Tips And Tricks To Help Make Your Online Small Business Successful
Layered Strategy
Online marketing can be very providential to your business, but if you aren’t strategic in how you apply these new techniques, you could end up “spinning your wheels”, as the saying goes, in vain. What you want to do is consider your options and choose those which best fit your online business. To that end, attaining professional support is advisable.
There are quite a variety of agencies who have a specialization which is directly geared at facilitating online marketing solutions. Continuous marketing online is likely to yield ROI, or Return On Investment. However, your level of ROI will depend on where you market online.
For example: if you’re running an online business selling products and/or services to a specific demographic, you have a few different options in terms of online marketing. There is something called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. This is a very popular marketing tool today, and it is in hot demand.
Basically, keywords, key phrases, photos, videos, links, and “meta” data contained in HTML code all play a part in how a search engine categorizes search results. If you want to see the best return, you need to optimize your page to be more visible to search engine algorithms. Additionally, any online content you design should also be optimized.
Guest Blogging, PPC, And SMO
Further strategy applies once you go the SEO route. If you’ve got a blog on your site, that’s going to produce some level of “draw”. You’ll likely see some level of traffic increase from regularly updating the blog on your main site, but if you can get that blog posted on other sites who provide guest-blogging services, you can increase your visibility by a substantial margin.
All these things being said, guest blogs and SEO specialization aren’t the only means of marketing you can cost-effectively use to advance your online business. Additionally, there is PPC, or Pay Per Click. PPC works like this: you only pay when someone clicks on an ad posted through Google or Facebook, or some other such PPC-hosting solution.
It then becomes the prerogative of whoever is providing you PPC service to really push your business out there. The more clicks you get, the more money they get. This can be very successful for some small online businesses, but at the same time, it can be a dead end. Working with professional SEO agencies can help you determine if your products or services are best suited to such an approach.
Another way of proceeding which could increase traffic is SMO, or Social Media Optimization. Twitter, Facebook, Minds, Gab, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat—even Tinder: all these are examples of regularly-used social media. Optimizing your business such that it has requisite visibility on these sites is definitely advisable.
Getting Beyond The Digital
Between SEO, SMO, and PPC, you can really get yourself out there; but of course, these three methods of online marketing are just the tip of the iceberg. Once you have an established presence through them, you want to look at things like Yelp! reviews. If you have clients who are satisfied with what your business does, have them write reviews.
Certainly, some clients may not have time to write reviews. You can write reviews for them. Basically, you know you’ve got a client who likes what you do, you write a review from their perspective, then you tell the client what you’ve done, show them the review, and ask them if they’d be willing to let you post that review in their name. If they are, you saved them trouble and attained the commendation you deserve.
You want to promote your personable as well. Consider live chat solutions which make an online experience feel more “real”. AccuWebHosting.com points out: “You know-how, in normal business transactions, you speak to your customers? Either face-to-face or over the phone? Well, now you can use live chat software that enables you to converse with your customers in a written/digital format.”
You might also look into branded merchandise. There are pens, coffee mugs, shapes made from “stress foam”, notepads, sunglasses, lanyards—the list goes on. You likely should commission a number of merchandise items and brand them with your business’s name. As to branding: you want your brand to be easily recognizable, simple, and attractive.
Learn From The Pros
Logos are basically an archetype of your business. The “M” of McDonald’s is archetypal of “mmm, mmm, good”. Additionally, red and yellow colours are conducive to appetite. Nike’s sneakers have a check-mark that is stylized, and the slogan: “Just do it”. This is recognizable and representative.
Your small business needs a logo, a slogan, and a “character” which can be easily picked out, and which is pleasing to the eye. You want the logo and slogan spattered across the web like buck-shot on a close target, and you want it on a variety of merchandise, swag, and promotional items.
Something else worth doing is working with online bespoke production solutions. Basically, you commission something like a t-shirt, the producer takes half off the top, you get the rest. So if you charge $20 for a t-shirt on your website, and a client buys, then the production company gets ten dollars to design and ship it, you get ten, and the client gets the shirt. Everybody wins, convenience is maximized, production costs minimized.
Today’s marketplace provides many options for online businesses large and small. If you’re strategic about using methods that are known to work, you can increase your visibility substantially, and so your profit.
Poppy Watt