Just because you own an online business doesn’t mean that you have a strong online presence. Having a powerful presence online is like building a store on a busy corner where you have prospective customers coming in all day, every day.
Every bit of knowledge pertaining to your business that you can place on different platforms will work to convince potential and current customers to visit your site where they can discover even more about your business and what you offer.
Building a strong, rich presence online is something that is crucial if you want to be noticed by your prospects because it helps them to easily find your business’s products and services, which leads to better conversions and more sales.
With that kind of visibility online, you are no longer guessing as to what works, but you know precisely what you have to do in order to win!
This essentially means your business is taking on less risk, as you will be spending much less than your competitors (and producing results that are better and a lot more effective, in the long run).
That’s as close to a guarantee of success as you’ll get in business. In short, a powerful online presence comes with a host of benefits, and it’s a factor that largely impacts your business’s success.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at why all bloggers and online business owners need to build a robust presence online as well as how to do it quickly and effectively.
So, without further ado, let’s jump right in.
5 Reasons Why You Need To Build A Powerful Presence Online
1. To Establish Your Expertise
A strong presence online isn’t easy to develop, but it’s always worth the effort and time that you put into achieving it.
If you want to be viewed as an authority in your niche, you need to create valuable, helpful content on your blog, social media, and on other platforms.
But keep in mind that this only works if the content that you’re publishing is truly awesome and useful.
If, for instance, the content on your blog is thin, or if your activities on the social networks can only be described as haphazard, then you run the risk of being seen as an unprofessional amateur.
That’s why it’s important to ensure that you’ve got a solid strategy as well as a detailed and effective plan of action to help you lay the right foundation to ensure your business’s success in the future.
2. To Reach a Much Wider Audience
There are about 2.4 billion people on the internet, and that number keeps growing.
In order to get your own little slice of that traffic pie, you need to set up a solid presence online so that you can get your business in front of as many potential customers as possible.
Building your online presence also allows you to easily connect with all your customers on all the various platforms.
3. To Keep Your Brand Top Of Mind
Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) is a very important concept in marketing communications, marketing research, and consumer behavior.
It’s all about how well you rank in your consumers’ minds. This is one of the best benefits of having a well-developed online presence.
Wherever your prospects and customers go, they see and interact with your brand, which is crucial to success in the long run. When you keep your brand top of mind, you’ll be the first one that customers think of whenever they need things from your niche.
Name recall is something that is particularly important for smaller businesses who are facing massive competition online.
Even when you aren’t pushing specific products or services, your online presence will be helpful in reminding your audience about you and your brand.
4. To Engage In Effortless Marketing
By building a powerful presence online, you’ll be able to tell people that your business exists quickly and in a very affordable way.
Marketing your business is something that isn’t limited in any way. You can create a marketing plan and make it so that it costs you as much or as little as you want it to.
Your resources become magnified in a significant way when you have a strong online presence, and sharing your business’s message with your audience becomes as effortless as clicking a button!
You’ll also be able to advertise your business for free across a variety of platforms including social media networks and your blog.
If you do your search engine optimization work really well, Google will do all the hard work for you in getting those customers to your door.
5. To Determine What’s Working In Your Business – And What Isn’t
Solid web visibility will allow you to see the effects of all the marketing activities that you do online so that you can tell which of your efforts are yielding the kind of results you’re after, and which ones aren’t.
The last thing you want is to spend weeks or months and a lot of money doing something that doesn’t work.
By building a strong presence online, you can more easily see the direct effects of everything you do to market your business so that you know which marketing tactics aren’t giving a respectable return on your investment of time and money.
You’re easily able to track your social accounts and site metrics to see numerical proof of those things that work compared to the ones that don’t.
For example, if you’ve written a blog post on a specific topic, and you see a spike in visits to your site, then you’ll know that you’ve definitely hit on awesome content that your readers will probably want more of.
When you’re able to actually see the results from your marketing activities, it makes it easier to make improvements to the various aspects of your business.
OK, so now that you know why a rich online presence is crucial for your business, let’s take a look at how you can get started right now building a solid web presence that will ensure the success of your business now and into the future.
How to Build A Robust Presence Online
Most bloggers and online business owners assume that just having a blog and sharing content on social media is enough to maintain their presence online, but, as you have seen, that is very far from the truth.
