here’s how to use a range of tactics from keyword research to mining platforms to exploring past successes to find, inform & guide your content marketing ideas.

*Note – if you are interested in finding trending topics for social-optimized posts, also check out my Trending Topics guide here.

Anyone who owns a website and recognizes the opportunity to get visitors from Google organic search suspects the importance of keywords.

If you can appear in those results when someone types in a certain keyword – that’s not only a visitor…but a highly qualified, free visitor.