The internet is a whole world itself and everyone strives to make themselves better over the internet. Many people want popularity, fame, views, and attraction from the internet but are often unable to do so. Even businesses of all sizes are not able to draw a steady stream of customers because of weak online presence. If you want to promote your brand, you should generate referrals and new customers by utilizing all the resources and optimizing your online presence. With the latest tools at hand, making your online presence better is no longer an issue.
In this article, we will walk you through the process and steps that you follow in order to achieve a strong online presence. Here are some important things that you need to be familiar with first to get started:
Accessibility
The easily the user can access your business, the better it is for your online presence. For example, if you have a mobile app, a website, and pages on different social media platforms and all of them are active, users would remain engaged with your business – adding to your online popularity.
Search Engine Presence
Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. are just some tools to help you search for various things on the internet. With time, they have evolved a lot! Now by typing only a few keywords, you can conveniently search for the right thing. There are two major things that you need to consider while thinking about search engine presence: SEO and AdWords (discussed in detail below)
Social Media Presence
Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram can be used to promote your business among a wide-spread audience, even all across the globe.
Visitor Engagement
After all, your main goal would be engaging your visitors and converting them to leads/prospects. You can engage them with strong content and blogging. Content can include articles, images, videos, etc. For IG engagement, you can avoid sites like MassPlanner and get the alternatives instead.
User Experience
Create an excellent user experience to make a solid online reputation. If the user has a great mental model about your brand or business, it will ultimately make your online presence better. Make use of the Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) process – it will help you increase the percentage of website visitors who are capable of taking a desired action.
It provides complete details about how users are moving through your site, what actions they are taking, and what is resisting them from achieving your goals.
Promotion
Customers love promotions! Once you are all set with any platform where you can engage with your customers, you can do promotions with the help of E-mail Marketing and Advertising (Google ads, PPC).
Major Platforms
Here is a list of top 2 platforms/mediums on which you can build a strong online presence:
1. Social Media
Not everyone needs a website to promote their business. Social media is a great way to improve your online presence, and generating additional revenue and customer loyalty are two of the amazing perks of it. Social media plays an important role in almost everyone’s everyday lives, and utilizing this platform as a channel to bring in more people to your business is the best thing you can do right now.
For instance, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the top 3 places to post news, tips, photos, videos, and have one-on-one conversations with your customers. In addition to these platforms, you can consider LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and Tumblr too. Instagram, a photo-sharing network with over 130-150 million users worldwide, will work great for your business that sells products like jewelry, garments, housewares, or accessories etc. LinkedIn is a professional place to interact with businesses and people worldwide having similar interests and mutual benefits.
Decide what social media platforms you want to utilize and work on them with great content at hand. If done right, you will certainly see high engagement rate and people will be intrigued by what you are offering.
Pros:
- Free
- Convenient and reliable
- Requires low maintenance
- Global Reach
Cons:
- Less control over design if compared to a website
- Fewer changes in algorithm
2. Website
A website is just like a front door to your business or online store, make sure it is capable of attracting a lot of customers. Regardless of your business size and scale, you should definitely invest in a good website. It can be extremely basic as long as it contains fundamental information about your business. For instance, if you own a restaurant, you should have information like the current menu, opening hours, location, and contact details on your website. Lack of information might even lose you a potential customer over something that is so basic and costs a little.
Also, make sure your website is responsive and mobile-friendly because more searches are being done from smartphones rather than PCs or laptops. Having important information packed nicely in a visually-appealing, mobile-friendly website means more people will love to interact with the website, giving your business more exposure.
Here are some popular tools that you can use to build a top-notch mobile-friendly website without any extensive technical knowledge:
- WordPress
- Wix
- Weebly
Read how can I build a high-quality website
Here is what you can do to enhance your online presence
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is a way to gain more traffic on your website organically without investing any money. Basically, there is no financial cost here unless you hire an SEO expert to do the job for you. The only thing you need to do is invest your time and implement the techniques required. Link architecture, link building, keywords densities, TrustRank, are just some parts of SEO.
There are 4 key areas of SEO that if dealt right can open doors of success for your online business and enhance your online presence:
- Technical SEO
How well your written content can be crawled and indexed by the search engines
- Content
How relevant and accurate your content is according to the prospect’s query
- On-site SEO
Optimizing your content (with respect to the keywords) and HTML
- Off-site SEO
Building trust and authority so Google and other search engines can stack the deck in your favor.
Here are some steps to make SEO work like a charm for you
Targeting the Right Audience
You might not be able to target a number of popular keywords but one thing that you can certainly do is come up on the first page of Google search when people look for you. Maybe someone is looking to connect with you just because they heard about you from a friend or met you at a conference.
Now, there is a difference between people searching for you and you searching for the right audience. If you target the audience that is looking for you, chances are you will come up on the first page. For instance, if you are a New York-based realtor, rather than targeting the keyword “New York real estate” you can go for “John Doe Realty, New York”. This unique keyword will have low or no competition, enabling you to easily get first-page ranking.
Keyword Research
SEO experts use a variety of tools to find out and analyze the perfect keywords but there is an easy method to do this. Just think of a term that people might type into Google search to look for you, now go ahead and type it into Google and check what comes up.
High competition keywords like “New York real estate” are hard to target and compete for. You can target longtail keywords that are unique and highly specific to you so no one other than you could come up when someone searches for it. Such keywords are ripe for picking, all you need to do is rank your content with them by making a few quick tweaks. Here are some tools to do keyword research:
Optimizing Your Title Tags
This is one of the most important factors of SEO. Titles are at the very top of your website, you can optimize them to make your website’s online presence stronger. For example, on your homepage, you can use a title like “John Doe Realty: Your Reliable Realtor in New York” and use the same keyword in your bio too. These keywords might not get massive traffic to your site but there is a likelihood that people searching for this will check your website for sure.