However, building a strong online presence can prove to be a time-consuming and frustrating process – especially when you consider the numerous options that are available.
It involves creating many accounts, setting up different profiles, designing your site the right way, figuring out the best mediums for engaging your target audience, and so on.
Fortunately, if you know what you’re doing, and where to start, then building your presence online will be much less frustrating.
Here are the steps you need to take to start building your online presence immediately:
Step 1: Set Your Goals
Write out your plan, keep it plain and simple.
Itemize all your set goals and objectives, and strategize on how you’re going to achieve each of them. So, after setting your goals, you should break them down into much smaller bits.
For instance, if your big picture involves ‘having a fashion blog that is among the top 10 most viewed fashion blogs by December 2020’, you could then write down how you’re going to achieve this, and break it down into simple actionable steps that will guide you to the achievement of your goal such as:
- I’ll blog for an hour every day
- I’ll do one product review a week
- I’ll offer my services to 3 loyal readers each month
- I’ll collaborate with on influencer in my niche
- And so on…
Itemizing your steps will help make that big goal a lot more attainable and it will give you a massive confidence boost as you achieve the mini goals along the way.
This, in turn, will make it a lot more likely that you will not give up on your big goal.
Don’t build your online presence simply for the sake of it, as most people do – take it a notch further and create it for the purpose of helping you achieve your business’s overall goals.
2. Get Your SEO Right
Building a solid presence online starts with your site.
After you’ve written down clear goals, it’s time to make sure that your website, as the hub of all your activities online, is a place where your audience can find out any and all the information they need to know about your business, products, and how they can contact you to do business.
But, even if you put all that information on your website, it won’t help your customers if they can’t find you amid the sea of similar content on the Internet.
And that’s where search engine optimization comes in.
Don’t worry if you’re not an expert on SEO, most people aren’t!
But, there are a lot of excellent SEO techniques that anyone can easily implement on their website that don’t require a degree in the topic.
I recently wrote a post about SEO for beginners that you can check out to help you understand the basics of SEO practice so that you can channel your marketing efforts toward creating content that works.
Being able to apply the right SEO techniques is the easiest and most effective way to take your site to the first page of Google.
3. Create Value – Consistently
The only way you’re going to succeed in creating a strong online presence is through consistently creating value.
Once you’ve decided on the habits that will help you move toward your goals, make sure that you do them each and every day.
Whether it’s blogging, creating videos, or sharing your message on various social platforms, whatever you decide to do – do it consistently.
And rather than just doing it because it’s on your to-do list, make sure that you take the time to ensure that everything you provide is packed full of value.
This will help you to establish your credibility, which will ultimately lead to you becoming an authority in your field.
That’s how you carve a niche for yourself, and it’s very important for growth and visibility online.
4. Focus on Specific Platforms
There are a lot of tactics that you can use to get your brand in front of as many eyeballs as possible online including:
- Various social media networks
- Commenting on other blogs in your niche
- Commenting on related forums
- Answering questions on Quora, Yahoo! Answers, etc.
But trying to be everywhere all the time online is a near impossible feat.
One or two people may have done it in the past, but it’s not something I’d recommend. This strategy of being everywhere online is a surefire way of destroying your business instead of building it up.
How?
Being inactive on any of your social media networks could have a profound negative impact on your business as your followers and fans view inactivity as a sign of inefficiency when it comes to communicating with them.
And since it’s extremely difficult to give an equal amount of attention to each of your accounts, it’s important to choose a few that you can give your full focus to.
The same goes if you’re going to answer questions on Quora, in forums or if you comment on blogs.
If you’re doing that in too many places, then you won’t be able to keep track of the replies to your comments – let alone respond to them. This is something else that can make it seem like you’re an amateur.
So it’s best to only pick a few places that you can monitor consistently.
The Final Word
The most important thing to keep in mind when building your presence online is that it’s a long term play.
Be patient and keep track of everything that you’re doing to take you toward your goals. As long as you’re consistent in your efforts, you will see the incremental results as time goes on.
Feel free to post your comment below. An email address is required but it will not be shared with anyone, put on any list, or used for any kind of marketing, just to alert you if there are any replies. Thanks and happy hunting!
PlanetBizOp.com
->Steven
Updated: Originally published January 15th 2019
