You have a business and you know you need to be on the internet but its all a bit daunting. It does not have to be. Growing your business on the internet follows similar principles to building a real business. Let me show you how:
Step 1 Get a lay of the land – investigate the neighborhood
In other words, do some competitor research (on the internet of course !)
- How many competitors are there?
- What are their customer niches / who are they appealing to?
- What is their unique selling proposition?
- What does their website look like?
- What do you like / don’t like about it?
- How are they enticing customers to contact them?
– Contact me page
– Newsletter subscription
– Free something – free consultation
– Special offer
– Gift
– Other . . . - Do they have a special offer, newsletter, blog, download, other resources?
- Are they participating in social media and if so which ones and how many followers do they have ?
- How many inbound links do they have?
- Who links to them?
Step 2 Who do you want to do business with?
- Who is your idea client?
- What is it about your business that would appeal to them?
- What is different about you do you offer?
- What do you think your customers would want / value that you could provide for free?
Step 3 Time to design your shop front
You have 7 seconds to capture someones attention on your website before they switch off so here are a couple of tips:
- Have clean headlines
- Not too much continuous blocks of text
- Include pictures & video
- Have a way clear call to action on the page above the fold
(meaning in the top left or right quarter of the page.)
Step 4 Don’t Forget The Back Of House
In website term the back of house or basics of your website include
- Clear site navigation
- Heading that contain the keywords
- Page title meta tags
- Strong description meta tags
(this is the text that will appear in the search engine results). - Include alternative keyword rich Image text tags
- If you have an actual online shop, make sure each product contains keywords
- Install google analytics code on each page so you can see how you are going and change what you are doing accordingly.
Step 5 Put Up Your Open For Business Sign
- Submit site and site map to google and yahoo otherwise no one will find you
- If you have a physical location go onto google maps
- Sign up for google business listing
- Submit your details to relevant directories
- Start getting incoming links from relevant high ranking site
Step 6 Find customers by leveraging your existing network and building relationships with potential customers
- Write a newsletter and get people to subscribe to it
- Give away something for free in exchange for an e-mail address
(eg information, cheat sheet, tips, articles etc) - Start blogging
- Post articles of article directories
- Create a facebook fan page, import all your contacts and have them become fans. Let everyone know you are on facebook
- Create a twitter account and link it to facebook
- Find and sign up to relevant social media groups and participate in discussions
- Advertise your services with google adwords or banner ads
So you see the internet is just another way of people finding you and social media is like an extension of word of mouth.
If you don’t have time to do this yourself, please contact me and I’ll do it for you.
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