Business Basics 101: How to Establish an Online Presence

Many business owners have trouble figuring out how to use the internet to their advantage. In fact, 6 out of 10 small businesses have yet to establish an online presence and get a website. The good news is that there are plenty of tools and resources to help you learn more about how to find customers and make money without spending too much on marketing costs.

Create Compelling Content

One of the easiest ways to attract attention to your website or social media channels is to create compelling content. It doesn’t matter what tone you take or what you decide to talk about as long as it is interesting and fits your brand. For example, if your company aspires to attract those with creative minds, it may be best to write about art culture or share stories of business owners using unconventional business models.

However, if you aspire to cater to a more technical crowd, you may want to create content that is factual and serious in tone. Content can take the form of infographics, blog posts or full-length articles. Video content can be effective as well depending on the needs and habits of your audience. Creating a YouTube channel can be an easy way to get your content out without paying to do so.

Use Social Media Sites

Making use of sites like YouTube can be effective because they are used by millions of people around the world. YouTube is actually the second-largest search engine in the world behind Google. Facebook and Twitter have user bases in the millions, and they make it easy to target people based on age, gender and location.

Businesses, like ASEA, using Crunchbase and other business social media sites have been able to cut costs and make their companies more appealing. Whether you are starting a new company or are looking to grow your existing company, you too can take advantage of these resources to do so. Other benefits to using social media for marketing as opposed to newspaper or television ads include the ability to track its effectiveness and stop ineffective campaigns immediately.

Learn How to Use Paid Advertising

It may be difficult to rely on organic traffic to your site if you are just starting out. It may also be ineffective if you have a message that must be seen immediately such as details about a one-day sale. Fortunately, you can attract traffic to your site or otherwise get your message out for just pennies a page view or click if you know what you are doing. Paid advertising options including posting pay-per-click ads on search engines or buying sponsored stories or trending topics on social media sites.

Be Patient

You won’t attract large amounts of traffic in a single day or week. A single pay-per-click ad is not going to bring your hundreds of customers in a short period of time either. To see the results that you want, you have to spend months or years creating content and networking with others online.

Remember, it is better to have 100 followers who will share your content or buy your products compared to 10,000 who won’t do anything after seeing your blog post or social media link. In many cases, spam or shallow content will not be indexed on search engines, which means that fewer people may see it.

Starting a website or creating a social media presence for your business may make it easier to gain customers and increase brand awareness. It may also make it less expensive to acquire customers, which means that more of each sale is pure profit for the business.