Optimizing HTML URLs and Image Names
Optimizing your HTML URLs work great in ranking your website for certain keywords. Search engines like Google don’t just crawl through the content but also look at your URLs, tags, and file names etc. For instance, you can rename your HTML page to “john-doe-realestate.html” and have a photo renamed to “john-doe.jpeg”.
Optimizing Content
Once you have researched the right keywords according to your website, it is time to optimize your content for those keywords. If your website has a blog, it would work great in making your website rank good because you can write SEO optimized articles that are loved by search engines.
Using keywords throughout your content doesn’t mean going crazy with them. You might be able to get Google’s attention but your visitors certainly won’t appreciate your content. Good locations to use keywords in the content are:
- Headlines
- Sub-headers
- Body
- Conclusion
Also, don’t forget to use longtail keywords (keywords that are extremely specific to whatever you are offering) in your content as well.
2. Facebook Advertising
Facebook ads can be started for as low as $5. It is one of the best ways to target a highly specific audience according to your business. For example, as a realtor, you can target people who are looking for buying/selling property or investors based on their location, age, and interests. Basically, you have complete control over the demographics you select for your Facebook ad.
Use advertisements to tell people how you can help them and solve their problems. We recommend you to start with a small budget and increase it gradually after analyzing the stats of your ads. This is a great method to reach to a wide audience and enhance online presence. You can even sell your products directly on Facebook without having an online store. Here are 8 easy steps to get you started with Facebook Ads:
- Create a realistic budget
- Create a fan page
- Create your first campaign
- Create your first ad set
- Create your first ad
- Create one or two more ads to do split testing
- Wait for 1 day
- Delete the ad that doesn’t work
Once you go through this process, you will have a much clearer idea of how Facebook ads work. You can then either expand your audience and budget or continue boosting previous ads with current settings.
3. Google Ads
Advertising is a great thing especially when you are just going to enter into the online world. It takes time to see positive results through organic SEO – Google advises to wait for at least 3 to 4 months. So, another excellent and fast way to head start your online business and generate traffic to your website is Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords. It is an advertising system by Google on which advertisers bid on certain keywords relevant to their product.
Those keywords appear in clickable ads that pop up on Google search engine when someone searches for a relevant query. When people are looking for something like products, services, or information, chances are they are already in the buying stage and Google Ads can help in redirecting them to your website, increasing quality leads. Here are 10 easy steps to help you get started with Google Ads:
- Create an AdWords Account
- Choose your campaign type, name, and establish goals
- Determine demographics
- Conduct keyword research
- Set your bid strategy and budget
- Add ad extensions
- Write your first killer ad with selected keywords
- Design your landing pages
- Bid for keywords; go for cheaper keywords if your budget is low otherwise you can select high priced keywords as well
- Review your ad, confirm your billing information and publish it
4. Start Producing Content
Content like blogs, vlogs and images is one of the best ways to start communicating with your target audience through a reliable channel. High-quality content helps you gain potential customers, reach them, and establish your brand. All this combined can result in a strong online presence.
Writing blogs is extremely easy and absolutely free! However, you can hire a professional content writer to produce high-quality, SEO optimized content that can help in ranking your website on Google’s top pages. Regardless of what industry you are in, a blog can help you add more value to your visitors.
If you aren’t yet producing content, consider starting it now.
5. Influencer Marketing
In this day and age, this is the best tactic used by many brands and businesses to make their online presence better and reach a wide audience. It can be free if you approach the right people and offer any mutual benefits. You can also approach famous celebrities having millions of followers on their social media pages – it will cost you somewhere from $100 to $15000+ to promote your brand or product.
Influencer marketing has become more powerful online, with social media accounts having tons of fans and followers. It might be an expensive way if you would like the influencer to sponsor your brand or business but if done right, it can drive massive traffic to your website or social media page.
6. Send out a Press Release
All the above-mentioned ways are more than enough to spread the word about your business, but if you still want more, you can engage an agency to write and publish a good Press Release, telling the world about you. PR would cost you about $100 or more, depending on the agency you connect with.
Bonus Tips to Get Online Popularity
- Keep Yourself Updated
If you are working on a blog, add more content to it on weekly basis. If you are working on a YouTube channel, add videos frequently. The main goal is to stay in touch with your audience. Let’s say you have a photography website, you can upload pictures on a regular basis so your audience can stay tuned with all the latest updates. Regularly updated content can always make your online presence better.
- Create Better Attraction
Some bloggers do not pay attention to how their content looks like. The appearance certainly matters because if the reader sees long and boring paragraphs, he might leave and visit another website. For bloggers, we suggest that you write a nice conclusion at the end with a clear message. Also, you can use attractive images that could help in making your blog visually appealing.
Creating more attraction will engage more audience and can lead to a better response from traffic and make your online presence better as well. We also recommend that you regularly have a Q&A session, ask for feedback, conduct contests, etc. – it would help improve your content and let your visitors know that you really care.
- Highlight Current Affairs
We are not just talking about politics or news here but every big thing happening around you is a part of current affairs. Try generating content, images, and videos etc. related to the current affairs like scandals, breaking news, or any other relevant material. It will help you keep closely bonded with your followers.
Conclusion
Let’s face it, you can’t make your online presence better in some days and there is no one-size-fits-all solution available out there when it comes to online presence. It requires consistent hard work until you achieve your goals. You don’t need a complex and expensive website to get started, you can start your online journey with a social media fan page and gradually move forward as you succeed. All the tools, steps, and ways we have mentioned in the article above are great in making you popular online. Just stay consistent, don’t let things go down, and you will definitely rise in the online world.