The online presence of your brand is your digital footprint, as well as your online persona, rolled into one. It includes social media presence, your website, or your blog posts for your followers. If you own a business and are still not online, you are missing out on a lot of potential leads as well as growth.
So, here are a few smart, and simple ways to help you build a purposeful and an unforgettable online presence.
Best Ways to Get Seen Online
Merely having a social media page or a website will not magically attract any visitors. These are just platforms where you can present your brand. But, it is the effort and tactic you apply that makes your brand visible. So, here are 20 best ways to help you actively grow your online presence.
1. Prioritize Your Goals
Set your priorities straight – that is the key to establishing an active online presence. For small businesses, the priority might be to increase brand awareness, whereas, for big companies, it can be about creating more engagement.
Each individual or business has its own goals. So, you must have a sense of direction to achieve the desired results, no matter how easy or difficult the process would seem.
2. Find Your Customers
If you identify who you are appealing to, you better understand the kind of content to work on. This way, you can thoroughly cater to their likes, dislikes, needs, or habits.
3. Pick the Right Platforms
Platform may not only refer to having a website. Online presence can mean, establishing your business on diverse platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, or elsewhere. So, for instance, if you cannot afford to have a website, small budget Instagram stores also do well if your target audience is the millennial shopper.
4. Work on Having a Website – Get the Right Domain Name
If you choose to have a site of your own, start with buying a domain name – it is the gateway to your website. Pick the one that is easy to spell, short, memorable, and has a standard extension.
Please use a no-nonsense name and the one that resonates with your brand’s identity. It will be great if you use word-only domains without any hyphens, symbols, or complex numbers. Do not try to take a name similar to that of an existing famous brand. Purchase the domain at a reasonable price and choose the one that is also SEO-friendly, so it supports your presence even in the future.
5. Purchase Hosting with Excellent Tech Support
For your site to be visible on the internet, you need to host it with a secure, dependable, and scalable hosting provider. And, they usually accommodate you with a dedicated, shared, or VPS server.
Shared server is apt for small to medium businesses, but it leaves the site vulnerable to cyberthreats and speed issues. However, dedicated servers are expensive, but the safest option for big companies to host their website.
The price plan depends on which server you opt as well as features like daily backups, one or two-click security certificates, security maintenance, and more. Also, make sure the provider has excellent tech support so you can reach them in times of need.
6. Implement the Best CMS
CMS or content management systems help you manage your digital content on the website. So, the CMS that has unique features, is under your budget and requires you to invest less time and effort is the right choice.
Popular ones include WordPress, Joomla, Squarespace, Drupal, and Wix. These offer the best security features, friendliness as well as extensibility. Plus, having to work on a CMS automates quite a few processes and saves your time.
7. For e-Commerce, Pick the Right Platform
If you intend to start an ecommerce store, WordPress alone may not suffice the requirement. To increase your online presence, you need to get yourself on the right platform. For e-commerce, WooCommerce, Shopify, Business Squarespace, Wix, or GoDaddy Online Store, are flexible options.
8. Create an Interesting UI
When talking of a website, make sure the UI (user interface) leaves a positive impression on your visitors. It must be user-friendly as well as engaging. Besides, it must have an intuitive navigation system, easy-to-read fonts, obvious call-to-action, standard pages, and optimized graphics. Stay consistent and accomplish what your audience might stop on.
9. Resonate With Brand Identity
It is essential to give a great first impression, so the visitors connect with your brand. Your site or a page just has a few seconds to catch hold of their attention, so make smart efforts. Set the right tone of your content, communicate to your customers through correct imagery, and keep the design consistent.
10. Start Producing Content
Quality, freshness, and quantity are important factors to search engines as well as the visitors. So, if you want to increase your online presence, develop a content strategy. Post blogs, articles, videos, infographics, testimonials, or seasonal and evergreen stuff that your visitors can engage with.
Integrate the content across all social channels to reflect your purpose and voice. Have a plan that addresses what kind of content you want to publish, where you would do that, and what the frequency will be. Sound relevant and keep visitors returning.
Not just the search engines, but visitors too regard updated content as valuable and appropriate.
11. Focus on Visuals
Do this because visual information transmitted to your brain retains for a much longer time than text-only stuff. One of the most helpful strategies is to have a video on your landing page since it helps maximize your conversion rate. It also creates a lasting impact on the audience.
12. Search Engine Optimization
SEO is an extremely important and continuous set of practices that you apply to your site to ensure that search engines index and rank your website for greater visibility. Therefore, work on having an appealing web design, faster page loading, SSL certificates, high-quality backlinks along with thorough keyword analysis and implementation.
What else can help? Garner positive reviews, link your social media channels, make the site mobile-friendly, and use internal linking, so your visitors keep clicking. These will decide if your site shows up on the first two pages of the search engine or gets invisible standing at pages 10, 30, or 50.
13. Leverage Social Proof
Visitors certainly go through and trust the online reviews of a business before making a decision. So, leverage this detail to the best of your advantage. You can publish case studies, positive customer reviews, collaborations with influencers, number of downloads/ sales/ sign-ups, and so much more.
14. Experiment with Ads
Online advertising, especially paid ads, is one of the fastest ways to improve your online presence. With the right campaigns, you also make it a memorable one. So, decide what you want to promote and choose the best-suited platform. Moreover, paid ads cater to targeted traffic and have faster and measurable results.
15. Incorporate Social Media
Choose the network that correctly supports your brand image. There are numerous channels, such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+. So, choose the one that you consider worthy. Also, make sure you are putting up shareable content and also leverage the power of influencers as they expand your reach and considerably maximize the content mileage.
16. Know the Things to Avoid
There is not just one but multiple activities that can give your online presence the needed kick. But do you know what you must avoid doing so your brand does not fail? Do not give your audience confusing messages – things must make sense to them, not just you.
Make your business stand out in your own way and do not copy the competitors. Your creativity can go wild – but do not lose consistency.
17. Engage With Your Audience
If you really want to grow your online presence, actively participate in engaging with your audience. Show them that they are on top of your mind. Appreciate positive interaction and respectfully address their concerns.
18. Track Performance
Tracking your performance helps you analyze traffic and review your site overall. You can take note of your daily, weekly, or monthly visitors and keep track of the bounce rate. Moreover, you can also crawl for errors, check broken links, backlinks, page load time, and know which keywords are performing well. This way, you get to know your mistakes and the plus points.
19. Have a Maintenance Plan
Merely having a site and uploading content is not the idea of sustaining your online presence. You have to have a maintenance plan, so your website does not grow stale, ranks well and also does not get hacked.
So, back up your data in multiple ways, learn more about your audience, and use performance data to fix errors. Update your software, check for malware, research about the trending ways to business your ideas, and also keep track of what your competitors are doing.
20. Be Consistent
Consistency is the secret sauce for increasing your online efficiency. Regardless of the niche or industry, understand that brand building takes time. Make sure you give your 100% in maintaining the quality and just keep going at your efforts!
Maximize Your Online Presence
To grow your brand online, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions. If you are just getting started, having a complex site might not be the idea. There are easier options as well, like a portfolio page. But, do not restrict yourself if you genuinely want to succeed digitally.
You could have your own ways to go at it – which is perfectly fine. But, you can also try the ideas mentioned above to attract more visitors, build your reputation, achieve your goals, and massively succeed in your business.