How to Skyrocket Your Online Business in Six Steps
If you want to be independent and make solid money – you can run an online business. You will be CEO of your own company with your dream team.
Practice shows that whatever online business people run, it can be lucrative.
However, your business niche may be quite competitive. You will face challenges. Likely, you can succeed by implementing an actionable marketing plan.
In this post, you will explore six steps that skyrocket your online business.
The upvote market is a strategy that involves using purchased Reddit accounts to increase engagement and visibility.
Shall we begin?
- Identify places where your potential customers dwell
Don’t hurry up with doing marketing before you figure out where your target audience hangs out. Start with market research first. Your goal is to get as much information about people who can buy from you as you can.
You should save your time and money. For example, you must know what social media channels your future customers use. Otherwise, you may invest in social media tools to handle business accounts and end up with no leads.
So, how to find a business-related target audience?
- Visit forums
You are aware of such Q&A platforms as Reddit and Quora. People hang out in different threads trying to find answers to the questions.
Reddit suggests various subreddits that cover all possible topics you need. Thus, it is a great way to stumble upon people who might be interested in your product or service.
Let’s assume you’ve launched a marketing agency that helps with product promotion across social media channels. One of the directions is TikTok promotion. Type a related request and see what people discuss:
Skim through the subreddits, review the questions, and find hot topics. It will help you understand the problems people have and how your product or service can solve them.
- Analyze social media channels to see what content works the best
Social media channels don’t duplicate the same content. It is caused by technical aspects, channel specifications, etc. That’s why you should analyze each social media channel to see how to move your content right.
For example, you sell music equipment online. What kind of content would work for you on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook?
YouTube allows uploading long-form video content. It can be product reviews, masterclasses from musicians who use your instruments, or “behind the scenes” of making the products.
Instagram allows you to do the same but in a short time span.
Facebook is a platform that can introduce content from other socials in one place.
- Run keyword research
The online business aims to acquire customers on the web. Therefore, your potential customers will search for your product using search engines.
Your goal is to help them find it easily.
How to do this?
SEO is one of the most actionable marketing channels in this term. It doesn’t require investing tons of money. But it takes lots of time to get positive results. Especially, if your niche is a competitive one. like the dental insurance one. In this case, you might want to use location terms like “dental insurance in Texas” or “dental insurance in California” to increase traffic coming from the state you’re based in.
The first stage of any SEO strategy is keyword research. Explore keywords that will help you rank in the SERP well. For this, you can use one of the SEO tools available in the market.
SEO experts can provide invaluable insights and sound strategies that can help give your website an edge. If you need help with keywords and SEO strategies, Austin experts in search engine optimization can work with you every step of the way to ensure that your website reaches its fullest potential.
In this case, this is Keywords Explorer from Ahrefs.
Analyze a few business-related keywords with the tool. Pay attention to such SEO metrics as Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume.
KD shows how it is hard to rank for a specific keyword. SV estimates how many people search this keyword monthly.
Also, this tool suggests keyword ideas that you may use in your SEO game.
- Work on creating a user experience
Whatever online business you run – your website must work flawlessly. It means that people shouldn’t experience any difficulties in site navigation. Besides, the site speed must be fast.
To sum up, your customers should have an outstanding user experience. How to make things work?
- Site speed
The ideal time load of the pages on your site is 2-3 seconds. Otherwise, people will leave your site without any doubts. The best way to control the site speed is by using the free tool PageSpeed Insights.
- Site structure
Website structure is important both for users and web crawlers. Make sure it takes a few clicks to get every page on the site. The structure should be simple. Plus, use internal linking to help crawlers jump from one page to another.
- Choose up to three main marketing channels
Marketing channels diversify. You might want to embrace all of them. Your thought might be – the more channels you use, the better for your online business.
Nope!
Stay focused on two or three marketing channels instead. The other question is what channels to choose.
For quick results, paid advertising works the best. However, ads give the results while you’re paying. What’s more important, your purpose is to take care of driving passive traffic. It is possible by using SEO.
Of course, don’t shy away from mixing the strategies. Besides, you can add more channels to your overall marketing strategy.
To make things work ideally – hire and manage remote employees. It will allow you to delegate the duties and control the entire marketing process.
- Produce informative content
Doesn’t matter what marketing channel lineup you use. If you don’t create quality content, all your work will be in vain. Content is king.
The quality of content depends on:
- Information
- Engagement
- Relevance
- Uniqueness
In a nutshell, your audience should absorb content as the source of unique and valuable information for your business that is interesting to consume.
Plus, the quality of content improves with your personal experience. Hence, explore your niche deeply and share insights with the audience.
- Build partnerships
Assume that you have crafted a solid website, explored the places where your customers hang out, and chosen marketing channels. Now, you need to build partnerships and move your online business forward.
Whatever partnership you run – it brings value. It helps evaluate a business idea to the next level. Secondly, potential partners help spread the word about your brand.
The question is how to find valuable partners.
Start with the personal toolkit you use in your working routine. It can be SEO tools, email marketing services, etc. Reach out to these brands via email and offer to build a business partnership.
Remember that any partnership should be on a win-win basis. In other words, you won’t be able to find a partner who would help promote your business for free.
It doesn’t mean that you will have to pay money for this. There are other ways how you can return the favor from your end.
For example, you have a YouTube channel with lots of subscribers and video views. You can promote your partner’s brand in your videos + share their direct links with socials in the video description section.
Also, you can deal with stakeholders who may invest in your business. However, they will be able to influence your final decisions. Moreover, you may need to engage stakeholders in some way. It leads to more resultative cooperation.
- Automate the process
Being the CEO of your company, you will need to create a to-do list of tasks. Some of the tasks you can complete personally, the others – delegate to the employees.
Where to start?
Brainstorm what tasks you need to do. For example:
- SEO activities – keyword research, competitor analysis, link building
- Content writing – research topics, creating outlines, editing, publishing
- Social media activities – share updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter
- Send/pay invoices
- Find new partners
- Affiliate marketing – talk to your affiliate partners
- etc.
As you can see, some of the tasks require specific skills. For instance, your SEO specialist should take care of SEO duties. Your financial specialist should handle all “invoice” stuff.
Don’t try to embrace each and every duty in the company. Let professionals do their part of the work and help grow your online business.
To Conclude
Running an online business is a hard ongoing process. You won’t succeed right off the bat. You will fail in some way. However, don’t take your failure as a mistake. Any failure is an experience that helps you become a better professional.
Follow these three simple pieces of advice:
- Start small
- Don’t hurry up
- Be patient
Online business loves people who keep trying till the end.
