Actions You Can Take to Grow Your Business Online

You believe you’ve got an excellent business idea, and you have taken the basic steps to get it out to potential customers online. You have a killer website that makes a powerful first impression on visitors, and perhaps you’ve done some advertising to get it in front of people. Despite all of this, customers are not exactly beating a path to your online door. If this situation has you feeling down, there are actions you can take that will boost your rate of growth.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Gets Your Website in Front of More Prospects Quickly!

There are online advertising platforms that enable you to place a bid on search terms that are related to what you are selling. If you sell leather wallets, then you can set a maximum price that you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your listing under leather wallets. The more you are willing to pay the higher up on the search engine pages your specific listing will typically be displayed. There are, however, other factors that affect this such as the rate at which a given ad is clicked by prospects.

Once upon a time, if you wanted to advertise online in this manner, you had to either go with Google Adwords or what was called Overture.com. The latter was the pay-per-click platform used to place ads on Yahoo!, but they are now called Bing Ads, and their ads are shown on Yahoo! and Bing.

Today, there are far more options. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have paid advertising programs. These are not all exclusively targeted based on a set amount paid per click on a keyword or phrase. On Twitter, for example, you can set your ad to be targeted by keywords in peoples’ tweets, but you can also refine it based on the recipient’s interests, geographic location, gender and other factors.

One big benefit of this search engine marketing (SEM), as it is known, is that it enables you to take action that increases traffic to your website almost immediately. Once you set up your keywords and ads and the targeting for who will see your ads, there may be a short editorial approval time lag on some of these sites, and then your ads will go live. This gives the satisfaction of seeing increased traffic to your website the same week that you set up your advertising account. There is no better boost to morale than seeing a nearly immediate response to your actions, and this is what search engine marketing brings.

Work on SEO Marketing for Your Website

If you are sitting around feeling unmotivated, there are things you can do to change that. Ideally, you want so many customers flooding you with orders that you don’t have time to be depressed or bored.

Search engine optimization may not produce the immediate results that search engine marketing can, but it is widely regarded as the highest return on investment method for getting your website out in front of qualified traffic. The established pay-per-click marketing platforms are generally flooded with businesses already using their services, and many keywords are bid up higher than many smaller businesses can compete with. Search engine optimization, however, is limited mainly by the time you are willing to put into helping the search engines see why they should display your website when potential customers are searching for what you have to offer.

There are definite action steps any entrepreneur can take to make their website more optimized for the major search engines. You need to check those technical aspects of your website to make sure there is nothing you will be penalized for in your search ranking. This includes making sure your webpages load quickly, that all links work properly and that your website’s architecture and navigation lend itself to being easily crawled by a search engine. Taking the step of ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is important as well because Google started penalizing sites that were not optimized for mobile devices as of April of 2015.

Perhaps the most important single thing when it comes to search engine ranking is having high-quality content that is relevant to what your business sells. If you like writing on the topic of your business and are fairly good at it, writing some quality content to put on relevant pages of your site is something you can do to help your search rankings.

The good news on this front is that if you don’t feel like writing all the content for your website, there are content writing services online that will do this for you. You need content, and there are other people who want to make extra money online writing that content. Websites such as Textbroker.com bring them together in a place where clients describe what kind of article they are looking for, and writers do the work.

Constantly Advance Your Online Outreach Knowledge

When sales are in a slump or you feel unmotivated because things are not going as well as you originally anticipated, then reading articles such as this are a good start to turning around the situation. Acquiring knowledge on how to expand your business is an action step that anyone can take. There is so much freely available on the internet that doing this costs nothing.

Perhaps you are in a situation where your business has good sales, but you are feeling overwhelmed because you are trying to take on too much yourself. In this situation, it can pay to research ways to contract out some of what you need done.

In addition to previously mentioned content writing services, there are also more companies than you can imagine that help entrepreneurs with website redesigns, search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Search engine algorithms, in particular, are constantly being updated, and a professional SEO marketing company may be better able to stay up on all these changes while you focus on your business. When feeling overwhelmed, the wisest action step to take is to find someone else to carry part of the workload.

Constantly continuing your education on how to build your start-up is both free and the most powerful thing you can do for your current and future success. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, said, “change is the only constant in life.” Taking the initiative to actively stay on top of these changes can give you the confidence to see your business through temporary slumps.

Source: Actions You Can Take to Grow Your Business Online