Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business – Part 2. Even though you will have to overcome some hurdles, there is a strategy for success.
Step 4: Pull and Push Traffic to Your Site
Regardless of what you are doing to earn money, you’ll want to master traffic generation to your site and offers. There are a variety of channels you can use to accomplish this goal, but it needs to be a consistent process that you engage in.
The first is to understand and employ the use of search engine optimization (SEO). This is a technique where you craft content and position your site in a way that adheres to Google guidelines.
There are many different factors associated with SEO, and they are always changing as time goes on, so this is something you have to stay on top of in terms of learning. There are plugins, such as Yoast, that you can use on your WordPress domain to help you optimize each post that you create.
You also have to know how to optimize your content, such as creating helpful, authoritative content that Google feels will best serve their audience in a comprehensive manner.
The use of keywords is also going to be important everywhere within your site, including the title of the post, the alt tags of the images, woven throughout the content itself, and more.
On Page and Off Page SEO
You’ll need to be adept at handling both on page and off page SEO. For example, ensuring the navigation of your site works properly. Also that you have an interlinking strategy set up to help guide your audience. And ensure that your backlinks are in place showing that authority sites are pointing to you as a great resource.
Another thing you want to learn when it comes to traffic generation is how to use social media to your advantage. You may not want to leverage every single social media platform, especially if your target audience is not actively engaged on it.
Pick and choose from the ones that best suit your audience, and develop content that they will find interesting enough to absorb, share, and comment on. You might want to look into YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook to start.
Set up a profile with a good branding and bio system in place that links back to your domain or offers and begin developing content that will help you build a following and get the click throughs that you desire.
If you have the funds as your digital marketing business grows, you can also utilize paid advertising options to your advantage. These can include search engine ads, such as those placed above organic ads on Google, social media ads, solo ads, etc.
Invest Your Money Wisely With Paid Ads
You never want to spend more than you have with paid ads. Be careful with your budget and learn how to target the exact audience that will convert best for your offers. Take time to test with small increments of money, and scale up once you have a high performing ad.
Don’t forget that networking can also work well with traffic generation. This is something where you can potentially gain traffic from guest blog opportunities, participation in giveaway events or webinars, and so on.
Have a list of people who have an audience that mirrors your own, and reach out to them and form relationships that will ensure you get invited to take part in these types of opportunities.
Step 5: Cultivate a Subscriber List That Converts Easily
The next step in your digital marketing journey is to make sure you are list building throughout this process. Regardless of the business model you are in, it’s usually a good idea to have a list of subscribers you can communicate with on demand rather than hoping they find your site at a later date.
When you have a list of subscribers, it allows you to tailor your content to their needs and personalize it so that they feel you are speaking directly to them rather than posting content online for everyone to see.
The first step in this process is to decide which email autoresponder system you want to use. You should be able to find no cost options. Several vendors offer up to 500 subscribers or for a certain period of time. These include providers like AWeber, GetResponse or MailChimp.
Next, you need to create a lead magnet that tempts people into handing over their name and email address in exchange for your free gift. It has to be enticing enough and hit on their pain points.
It can’t be a vague and general offer that they could find information on just anywhere. Try to create a high amount of value in your free gift to ensure people have no hesitation in filling out your opt in form.
Your lead magnet might be a report, a full info product, a checklist or cheat sheet. A drip-fed email course, a software tool or something else your audience would appreciate.
High-converting Landing Page
Design a high-converting landing page (or use a template for it) that has strong copy with a headline, bulletpoints, and a call to action urging them to sign up. Drive traffic there from your social media accounts. Do this through sales of products, and have the form in the sidebar of your blog, too.
Begin emailing your list of subscribers, starting with a warm welcome email that not only delivers the free gift they signed up for, but also sets the tone for what they are going to gain from staying on your list.
Then, from that point on you can send them valuable information via email, whether it’s in the form of individual slants or entire newsletters that have multiple articles within it. You want to make sure you have a mix of value and promotion so that you are profiting from your email marketing efforts as well.
Make sure you have subscriber perks built into your system. You may give them access to gated content on your blog that requires a password. This way subscribers only can access this content. Or you create or find discount deals for them to save money. Thus they know that it’s worth staying on your list.
Step 6: Use Data Analysis to Fuel Strategic Decisions
The next step in your digital marketing journey is going to be to enable a data analysis system. This can be used across different platforms and it will fuel your decision making process so that you take a thoughtful approach to the next direction.
Data analysis is not anything too complex for the average individual to understand. It’s simply going to be a system that delivers information based on different metrics so that you can decide how you want to proceed.
For example, if you find that your content on a specific social media platform is driving a ton of traffic to your domain. That might help you make a decision to focus more on that platform and less on another one.
Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business – Part 2
You’ll also be able to see things such as which content on your own blog is outperforming others. It allows you to take a look at what works and what doesn’t so that you can meet the needs of your target audience.
You can gain this analytical data through a variety of sources. Your cPanel will have website analytics built into it. This will show you where your traffic is coming from, where your visitors are bouncing away due to a lack of interest or possibly slow load time for your pages, and more.
You can also get analytical data from your social media accounts, depending on whether or not the platform provides those to you or if they force you to sign up for a business account for that data.
And your email autoresponder system should have analytics built into it as well. This is going to show you which emails have the highest open rate based on the subject line. This is where people are clicking through on your links. And which emails are being marked as junk mail due to a lack of value.
You can also split test certain elements of your digital marketing efforts, which include sales pages and the emails so that you can see what little tweaks matter when it comes to conversions and performance.
All of this data will mean nothing if you don’t periodically take time to sit down and look at it. You want to see the results, for sure. But you need to make a proactive plan to improve upon things that need to be enhanced.
The most exciting step of the online marketing strategies for small business – Part 2 is the following:
Step 7: Scale Your Empire and Unleash Higher Profits
And lastly, you need to know in your digital marketing journey when it’s the right time to scale your business so that you can achieve higher profits. Too many newbies jump into a diverse income strategy on day one, and they try to do so much in the beginning that they end up diluting their progress.
You want to start with a single business model and get it to a profitable state before you identify new opportunities or markets that you can tap into.
For example, if you start out as an affiliate marketer and you are interacting with a target audience who continually asks you for information that is not yet being sold online. That might be a great opportunity for you to create an info product that meets their needs.
Your Own Info Products
Or, if you are selling your own info products and your audience continually asks you for the ability to own private label rights to it. That might be a sign that this is a good time for you to branch off in that direction.
When you are planning on scaling your online empire to new heights, you want to use as much automation as possible before having to outsource using a paid strategy.
There are many things you can do to free up your own time, whether it’s scheduling blog posts and emails to go live automatically, or using tools like Hootsuite to publish your social media simultaneously across many platforms.
You may want to invest in some technology that has the ability to help you create templates and systems that will shortcut your processes. And eventually, you may need to delegate some of your tasks to a virtual assistant. Some specialized tasks should be handled by a graphics designer, or ghostwriter. This way you can expand your business and your income effectively.
Each of these seven steps is going to help you evolve from a fledgling online entrepreneur to a formidable digital marketer who has created an online empire that serves as an asset for their future.
Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business – Part 2
This is a focused activity that will produce results when it is implemented in a deliberate, planned manner. It’s too important to be left to chance.
This is a two part article. If you missed Part 1, you can read it HERE.
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