Kim Kelley ThompsonWhen it comes to starting your own business and branching out into the online world, it is essential to build a strong online presence to increase sales. Although it can be frustrating at times especially when your starting off, it can be extremely rewarding in many ways. Through the expansion of your online presence, your brand and company will gain exposure, which can translate into higher sales.
Creating an online presence doesn’t happen over night and it is not as easy as just setting up a website and bam you’re in business. There are several factors that can take your online presence from little to big in a matter of months, yes months if you are diligent and put effort towards it daily. Below is the first in a two part series listing smart tips to build an online presence and boost sales:
Why do you need a strong online presence?
In the first place, one might ask why do you realistically need an “online presence”? If the intro to this article above didn’t reveal enough about its importance, ill reveal a little more about its impact. This online presence to your business is a way for customers and businesses to locate you. It is a combination of all online identities such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and any other social media channels your business uses. All these online channels are ways for your business to gain awareness which in the grand scheme of things transitions to followers, fans, and customers. Kate Erickson of Entrepreneur on Fire says that, “There’s a lot that goes into building your online presence, from establishing your goals, to actually creating different profiles and accounts, to building a website (your home base), all the way to figuring out the best ways to engage and interact across these different mediums”.
Smart tips that will build a strong online presence.
Establish Goals:
When initially starting off, the first step in creating your “online presence” is to determine what your company goals are. What do you desire to come from creating this online presence and how do you intend to go about making this a reality. It is important to be consistently checking your goals and comparing them to what you’re doing online to ensure that you’re on the correct path and are being proactive. It is important that you’re using your online business strategically in order to ensure success and planning your goals can help with that.
Website:
The next step is to actually construct your company website. This website should be the main online presence for your company as it will be used as a reference point through the rest of the media channels you will soon create. Kate Erickson of Entrepreneur on Fire says that, “Your website is your hub: a centralized place where people can go to learn more about what your have to offer, contact you, and interact and engage with your content”. Your main website needs to have your mission statement and clearly reveal what products you have to offer. It is highly recommended to consider using Google Keyword tool as a resource in order to have your website ranked higher when searched for.
Optimizing Content:
Through continuous content writing and the usage of Google’s Keyword Tool, your website becomes more accessible to being found. Through simply searching online, to have your company come up is extremely important. This generally will only happen if you continue to write content related to what your company sells and what your customers and clients will be searching for.
When writing content and establishing an online presence, it is imperative to post articles regularly. Ideally daily when your just starting out, but at least weekly for sites that have little or no traction and no budget to advertise.
A huge part of organic online traffic (visitors who reach your page by searching fro a particular topic) comes as a result of content you’ve posted, optimized content and regular content! Keywords and key phrases are those words that target your audience. So when writing you’ll need to keyword your content in order for it to be picked up by Google. But this doesn’t mean you can simply add words that you think will target your audience, there’s a science to it. Check out this pdf tutorial on optimizing content:
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