Starting any business is a challenge and the first few years are the most critical.
No matter what type of online business you’re starting, creating a growth plan is essential to its success.
In this post, I’ll dive into several growth hacks on how to grow your online business so as to separate yourself from the competition and build a business fortified to last.
How to Grow Your Online Business.
1: Take Advantage of Digital Advertising to Boost Traffic
Whether you’re selling candles from home, using a 3D printer to make money, or growing your blog, digital advertising can be jet fuel for your online business.
Between social media, search engines, and other display advertising options, it’s easy to become overwhelmed when exploring digital advertising.
Below, I’ll outline some of the best options for your business.
Social Media Advertising
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and many other social media channels all offer paid advertising as a way for your business to reach millions of people worldwide.
These channels can be a great way to promote your business to a massive audience with relative ease. And whereas traditional media methods would require a large monetary investment, most social media platforms allow you to get started for less than $10.
When setting up your campaigns, you can choose to pay per impression or click, whichever suits your marketing goals.
Search Engine Advertising
Unlike social media advertising, search engine advertising is slightly more limited between 3 main competitors Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Search engine marketing can be beneficial for those selling services and want to bolster their results to the top of search engines like Google.
Whenever your ad is clicked, you will be charged based on auctions running in the background. You can set limits on your bids to ensure you do not overspend on your campaign.
While Google Adwords is the main giant in search engine marketing, the other search engines do have their own ad platforms such as Bing Ads
Display Advertising
Display advertising is a broad type of advertising in which you create advertisements to display across the web.
You can choose to publish your ads through select publishers like Google Ads or you can work directly with website owners to publish ads on their real estate.
The cost depends on which methods you choose. With Google Ads, you can input limits for your ads whereas working with website owners you might pay a monthly fee to promote your business.
With any type of display advertising, it’s critical to ensure that you have proper tracking set up so that you can analyze the results of your campaign and make certain your spend has a positive ROI.
2: Utilize Social Media Marketing
As social media continues to grow and evolve, your business needs to have an online profile.
In addition to social media’s primary benefits, there are also some secondary benefits like improvement of SEO rankings and more. By having social media profiles, this is a signal to Google and other search engines that your business is legitimate resulting in better rankings.
Increasing your social media following will help your business gain social proof, exacerbating growth for your company. Furthermore, posting to your social media channels is a great way to promote products, content, or services to an engaged audience.
3: Turn Customers Into Advocates
There’s no question that your current customers and readers can become a tremendous marketing tool for your online business.
As an online entrepreneur, many of us forget to use this hidden tactic to grow our business exponentially.
So what can you do with your current customers or readers?
Build Your Email List
Building an email list has a plethora of benefits from increasing your page views to bolstering online sales.
By building your email list you can have instant access directly to your followers’ inbox, allowing you to promote your business at any time.
By providing high value, you can gain trust with your subscribers making them more likely to complete an action you desire, like purchasing a product or reading your latest blog post.
Ask for Reviews or Promotion
For most people, there’s only one way to get them to do something. By asking.
This is true when it comes to business and asking for testimonials or promotion from your audience. You’ll need to ask them to do so.
Be sure to ask your readers or customers to give testimonials, reviews, or promoting your business through social media. This is another form of social proof for your business which sends strong signals to search engines about your brand.
Become a Better Copywriter
Copywriting is certainly a skill that takes time and experience to perfect. Turning your value props into a clear, concise message can be quite difficult.
By bettering your skills as a copywriter, you can increase conversions for your online business resulting in more revenue.
There are many different tips to become a more profound copywriter but here are a few to help you get started:
- Always include a strong and clear call to action
- Back your words with facts and statistics
- Pose questions for the reader to consider
4: Master Content Marketing
Many new businesses tend to push content marketing to the side because of the amount of time it can take before results are seen.
However, those who get started earlier will see results faster than others.
What is content marketing, exactly?
The Content Marketing Institute defines it as “a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Some of the best examples of content marketing are:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Social media
- Infographics
Blogging is an excellent inbound marketing technique used to gain qualified traffic to your website. By creating unique quality content, your blog can acquire highly targeted traffic that is interested in your offerings.
Conclusion: Starting and Growing Your New Online Business
The first few years of your business are likely to bring many different emotions. You’ll experience both the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. Some entrepreneurs will choose to ditch furthering their education in college and instead work on growing their business.
By utilizing digital advertising, social media, content marketing, and sharpening your copywriting skills, you can grow your business no matter the industry or size.
What challenges do you face with your business? Have more tips on how to grow an online business without tearing yourself apart? Share in the comments.
