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Business Development Online: Tips and Ideas For Success

The beauty of the internet is that it allows smaller businesses to compete in ways that are not usually possible offline. The bad side of the internet is that too few people have a real plan for how to develop a business online, and as such, the failure rate is exceedingly high.
To succeed on the internet, and understanding of the various promotional channels, as well as potential pitfalls, is necessary. These include:

  • Search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword research
  • Social Outreach
  • Webmaster to webmaster relationship building
  • Crafting strategies to promote and sell offers without having to push an offer too hard

It Starts With Keyword Research

Keyword research is important for two reasons. The first is that proper keyword research is essential to a successful SEO strategy. It takes time to learn, but returns can be very high.
The second has to do with finding the “pulse of a market”. Knowing how the potential customers within a market communicate with each other helps in developing sales letters, outreach efforts and more. Keyword research goes beyond advertising and is essential to successful relationship building with customers and other webmasters.

SEO

SEO can be a great way to accelerate the growth of an online business. Targeting low competition keywords relevant to a product or service is important to the success of many businesses. Being ranked highly in search engines, namely Google, comes with a built in amount of trust and credibility.

With that said, there is a never ending struggle to keep up with algorithm adjustments. Recent updates, like the Penguin Update, penalizing manipulative off-site practices, or penalizing low quality on-page attributes, like the Panda Update, make SEO a strategy filled with uncertainty. Each update places a site’s rankings at risk.

At best, SEO should be a small portion of a business’ traffic strategy.

Social Outreach

With the development of social networks like LinkedIn, Google Plus, Facebook and Twitter, the opportunity to connect with customers and even competitors in a market is greater than ever.
Social outreach allows companies to get their brand out to the masses, while also maintaining their reputation by tracking positive and negative social mentions.

The key to successful social outreach is finding the network with the highest activity in a given market. The tech industries do well on Twitter and Google Plus. White collar operations tend to thrive on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Relationship Building

Getting mentions from other webmasters in the form of a link is great for brand exposure and SEO. To make the most of this, businesses should be looking to connect through social media, blog commenting and email.

Social media is often preferred, since direct contact is much easier to achieve without interference from assistance and other “gatekeepers” that may be in charge of monitoring blog comments and email communications.

Some tactics that work are:

  • Sharing important work on social networks to help others gain exposure
  • Leaving regular, insightful blog comments
  • Skipping both of these and sending direct emails in thanks for an article, a product or other event

Each of these can help one business gain the attention of another, leading to better relationships and more future exposure for both businesses.

Cold Leads and Sales Techniques

Smaller businesses may only convert their visitors at a rate of approximately 2%, while even the biggest operations seem to cap out at 15%.

Since almost every lead goes cold, having an email marketing campaign focused on value is vital. This allows many businesses to sell less often, but at a higher rate of conversion. Focusing on providing valuable information can help to increase sales with little effort. this is commonly called “content marketing”. Consistently producing valuable content for free can often lead to more sales and customer loyalty.

Wrap Up

It is important to note that there is much more to building an online business than these points. Product development, funding, acquisitions and more are all part of any business experience, online or offline. Understanding these basic points will develop a solid foundation to weather the ups and downs in almost any market.

@JulianaPayson is editor at InMotion Hosting’s WebHosting news blog. They aren’t just a web hosting company, they take a deep interest in making sure website owners that buy webhosting with us learn how to make their online businesses survive. If you have any tips, suggestions to share with their 100k+ audience please write to Juliana directly by commenting on the blog.

SEO – The Most Cost Effective Way to Generate New Business

If you are a business owner and you have a website, proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is crucial to your online success. Companies of all sizes are taking a huge portion of their marketing budget for SEO purposes, since this is one of the best and most guaranteed methods to bring targeted traffic and potential customers to your website.

Improve Your SEO Rankings

With SEO implemented into your marketing efforts, you will see a steady flow of targeted traffic coming to your website, which is exactly what any business owner wants. The higher your website places amongst Search Engine Results Pages (SERP), the higher your chances of being found in search queries. This is one of the most important aspects that people also often overlook; there are literally billions of searches done every day on Google alone, so you need to ensure that your website shows up for keywords that accurately represents your business and services.

Build Your Company Brand

Having a website is not going to do the trick on its own; you need to build brand awareness and send targeted traffic your way. This can only be done if you are implementing proper SEO techniques. With a company that is gaining popularity, your customers will also see that you are a reputable business to deal with and that you are here to stay. This will also help to build your brand awareness and land you potential clients as well. A positive company brand will go a long way and SEO will help to increase your position within search engine results, helping you to rise above your competition.

Increase Your Revenue

You want to increase your bottom line, and SEO is the perfect way to do this, since this will help your site to rank better and be visible to potential customers. In order for customers to sign up or purchase products and services you need to build a targeted and constant stream of traffic to your website. Proper SEO techniques will enable your website to be visible online and be found in major search engines. An increase in search engine rankings will also provide an increase in targeted traffic to your site, and this in turn will lead to an increase in sales.

Generate Traffic

With proper SEO techniques, you will be able to generate traffic to your website, and this will also mean potential leads. You can then work to convert those leads into returning customers and thereby increasing your revenue. Always ensure that your website provide all the information that potential customers will need so that you can capture the lead and hopefully convert it into a sale.  People will visit a site and look for useful information, if they can’t find it; chances are that they will go to another site. This is not what you want, so always ensure that your website is optimized to generate as much traffic for you as possible.