How To Grow A Small Or Mid Sized Business Online

How do I make my business grow online? If this was an easy answer I probably wouldn’t even be writing this but the truth is that it really takes a variety of search marketing efforts all working at the same time to truly grow a business online. If you are still hung up on just ranking number 1 for every keyword in your industry it takes a bit more than that to really build a web brand. Although rankings are still very important they should never be relied on for the growth of your business for the long term. I have come up with a handful of ways that should be conducted in some sort of order when trying to market yourself online.

1. Attractive Website: Design is a very subjective thing so don’t worry about pleasing everyone because chances are you will never be able to make everyone happy with your website. What is important is that you have a cleanly laid out website with all conversion metrics in place for your visitors to utilize. If you need website leads have a lead form on every page, if you want your phone to ring make sure to have a phone number visible on each page. Have a simple and consistent layout to make sure that your website is not over cluttered and easy to navigate through.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You are going to want some inbound traffic at some point because constantly looking for business can get frustrating. Research all the keywords and phrases that are relevant to your industry and pick 5-6 different keywords for each page of your site that are relevant to the content on that specific page. Write custom crafted meta tags and descriptions along with optimizing website content and let the changes sit in the search engines until everything re-indexes. Sometimes it could take 7-10 days for all the optimization changes on your website to reflect in the search engines.

3. Twitter: Get a Twitter account fired up for your business and fill in the profile completely. You can even utilize some of those keywords in the SEO process right into the description of your business for your Twitter account. Start by following people who are following your competitors every few days. Over time some of them will start following you back allowing you to build up your account nicely in the search engines. Post things like tips for your industry or links to blog posts to get people’s attention but make sure you show some sort of personality in your updates. If the voice of your business is going to sound as dry as beach sand you are never going to attract any attention.

4. Facebook Fan Page: Now I don’t care if you like or dislike Facebook but the reality is that as a business you absolutely have to have a Facebook fan page for your business. There are studies that have shown customers will not make purchases from businesses that don’t have a Facebook fan page for their business. Give your audience a place to meet and congregate. Just look at it as another link for your business floating around in the web space.

5. Be an Expert: It doesn’t matter whether you just stepping into your field or if you have been there for 15 years position yourself as an expert in your field and start writing articles and blog posts surrounding a variety of topics. Push those articles and blog posts through all your social networks in order for others to really start bumping into them. Don’t boast how great you are at what you do but rather speak about every square inch of your industry as if you have been doing it your whole life. Over time your audience will notice.

6. Launch A Blog: This should really be incorporated with step 1, launch it when you are launching your website and you will be very happy you did down the road. Launching and actually writing in a blog will give you leverage to push your business out in the web space with much greater ease than if you didn’t. Each blog post acts as new page of content being added to your website that you can use to push through all the social networks and attract attention.

7. Start A Newsletter: Once you start coming up with ways to generate emails for your newsletter you might want to start a scheduled newsletter for your business. If you have already launched your blog a newsletter will be a perfect combination. You can recycle your blog posts and use them for the newsletter which will generate a steady stream of traffic to your website over time. It is all about touch points and this will create an amazing touch point for your business.

8. Launch A Video: There are plenty of websites and services that can help you launch a small online video. If done right your video could also act as a viral marketing campaign which could really help you grow your brand over time. Once you have a video you can submit your video to YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites to really help you grow your reach in front of your audience.

This is not the only way to grow a business online but it is one way that should allow most small to mid-sized businesses that haven’t approached the online space to take advantage of what the web has to offer. Over time you will be able to add things like pay per click and affiliate to really get things going, at the very least just do something online to create some awareness surrounding your business so you can start pulling in some new online traffic.

About the Author:

Maciej (ma-chi) Fita is the owner of a Boston based search engine marketing company that specializes in helping small and mid sized businesses grow their brand online. For more information on how to build your brand online please visit http://www.seonoobie.com .